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

ri0 VI. Premises The Tongue as a Muscle

A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge