Feeling as a Foreign Language

Rating:
Summary: A splendid reflection on poetry
Review: Alice Fulton here offers beautifully crafted essays on poets and poetry, emphasizing the power of estrangement that gives lyric much of its interest. Emily Dickinson plays an important role in this book, but above all the reader will find elegant and telling formulations about poetry's exploration of possibilities of feeling.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Challenging, and Accessible
Review: Let's keep it simple: this is a challenging but accessible and rewarding book. It's not surprising that some professional reviewers have carped; the book takes them (often deservedly) to task for preaching "karaoke poetics," parroting with increasing volume and decreasing originality things that were said -- and tired -- a decade ago. Fulton's chapters on her own poetry and on Dickinson are outstanding, but the whole rewards even a casual reading. Though it's prose in format, the book is still a poem -- a fractal poem -- in the way it plays with its subject matter, diverges on flights of fancy and whimsy, reveals the poet as a person rather than a cold auctorial voice, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Startling ideas, gorgeously written
Review: Not since I read Wallace Steven's 'The Necessary Angel' 25 years ago have I felt such a wide-ranging intelligence in a book of essays on poetry. Fulton uses theories of science in absolutely startling ways. Readers with any interest in rich metaphors will find much here that is positively exciting and new. Her two essays on what she's calling "fractal verse" are solid, thoughtful, and full of possibilities for where poetry can take us. So far as I know, no poet has ever before described the "poem plane" and how poets are at the threshold of "breaking" through it. To me, this is as significant as Pound's idea of "breaking" the pentameter was when it was first proposed. This book is the work of a true visionary.