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"
Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook
II. Poetics
"Subversive Pleasures"
Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic
Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions
III. Powers
"The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty"
Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle
Her Moment of Brocade: 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