To own the Art within the Soul
The Soul to entertain
With Silence as a Company
And Festival maintain
In an unfurnished Circumstance
Possession is to One
As an Estate perpetual
Or a reduceless Mine.
Emily Dickinson, Fr. 1091
Over these past months, I have returned to the work of Alice Fulton, whose poems and fearless poetics have for decades been sustaining, restoring, and expanding my understanding of what a poem can be and mean and do. I turn to her poems for a difficulty, complexity, and beauty that I prize, and to her poetics for the ways in which Fulton borrows tropes and theories from science, linguistics, visual art, mathematics and elsewhere to offer a myriad of prismatic lenses with which to appreciate how poems work: her notions of fractal poetry, for example, or of the necessity of “cultural incorrectness,” or her signature, double-equal sign glyph (= =), her “bride sign” that serves as a kind of syntactic stitch or suture among her poems’ illuminating, seeming contradictions.
I was just out of an MFA program and starting my first teaching job when W. D. Snodgrass selected Fulton’s first full-length collection, Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, for the 1982 Associated Writing Program’s Award. I have been reading and teaching her seven subsequently published volumes ever since, including, most recently, Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems, which appeared in the fall of last year. For me, each Fulton book, when it has arrived, comes right on time, a testament to Fulton’s ever refreshed praxis and her acute attention to the plights, reverberations, and cultural stirrings of any given moment.
Coloratura is not an overtly pandemic book, but it gestated, in the seven years since Barely Composed appeared in 2015, during a period of various crises: political instability, climate imperilment, global pandemic, escalating gun violence, the ascension of AI, social media platforms, and the metaverse, all amidst worldwide nodes of volatile, warring tensions too numerous to count. In Fulton’s inimitable range of tones — from hyperbolic satire to spiritually bereft yearning — the book also shapes itself around one woman’s experience of grave injury and recovery from a riding accident involving, ironically, a rescue horse, a service animal. These various vulnerabilities and imperilments form the subtext of a volume that reads for the reader like an aetheist’s breviary or Book of Hours for the various personal and societal apocalyptic forces of our epoch. “I stand in line to be inoculated against time,” says the speaker of the book’s frontispiece sonnet “At The Feast,” “Will you join me?”
The book is comprised of many mostly long poems divided into six sections and anchored along the way by three stunning “coloratura” pieces, “Coloratura On A Darkness Chosen From A Gamut of Stygian Events, “Coloratura On An Apparatus With Star-Shaped Cells,” and “Coloratura On A Dissonance Heard in Reticent Librettos.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music defines “coloratura” as “the elaborate and agile ornamentation of a melody, either extemporized or written, with runs, cadenzas, trills, roulades, and the like. Hence a coloratura soprano is one whose voice is flexible enough to cope with these demands.”
The notion of coloratura provides a fitting formal scaffolding for Fulton’s poetics in this new book, with its nimble ranging among operatic extravagance, virtuosic ornament, bedrock intelligence and technical chops, its willingness not only to lean into a Keatsean “fine excess” but also to attend to the hidden, the blue, notes between notes, to what’s nearly obscured or in the margins. “You have to make love to the corners,” Fulton writes in “Netherlandish,” a hibernal poem in which a speaker is enduring a difficult period (“I was living in a high-maintenance loneliness”) and meditating on Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, a vista showing not only the painting’s panoramic saga (“only kings can afford such worship”) but also the nearly hidden object of their adoration, the Christ child, a “larval squirm, a maggot / immanence, the size of a cursor.” Fulton ends the poem:
I can’t make it out. Whatever
is taking shape took shape
without any procreation.
Yet everything it touches becomes
an erogenous zone. That’s how you know
you’re in the presence of a god.
If you’re looking for the marvelous,
look to the margins.
If you’re looking for a miracle,
look to the invisible.
It is this kind of sonic and imaginative range — which puts into conversation the music of what is voiced with what is silent, invisible — that makes it almost impossible to talk about the powerful hold of these poems. To do so would be akin, as Dickinson would say, to splitting open the lark to find its music. None of these complex pieces can be reduced to any one theory or perspective; their manifold, tangential, numinous and unsparing vision defies that. Yet, to borrow a phrase from Fulton’s former teacher, Archie Ammons, “Touch the universe anywhere and you touch it / everywhere.” In their acute, white-heat accruals, these poems seem to magically offer an experience of both the nonce anywhere and the perpetual, enduring everywhere.
