Alice Fulton

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Alice Fulton : biography

1952 –

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 [and] the 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’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 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.