Alice Fulton

Fulton has written extensively on poetics, including in Feeling as a Foreign Language, where she elaborates on her idea of “fractal poetics,” as well as her use of the “double equal sign,” a punctuation mark she began using in Sensual Math.
In an interview in Memorious, Fulton elaborated on both ideas: “A fractal poem might splice a complex, dense passage to a flat or transparent line,” she told Les Kay. “The friction between the two registers of diction can create an uncanny dissonance. In this way, didactic lines can be part of a larger oblique structure. The context, the surrounding dictions and tones, changes the transparent lines, which in turn affect the denser lines . . . These transparent, potentially cheesy lines are embedded in a structure that includes other, more demanding sorts of language – lyrical, technical, satirical. A fractal poem sets plain language in a linguistic surround that skews – and charges – the plainness.” Of her use of the double equal sign, she said: “I also was interested in devising a punctuation mark that could have content without having a firm denotation or definition. And I thought the sign could signal syntactical deletion. That aspect was suggested by Dickinson. In one poem, I called the sign ‘dash to the max,’ ‘dash to the second power – because it’ a double equal.’ Then, too, I was influenced by A.R. Ammons’s use of the colon. Ammons didn’t devise a new punctuation mark, but his poems are riddled with colons that become more than punctuation marks. He forces you to interpret the colon.”


Fulton is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Dance Script with Electric Ballerina (1982), which won an Associated Writing Programs Award; Palladium (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Powers of Congress (1990; reissued 2001); Sensual Math (1995); Felt: Poems (2001), winner of the Bobbitt Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (2004). She has also published a book of essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (1999), and a collection of linked short stories, The Nightingales of Troy (2008). Two stories from the work were included in the Best American Short Stories series, and a third received a Pushcart Prize. Fulton’s poems have also been set to music by contemporary composers such as Anthony Cornicello, William Bolcom, and Enid Sutherland; the pieces have premiered in spaces such as the Guggenheim Museum, Carnegie Hall, and the Walker Arts Center.

Fulton has received many honors and awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2011 she received the Literature Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters “to honor exceptional accomplishment.” She is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University. Bibliography

POETRY

Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems, W.W. Norton, New York, NY, 2004
Felt: Poems, W.W. Norton, New York, NY, 2001
Sensual Math, W.W. Norton, New York, NY 1995
Powers of Congress, David Godine, Boston, MA, 1990; reissued by Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY, 2001
Palladium, University of Illinois Press. Urbana, IL, 1986
Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1983
Anchors of Light, Swamp Press, Oneonta, NY, 1979

FICTION

The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family’s Century, W.W. Norton, New York, NY, 2008

ESSAYS

Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1999

Links

Alice Fulton’s website
Memorious: Interview with Alice Fulton by Les Kay
NewYorker.com, Our Poets on their Poetry: Alice Fulton
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘What I Like’ read by Shawna Monson