Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry

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