Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry - Paperback

by Alice Fulton (Author)

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

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VI. Premises
The Tongue as a Muscle

A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge

Author Biography

Alice Fulton is the author of the poetry collections Sensual Math, Powers of Congress, Palladium, and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina. She has received several major honors, including MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.