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Alice Fulton (born 1952) is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Emerita at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
. Her awards include the
American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
Award in Literature, Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award, and
Ingram Merrill Foundation The Ingram Merrill Foundation was a private foundation established in the mid-1950s by poet James Merrill (1926-1995), using funds from his substantial family inheritance.J. D. McClatchyBraving the Elements ''The New Yorker'', 27 March 1995. Retrie ...
Award, as well as the
MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...
.


Biography

Fulton was born and raised in
Troy, New York Troy is a city in the U.S. state of New York and the county seat of Rensselaer County. The city is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany ...
, the youngest of three daughters. Her father was the proprietor of the historic Phoenix Hotel, and her mother was a visiting nurse. She began writing poetry in high school. In 1979 she attended a women's poetry conference in Amherst, Mass., which she would later cite as a formative experience. While an undergraduate, she received competitive scholarships to study poetry with
Thomas Lux Thomas Lux (December 10, 1946 – February 5, 2017) was an American poet who held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program. He wrote fourtee ...
at The Writers Community in New York City. In 1980 she married Hank De Leo and moved to Ithaca, New York, to study poetry under
A. R. Ammons Archibald Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. Poetic themes Ammons wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comi ...
, Phyllis Janowitz, Kenneth McClane, and Robert Morgan in Cornell University's Creative Writing Program. While at Cornell, her first book was selected by W. D. Snodgrass for the Associated Writing Program's publication prize. After receiving her MFA, she was a fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 1983 Fulton moved to the
University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a three-year appointment as Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.Michigan Society of Fellows
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Mark Strand Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004 ...
selected Fulton's second book, ''Palladium'', for publication in the 1985 National Poetry Series. In the interdisciplinary Society of Fellows she further developed her interest in using scientific metaphor and began her lifelong friendship with John H. Holland. She has often cited Holland's writing on
Complex Adaptive Systems A complex adaptive system is a system that is '' complex'' in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. It is '' adaptive'' in that the indiv ...
as being instrumental in the development of her theory on Fractal Poetics ee Fulton's prose collection It was also where she met the composers
William Bolcom William Elden Bolcom (born May 26, 1938) is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Grammy Award, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. He ...
and Enid Sutherland. In 1991 Fulton was awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship. In addition to poetry, Fulton has written essays and criticism and has been widely praised for her finely crafted and emotionally powerful short fiction. ''The Nightingales of Troy'' collects the ten stories she had published before 2008. Two of those stories were selected for inclusion in ''The Best American Short Stories''. Three contemporary authors share the distinction of appearing in both ''
The Best American Short Stories The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of ''The Best American Series'' published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in con ...
'' and ''
The Best American Poetry ''The Best American Poetry'' series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems. Background The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, has a different guest editor every year. Lehman, still the general ...
'' series: Alice Fulton,
Lydia Davis Lydia Davis (born July 15, 1947) is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short (one or two pages long) short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of ...
, and
Stuart Dybek Stuart Dybek (born April 10, 1942) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Biography Dybek, a second-generation Polish American, was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s ...
. Alice Fulton was a senior fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows from 1996 to 2000. She remained at
University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
until 2002, when she returned to Ithaca as the Ann S. Bowers Distinguished Professor of English at Cornell University. In 2011 she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. The Library of Congress awarded Fulton the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award in 2002. In 2004 she was the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at University of California, Berkeley, and in 2010 she was the
George Elliston George Elliston (1883 - October 7, 1946) was an American journalist. Biography George Elliston was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. She graduated from Covington High School. Elliston worked as a reporter for the ''Cincinnati Times-Star'' and l ...
Poet at
University of Cincinnati The University of Cincinnati (UC or Cincinnati) is a public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1819 as Cincinnati College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in Cincinnati and has an annual enrollment of over 44,0 ...
. She has also been a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and a number of other universities.


