Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry by Fulton, Alice

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. ProcessHead Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes

Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook

II. PoeticsSubversive Pleasures

Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic

Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions

III. PowersThe Only Kangaroo among the Beauty

Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle

Her Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson

IV. PraxisSeed Ink

To Organize a Waterfall

V. PenchantsA Canon for Infidels

Three Poets in Pursuit of America

The State of the Art

Main Things

ri0VI. PremisesThe Tongue as a Muscle

A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge