Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry

by Alice Fulton

In Feeling as a Foreign Language , award-winning poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics? In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of "inconvenient knowledge." Contents Preamble I. Process
Head Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes An Alchemical Scrapbook II. Poetics
Subversive Pleasures Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Singing the Body Eclectic Fractal Writing in Three Dimensions III. Powers
The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty Unordinary Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle Her Moment of The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson IV. Praxis
Seed Ink To Organize a Waterfall V. Penchants
A Canon for Infidels Three Poets in Pursuit of America The State of the Art Main Things ri0
VI. Premises
The Tongue as a Muscle A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1999

About the author

For a photo gallery, the story behind the stories, and a reading group guide for The Nightingales of Troy, please visit alicefulton.com

Reviews

[Carol Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iconoclastic poet Alice Fulton ranges far & wide, why formal vs free verse poetry is a dead conversation, why writing about other instead of about self makes for interesting poetry, why & how women have been ignored / despised in the poetry world. A long slow interesting read.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fulton's defense of the abstract as fractal and fragment of ideas in life--while vague and, in a strange way sentimental--was very influential on me almost twenty years ago when I first read this book in a poetics class in undergrad. Revisiting this book now, I found it refreshing even if some of the long discussions of Dickinson can almost feel like distractions. Fulton uses science and experimental to push back on the objectivist/imagist fetish for concretizing ideas so valorized by American poets since Ezra Pound. Fulton's poetic voice does still come through in her essays and while some of this is dated, it is a refreshing read.

[Nancy Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt a recurring resistance as I was reading. Often it didn't seem quite right for a poet, especially such a celebrated poet as Alice Fulton, to be spelling out details of the way she works, or giving readers quite specific advice about how to read her poems. "So what didn't seem quite right?" I asked myself. As the answer(s) began to coalesce, I recognised them as distressingly old, unexamined assumptions about "the artist" and "the audience," about how an artist must let her reader or viewer or listener exert her own critical judgment based on what is there to see and hear. I recalled embarrassing moments when an artist whose work I planned to review in print insisted on a "right" understanding of it, feeding in the correct terms to use. At the same time, I began to really enjoy my reading, to feel a little less distant not only from this poet, but from poets in general, to know that at least sometimes, a poet writes in profound awareness of a potential reader, writes for a reader. Gradually I began to recognise the risk she'd taken in challenging what seems like an essential, nearly sacred separation between artist and critic, and how free I continued to be to read her poetry as I saw fit.

This is a book I'll need to read more than once, if for no other reason than I sensed my own attitudes changing as I read, and would like to clarify, firm up -- or reject -- those changes. But for now, I am very grateful that she did this quite daring thing.

[Alex Bilzerian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to read and re-read multiple times. Indispensable.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first and final essays were by far the best in the collection.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been years since I read this. My strongest recollection is that Fulton makes a case for the abstract in poetry. We keep hearing about the values of concreteness, "no ideas but in things", the objective correlative, blah blah blah. Fulton refreshingly puts forth the justification of abstract ideas in poetry.

Fulton looks to science, such as fractals and advanced physics, as a potential tributary of poetic form. However one responds to Fulton's poetry, I found her critical ideas worth pondering.

Fulton also spends some time analyzing Emily Dickinson. One can never have too much analysis and speculation about what the Belle of Amherst was up to!

[Wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it when poets write prose about poetry, explicating, unfolding, revealing their art. Alice Fulton here explores the variety of meanings in the word/image "screen" in one long essay; in a couple others, she opens the door to a "fractal poetics," which really caught my imagination, although I admit I will have to reread these essays to even begin to understand what she's talking about.

[Patricia Killelea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I heard about this Fulton's poetics through Kenneth Lincoln, and I have to say that I really don't care for Fulton's theory of "fractal poetics." Her ideas seem merely descriptive; hardly any analysis at all, which is problematic since she is doing literary theory here.

[Brandon]

i'm preparing for a panel i'll be on where my co-panelist is using the idea of fractal poetics as a main topic.

i like her essays a bit more than her poems.

[Sean Patrick]

A quick lesson on postmodern-femenist poetics, plus a foray into fractal poetry, and a great discussion of Emily Dickinson's staring into the abyss.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long one of my favorite poets, Alice Fulton also writes engagingly about poets, poems, poetics (and more). This may be the only book about poetry that I've ever re-read.