Works

Fulton's poetics "challenges the conventional wisdom among many poets that the content of a poem is less important than its form. In practice, Fulton has created a poetic style that is remarkably "about things" in the sense that her poems explore their overt subject matter deeply and uphold their convictions with rigor. ''Cascade Experiment'' ... amply demonstrates not only Fulton's broad range of interests but also her continual and evolving sense of how to use the most seemingly insignificant details to illuminate the nuances of difficult moral ideas." -- Sarah Cohen
Alice Fulton has suggested that poetry is a "model of the way the world works". Her poetry has been described as "intricately crafted, yet expansive — even majestic — in its scope and vision. One senses there is something startling about to be revealed in these poems, and indeed that mystery or tension often resolves in powerful acts of linguistic reckoning, as if a piece of psychological origami were unfolding before our eyes." The editors of ''Twentieth-Century American Poetry'' suggest that "In her drive to freshen poetic diction, avoid cliche and sentimentality, and create 'skewed domains‚' in her poetry, Fulton has distinguished herself as one of the most original American poets writing today. She has succeeded in challenging not only assumptions about gender roles, but also the assumptions underlying current modes of poetry such as the autobiographical, first-person lyric or the experimental 'Language poem.'" In his introduction to Fulton's first book, ''Dance Script With Electric Ballerina'', W. D. Snodgrass reads Fulton's poetry as a rare example of ''logopoeia'' ("the dance of the intellect among words") and writes that "we are always engaged by ... the sense of linguistic virtuosity ... a constant delight ... in language textures, the every-shifting shock and jolt of an electric surface." ''Newsday'', called it an "extremely impressive poetic debut‚" and a ''Boston Herald'' reviewer wrote, "Reading her poems is something like listening to a set of the most spirited and peculiar jazz: you must sharpen your spirit to be moved by what is uncanny and rare." While most critical response to this debut volume was positive, conservative critics were "more guarded, or even catty." Her second collection consolidated the "polyphonic textures," shifts in diction, and signature enjambments that have become hallmarks of her poetry. ''Palladium'' is structured in six parts, each focused on the etymology of "palladium" with the trope carried to Ellen Foscue Johnson's palladium photographic print on the cover. One review explained the organizing structure this way: "Etymology breeds metaphor; palladium generates the imagery and energy of the poems, informing them all without necessarily intruding upon them. The organizing principle of an Alice Fulton poem allows for cohesiveness yet is not so narrow or restrictive as to inhibit the flow of associations and ideas. It's as though the world itself were endowed with a centrifugal force, enabling the poet to branch out in numerous directions — parallel lines that manage to intersect on their separate paths to infinity."
Sven Birkerts Sven Birkerts (born 21 September 1951) is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book ''The Gutenberg Elegies'' (1994), which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other te ...
, noting Fulton's "irrepressible inventiveness" and "startling juxtapositions," named this an "aesthetic of profusion." Critics praised these "compressed poems of great texture and inventiveness," as "prepossessing and formidable," "hardwon and solid." ''Palladium'' was admired for its "energy and passion for specificity," its "wit and unpredictable, wildly heterogenous combinations," the way "surface and substance, style and content, coexist and are often at odds with one another." Peter Stitt described the style of ''Palladium'' as having "so much texture, thanks to ulton'simages and to her use of words, and that texture places a palpable surface on the abstract construct of the poem." Many critics praised Fulton's "energy," but Calvin Bedient and others were hostile toward the "wicked intelligence" in ''Palladium.'' Fulton defiantly included these criticism in the hand-written marginal comments of her innovative "Point of Purchase" in ''Powers of Congress''.
Rita Dove Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the positi ...
in the ''Washington Post'' described it as "a wry sendup of academics, featuring a bona-fide poem littered with marginalia from different critics, each with distinct personalities, literary persuasions and handwriting." Stephen Behrendt commented that this poem "comes with its own set of marginal annotations by (and in) several different hands. Not since Coleridge's "
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' (originally ''The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere'') is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–1798 and published in 1798 in the first edition of ''Lyrical Ballad ...
" has a long poem presented the reader with so remarkable an example of this particular phenomenon." Fulton has often referred to
Walt Whitman Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among ...
's "I am large, I contain multitudes" as a guiding principle for postmodern verse. David Baker, in reference to the multiplicity of experience evident in ''Powers Of Congress,'' wrote that "Fulton is embarked on a project to redefine or recreate poetry according to the multiforms of experience and intellect, rather than to shape experience by modeling it on a received poetic vision." For Larissa Szporluk, Fulton's "truly phenomenal poetics leave me where I've never been, changing the rules of the game of poetry completely." Lawrence Joseph instructs Fulton's reader to "expect a vision of American society — its technological, sexual, class, and religious relationships and context — embodied in language conscientiously intelligent and physical." Commenting on how Fulton's treatment of the "real world is never treated only as an exercise in 'realism'" British poet Rodney Pybus notes the "blessedly unpredictable and unconventional" nature of her use of "psychic and social turmoil." David Barber argues that Fulton's "expansiveness" of subject is realized in "poems that binge not just on language but on lexicons and argots, poems that lift their riffs not only from the deep wells of the American vernacular but from the streamlined vaults of newfangled technology and scientific determinism." ''Powers of Congress'' contains many examples of her signature use of polyphony and word superclusters which Fulton has described in interviews and in a 1990 essay on her own poetics, "To Organize A Waterfall." ''Sensual Math'' introduced Fulton's invention of the double-equal or bride sign (see Poetics below). Dorothy Barresi claimed that this work is "what great poetry must do and be" and that "Fulton's poems are like no one else's today‚" with their "on-again, off-again elasticity — a stretching smoothness to some lines, and a snapped back, taut quality to others — that manages to sound both eloquent and scared." Barresi concluded that "Fulton writes with fiery intelligence, and unapologetically so, for it is in the acts of thinking and rethinking that this poet believes we stave off the brute world's numbing assault." Stephen Yenser remarked, "Hers is a maximalist poetry, exploding beyond its boundaries." Many critics have praised the aural dimension of Fulton's poetry. Writing about ''Sensual Math,'' Larissa Szporluk asserted that "Fulton's acoustic signals reign, giving the impression that behind their creation lies some kind of unimaginable technology, telepathic jazz, or just plain genius." Edward Falco corroborated, "Her poems, spoken out loud or 'heard' in the process of reading, offer a subtle, magnificent jazz: a music for the intellect, felt on the tongue and in the body, resonating in the mind. And nowhere is the music of Fulton's poetry more stirring than in ''Sensual Math.''" ''Sensual Math'' contained a long sequence "reimagining Daphne and Apollo." Donald Riggs writes helpfully about Fulton's translation from the Latin and concludes, "It is within this larger and deeper context that Ovid's tale of Daphne and Apollo takes on, in Fulton's version, an expanded significance: that of the suppression of women's power by the Indo-Aryan patriarchal culture." Building on the music within the poems, the composer Enid Sutherland produced a monumental operatic scoring of this sequence that runs nearly two and one-half hours. Writing about ''Felt'' in ''The New York Times Book Review,'' Megan Harlan also commented on how Fulton's poems are "aurally rich with slant rhymes and musical rhythms." The wordplay present in Fulton's earliest poems has by now become thoroughly suffused:
In Alice Fulton's poetry, those charged instances when the literal and the metaphysical (and the sensual and the philosophical) overlap are often mediated by wordplay — a pun, a double entendre, a witty turn of phrase. The title of her marvelous fifth collection, ''Felt,'' is meant to signify both an emotion once experienced ndthe fabric constructed by fibers that are forcibly pressed, rather than woven, together.
Carol Muske-Dukes has asserted that Fulton's "poetic intuition is a kind of apperceptive proof — never false," concluding that ''Felt'' is "fetishistic, wildly associative, demonically apt and simply eloquent, calling to mind
Max Planck Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical p ...
's quote about the purpose of science as an 'unresting endeavor' developing toward a vision which 'poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.' " Selected from all poetry books published in the United States in 2000 and 2001, ''Felt'' was praised by the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award committee as "Full of animated, charged poems." The statement also noted that ''Felt'' sizzles with logophilia and tropes, is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop. Hers is a poetic sensibility at once remarkably comprehensive and remarkably precise, and felt; her best book so far is possessed of great velocity, great staying-power." ''Felt'' was also selected by the
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...
as one of the Best Books of 2001. As with her poetry collections, Fulton's first fiction collection is carefully constructed from interwoven parts "playing off and enhancing the meaning of one another."
What sets ''The Nightingales of Troy'' apart from so many other precocious debut collections is Fulton's knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts. Her best stories not only exhibit her architectural prowess, they also remind the reader of the near-magical capaciousness of the story form.
Donna Seaman notes that "Fulton displays extraordinary verve in the originality of the predicaments she creates for her irresistible characters, her evocation of the majesty of the land and the rise and decline of the town, and her ravishingly inventive language" and that she draws "brilliantly on the vernacular and ambience of each decade.""Fulton's prose thrives on the tactile, and, as in her poetry, the language is brilliantly precise. While often rooted in the physical, Fulton's narration frequently moves beyond the immediate, both powerfully and subtly."


Poetics

Fulton's "fingerprint-distinct voice" is immediately recognizable for its poetic ambition laced with humor and shifting poetic diction. While sharing an interest in scientific metaphors and diction with her mentor,
A.R. Ammons Archibald Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. Poetic themes Ammons wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic ...
, she differs from Ammons through her engagement with injustice and cruelty. In a statement accompanying her selection of Lisa F. Jackson's film, '' The Greatest Silence,'' for the 2008 "Revolution" writers conference and film festival at University of North Dakota, Fulton had this to say about her poetics:
As a poet and writer, I'm committed to undermining postures of arrogance and entitlement, the context of "impunity" epicted in ''The Greatest Silence'' Silence — especially enforced silence – has been one of my deep subjects, as has resistance, a quality as important to poetics as to revolutions. I've tried to engage with the background rather than the figure, to find new linguistic ways of confronting disenfranchisement, cruelty, and suffering, while retaining the uncanny qualities of poetry. I've tried to be a student of inconvenient knowledge — the sort of knowledge that, when taken to heart, forces us to change our lives in revolutionary ways.
Sacred, religious, spiritual, compassionate, and ethical themes are incorporated in her work. Miller has noted that "faith" is an "issue that comes up in all of ulton'svolumes and in poem after poem," as have Marchant and others. Peter Brier asserts that "Fulton conveys much of the ecstasy that is associated with the strongest religious poets, poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins" with similarities in phrasing, imagery, and sprung rhythm. Camille Paglia also finds "heavy sprung rhythms ... reminiscent of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins" and that Fulton's "ecstatic techniques" are deployed "for far earthier and more carnal purposes." "Like the Language poets, Fulton is interested in linguistic play and artifice, and also in critical theory and philosophy, although the theories most evident in her poetry and essays are those of science and mathematics." "From the first," Fulton "has been as theoretically astute as the Language poets" as well as being interested in a poetry that will "discomfit readers and unsettle their expectations, a poetry of ''inconvenient'' knowledge," a phrase originally used in Fulton's 1997 essay. Fulton first proposed her ideas for a new poetics based on the concepts of fractals and emergent patterns in her 1986 essay, "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic," in which she uses the term "fractal" to suggest "a way to think about the hidden structures of free verse." Tigerlily states that Fulton "coined the phrase 'fractal poetry' as a method of revisioning the value of both formal and free verse, calling the 'poetry of irregular form fractal verse.'" Some critics have taken Fulton to task for an inexact usage of "fractal." Other critics have countered that her use of "fractal" is more metaphorical than literal. Susan Duhig in the ''Chicago Tribune'' noted that "For Fulton, the fractal serves as a potent metaphor for a poetry with a form that exists somewhere between utter shapelessness and the Euclidean order of regular meter and genre, a poetry whose volatile, irregular patterning exists on the threshold of structure." Duhig concluded that Fulton's essays explicate "one possible language for understanding poetry in the age of quantum mechanics." Biogeneticist Ana Marti-Subirana writes at length and with specificity on how "Chaos theory and fractal poetics allow Fulton to analyze the complexity of social structures and cultural constructions through new perspectives in poetic form." Fulton's fractal poetics operates "as a means to engage both the poet and the reader of poetry into an intellectual immersion beyond the obvious." Fulton elaborated on her conceptualization of fractal verse in her 1996 essay, "Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions," in which she posits a "poem plane," a concept analogous to the picture plane in painting. She suggests that "By juxtaposing transparent with textured passages, fractal poetry constructs a linguistic screen that alternately dissolves and clouds." This later fractal essay shows evidence of her conversations with Holland on the subject of complexity. Fulton has stated that John H. Holland's work in complexity theory "greatly affected my poetics in the nineties." A full description of Fractal Verse is beyond the scope of this article; both of the seminal essays are reprinted in Fulton's prose collection. A third essay titled "Fractal Poetics: Adaptation and Complexity" was published in 2005 in ''
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...
'' (UK) with this summary: Barbara Fischer's analysis of Fulton's ekphrastic poem "Close" in ''Felt'' explains this maximalist approach:
Fulton's mixture of media is edgy and experimental — "This is not an illustration." She stands close enough to her subjects to see that art, visual or verbal, is adulterated by evidence of the processes that have made it. The museum-goer notes that "In person,
he painting He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
looked a little dirty. / I could see the artist's hairs / in the pigment—traces of her / head or dog or brush." She sees "gooey gobs of / process painted in," and notes Mitchell's knifework, which has "left some gesso showing through, / a home for lessness that— / ... / is a form of excess." This paradoxical excess of absence describes a characteristic feature in Fulton's work, here and in earlier books — a lavish and roiling expenditure of imagery and wordplay that draws attention to the means by which any representational illusion of plenitude is sustained. Critics have emphasized the "excesses" of Fulton's vivacious artifice, digressiveness, and heterogeneous diction (I would agree with those who do not consider such "excess" pejorative), and ''Felt'' ... powerfully investigates the emotional stakes of this "form of excess" as a poetics.
Reviewing ''Powers Of Congress'' in 1991,
Eavan Boland Eavan Aisling Boland (24 September 1944 – 27 April 2020) was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of w ...
was the first to liken Fulton to
Emily Dickinson Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massac ...
. With the 1995 publication of ''Sensual Math,''
Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of ...
suggested " ultonmay be Dickinson's postmodern heir." Critic and Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller further expounded on similarities between Dickinson and Fulton: "Like Dickinson, Fulton crosses the boundaries of popular and highly experimental genres of poetry writing ... Even in long poems and sequences of poems, Fulton's verse has the tight constructedness and multiple layered qualities of Dickinson's poetry ... Fulton shares Dickinson's outrageous sense of play with both cultural icons and aspects of English normally taken for granted." Miller also has pointed to Fulton's kinship with Dickinson in the use of end-of-line syntactic doubling, and was the first critic to note similarities in punctuation.
Where Dickinson makes the dash key to the rhythms and expression of her poetry, Fulton introduces a new sign of punctuation that she calls 'a bride / after the recessive threads in lace' = This double-equal sign, which 'might mean immersion,' is 'the unconsidered // mortar' between bricks; it makes 'visible the acoustic signals / of things about to flame,' 'hinging one phrase to the next,' throwing the reader into the same kind of adventurous uncertainty as Dickinson's dash.
Miller goes on to say, "For both poets, this interest in hinges, in connections, in incongruities and contiguities reveals itself in verbal and syntactical structures as well as in themes. In short, while these are poets of big ideas, they also are very much poets of language ... Like Dickinson, Fulton makes us see the pomposity, ridiculousness, and fragility of our beliefs, hopes, and attitudes as well as the sometimes terrible wonder of human interaction and the universe beyond ourselves." In addition to Dickinson's influence, Mark Jarman and Cristanne Miller have noted the influence of
Marianne Moore Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Early life Moore was born in Kirkwood ...
.
Rita Dove Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the positi ...
has written that "Nabokov is one of Alice Fulton's literary mentors: The sheer delight in language's subterfuges, the knotty avenues of recollections and desire, the human need for 'significance' that forms narratives even where there are none — these themes are the very bone and gristle of Fulton's prodigal, energetic poetry."


Quotes

*"Anguish is the universal language." *"The truly new looks truly wrong at first." *"Emotion is the best mnemonic device." *"A perfect skepticism questions disbelief." *"Poetry is neither future driven nor teleological in spirit. The pleasure exists in the presence and texture of each line, as each line is experienced. Which is to say: fiction is about what happens next; poetry is about what happens now." *"The unseemly has been the enemy of women's progress." *"Simplicity is prized as a symptom of sincerity." *"I used the hand's most important attribute, opposition, to hold the pen." *"The wish to survive turns poets into poeticians, mincing their words." *"Nothing is lonlier than what's human." *"...as free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface."
Many critics have commented on Fulton's command of scientific metaphor. Marti-Subirana asserted that "Alice Fulton's poetry stands as one of the most representative examples of intellectual exchange between contemporary experimental poetics and modern science — as represented by quantum physics, chaos theory and complexity theory." Marti-Subirana has elaborated on Fulton's use of "Complexity theory and Darwinism‚" and has identified a dimension of Fulton's work that she calls "Fulton's ''poetry of emergence.''" "This dimension examines individual and collective emotions (such as detachment and compassion), and behavioral patterns (such as cruelty) from the perspective of emergence and emergent patterns." "Emergence‚" is a central tenet of John H. Holland's description of
Complex Adaptive Systems A complex adaptive system is a system that is '' complex'' in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. It is '' adaptive'' in that the indiv ...
. Harvard mathematician Barry Mazur has written about Fulton's poetics and its relation to the "science of connections bridging differences." Mazur claims that Fulton engages with mathematics as the "science of the subtle glues ... that bind different ideas together, and yet keep them distinguished." He noted that "The very connectors themselves come out into the open in the poem entitled '= =.' " ''Sensual Math'' contains a number of poems that deploy and define her "bride sign." As with all of Fulton's books, including her fiction and nonfiction prose, ''Sensual Math'' is a carefully constructed web of interrelated parts that form an organic whole. One critic predicted that "''Sensual Math'' might well come to be seen as one of the most significant volumes of the 1990s." Writing about the double-equal sign, Lynn Keller commented,
Her inventive work, which stretches the linguistic, tonal, vocal, and emotional range of contemporary lyric, points ultimately to resources that lie between recognized categories, in liminal states, and at the cultural margins as offering hope for significant social and aesthetic change. Her double equal sign and other rejections of patriarchal binaries aim ... to counter the destructive othering that pervades all aspects of our lives ...
Physicist
Karen Barad Karen Michelle Barad (; born 29 April 1956) is an American feminist theorist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism. Biography They are currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the ...
's book, ''Meeting the Universe Halfway,'' takes its title from Alice Fulton's poem "Cascade Experiment," first published in 1989. Gabriel Mckee, comments that the poem "contains this compelling passage: "The poem is a wonderful combination of science and faith, and finds mystery in empiricism." Mckee continues, saying that the poem reminds him "of the 14th-century mystical text
The Cloud of Unknowing ''The Cloud of Unknowing'' (Middle English: ''The Cloude of Unknowyng'') is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer in the ...
, the title of which offers perhaps the most famous illustration of apophatic theology ... Fulton's poem makes an eloquent and moving case for science that seeks the unknowable, the unbelievable, and the impossible." Fulton's formal inventions invariably employ "form" in the service of content. She has stated that "During the act of writing, technique and meaning are inextricably linked, and it is only for the convenience of critical discussion that one could wish to separate them. The realization that craft depends on content leads to the concept of organic form and the idea that whatever elements help us experience a poem as a whole can be called its form." In an essay concerned with the body poems of
Anne Sexton Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book '' Live or Die''. Her poetry details ...
and Alice Fulton,
Deborah Landau Deborah Landau (born 1973) is an American poet, essayist, and critic. Landau's "taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions" have been described as "confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg." Her meditations upon yearning ...
asserts that "Fulton's forms often reinforce the discursive claims of her poems." The editors of ''20th Century Poetics'' point to "active enjambments" in Fulton's work "that make words do double duty as different parts of speech." Peter Brier says that Fulton uses enjambment‚ "to sharpen her phrasing, which in turn is remarkably sure and strengthened by the vividness of her imagery." Fulton has stated in interviews that she tries to "think freshly about the why of every line" and how to make "meaning shift at enjambments without the end word in the line changing its part of speech." Another of Fulton's techniques is that "she often refuses to gender her speakers, forcing her readers to reconsider their assumptions about what constitutes male or female identity." Throughout her career, Fulton has juxtaposed references to popular culture with allusions to literary and high culture. Ernest Smith has argued that a "significant theme in Fulton's work is the relationship among the individual, imagination, and culture, both historically constructed aspects of culture and contemporary, popular culture." Smith also comments on Fulton's "polyphonic texture" as "a sense of multiplying resonance akin to the use of counterpoint in music."


Awards and honors

*
American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
Award in Literature * Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award *
MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...
*
Ingram Merrill Foundation The Ingram Merrill Foundation was a private foundation established in the mid-1950s by poet James Merrill (1926-1995), using funds from his substantial family inheritance.J. D. McClatchyBraving the Elements ''The New Yorker'', 27 March 1995. Retrie ...
Award * Guggenheim Fellowship *National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship *Michigan Society of Fellows *Michigan Council for the Arts, Individual Grants in Literature * The Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship *Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Award


Bibliography


Poetry


Collections

*Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems: Poems (2022) *''Barely Composed'' (2015) *''Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems'' (2004) *''Felt'' (2001) winner of the
Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry The Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry is awarded biennially by the Library of Congress on behalf of the nation in recognition for the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two y ...
in (2002) *''Sensual Math'' (1995) *''Powers of Congress'' (1990) *''Palladium'' (1986) winner of the
National Poetry Series The National Poetry Series is an American literary awards program. Every year since 1979, the National Poetry Series has sponsored the publication of five books of poetry. Manuscripts are solicited through an annual open competition, judged and cho ...
and the
Society of Midland Authors The Society of Midland Authors is an association of published authors from twelve American states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. According to its constit ...
Award in 1986 *''Dance Script with Electric Ballerina'' (1983) winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award in (1982) *''Anchors of Light'' chapbook (1979)


List of poems


Fiction

*


Non-fiction

*''Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry'' (1999)


Writings about Alice Fulton's work

* Greg Schutz, "The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton,
''Fiction Writers Review,'' May 2009.
* Ana Marti-Subirana, "Chaos and Emergence: Dialogic Models of Intellectual Exchange in Alice Fulton's Poetics," paper presented at the Conference on Women's Poetry Since 1900, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pa., September 11–13, 2008
full text by ''Thoughtmesh''
* Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue, "Alice Fulton," ''Innovative Women Poets''. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007, pp. 121–151. * Barbara K. Fischer, ''Museum Meditations: Refraiming Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry''. New York: Routledge, 2006. * Ernest Smith, "Alice Fulton," in ''Contemporary American Women Poets: An A to Z Guide''. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006, pp. 128–132
''Contemporary American Women Poets: An A to Z Guide''
* Ernest J. Smith, "Alice Fulton," in ''The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry''. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006, pp. 574–575. * Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, "Alice Fulton," in ''Dictionary of Literary Biography 193: American Poets Since WW II''. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2006, pp. 138–147. * Cynthia Hogue, "Another Postmodernism: Toward an Ethical Poetics,

* Alice Fulton, "To Organize a Waterfall," in ''Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry.'' St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1999, pp. 173–207. * Megan Harlan, "The Past Tense of Feel," ''The New York Times Book Review'', April 15, 2001, p. 22. * Barbara Fischer, "Felt," ''Boston Review'', 26:5:54-56, October/November 2001. * Lynn Keller, "The 'Then Some Inbetween': Alice Fulton's Feminist Experimentalism" ''American Literature'' 71:2:311-340, June 1999. * Deborah Landau, "'Not a Woman, Quite': The Body Poems of Anne Sexton and Alice Fulton," in Giovanna Covi, ed., ''Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject''. Trento, Italy: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 1997, pp. 209–227. * Cristanne Miller, "'The Erogenous Cusp': or Intersections of Science and Gender in Alice Fulton's Poetry," in Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, eds., ''Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory''. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 317–343. * Cristanne Miller, "Alice Fulton: 'Wonder Stings Me More than the Bee,'" ''Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin'', Nov.-Dec. 1996, pp. 10–11. * Cristanne Miller, "An Interview with Alice Fulton,


References


External links



at the Library of Congress
Alice Fulton
at the Academy of American Poets
Alice Fulton home page with brief biography''Out of Bounds'' fiction interview''Out of Bounds'' poetry interviewAlice Fulton at University of Michigan
at Norton Poets Online
Alice Fulton interview
in ''Memorious'' magazine {{DEFAULTSORT:Fulton, Alice 1952 births Living people 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American poets 21st-century American women writers American women poets American women short story writers Cornell University alumni Cornell University faculty MacArthur Fellows The New Yorker people Writers from Troy, New York Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry University of California, Berkeley staff University of California, Los Angeles staff University of Michigan fellows University of Michigan faculty 20th-century American short story writers 21st-century American short story writers American women academics