The three coloraturas provide the matrices for the big themes on which Fulton riffs throughout the book. “Coloratura On a Darkness Chosen from a Gamut of Stygian Events” is a sonic, synaesthetic evocation of the mind, body, and soul in pain. Rendered motionless by a terrible accident, recovering in the very bedroom where her own mother died, the speaker writes:
I’d watch miracle people on TV
going about their casual errands,
parking lot to big box store, and envy
the weightshift that was walking, a primal dance
they took for granted as I had before
fractures turned me to a voice-
writer — each word a coloratura
that vanished the instant it existed,
which wasn’t, as I’ve said, a first.
The speaker ranges through her past experiences — as an all-night radio DJ and long distance operator, as a friend whose former colleague has suffered a catastrophic illness and turned to making velvet paintings, her parents’ death, her work developing photographs in a dark room, a riff on a purported restaurant where customers eat in the dark and are served by the blind, and finally to what it means to move into a dark beyond the dark of the living. “Twice now I’ve passed / some ticking meridian — fallen / unconscious, gone / into anon, a party of none, decoupled suddenly / from time.” It wasn’t, she writes, the pain and discomfort of the concussion,
it was that I’d returned from nonexistence knowing
there was a where where there
was no night no dark no
time. When I tried to explain it there was no
way. I write to write it
out, the frightful cold.
The poem evokes suffering’s fugue state in passages oneiric but also darkly humorous (of her friend Al’s velvet paintings, she writes “being low / on the commodity scale, déclassé, attractive / to those who follow their passions / and repulsive to those with what’s called taste — / those who prefer artisanal over kraft Velveeta, say. / O you shunn’d paintings! I will be your poet. / Hah! In truth, I also like artisanal.” In its forays into illness, this stunning poem evokes Tom Andrews’s masterpiece from The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, “Codeine Diary, another iconic, extended meditation on illness, injury, and recovery.
“Coloratura On An Apparatus With Star-Shaped Cells” continues Fulton’s exploration of the relationship between trauma and the language used to erase, hide, or express it, training her unstinting moral vision on animal rights, long one of her passions. The poem moves through an imagined interview, conducted with ingenious ingenuity by a speaker who feels close to Fulton herself and whose respondent is full of double-speak:
Can your experiments = = imagine?
Can they ever! Imagine mice trained with foot shocks to fear the scent of cherry blossoms. Imagine glow-in-the-dark monkeys injected with virus-carrying jellyfish genes. In one wacky little stunt, the head and forelegs of a puppy were grafted to the neck of an adult dog whose heart pumped blood for both. Imagine! Though it had almost no body of its own, the puppy head playfully growled, licked the hand that caressed it, and eagerly lapped milk when its host was thirsty. At first the big dog looked confounded and tried to shake it off, but the pair lived over a month. They then were stuffed and toured for exhibitions.
As in all of the coloratura pieces, this one is unflinching in its gaze and invites the reader to watch and listen also:
There are those who will say
they are un-
like us. Though their use-
fulness depends upon their being
almost i-
dentical. I
speak to you who are.
If you only.
Let witness in. Let empathy.
The heart pumps blood for both.
The poem’s third and last coloratura comes at the end of part Five, the book’s penultimate section. “Coloratura On A Dissonance Heard in Reticent Librettos” makes a “study” of silence in its various forms — militant silence, such as that required by Stalin so he could hear the approach of threatening footfalls, but also the particular sonic silence of the earth, “the voice of glacier blood, / the dark white that lives / between the lines. Rest ice.” Riffing on Isaac Babel (“I have invented a new genre. That of silence”), e. e. cummings, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and others, this section is a kind of meta ars poetica in a book that is itself an embodiment of Fulton’s poetics:
I was meditating to the silence of a bell
at rest. After the carillon, this bell
kept sounding. This stilled bell
spoke to everything
around it there
being a constant frottage
between its metal
and the elements. It
resonated with ambient
sounds and made a constant
low tolling. There was a constant
tamboura between
the bell and say the garden,
a vibration vibration
sensors could amplify.
Because the bell
is always ringing.
Its repose is silence-like
but it is not
silence. It is
ringing. It is rung
by your by
any presence.
Perhaps more than any poet writing today, Fulton takes to heart John Keats’s belief that writing poetry is a “vale of soul-making.” “As color is sifted through a prism = =,” she writes, “soul is strained through the world.” For Fulton, this soul-fashioning is a moral as much as it is a spiritual imperative. “Because knowing without going / through the suffering you know / is a mortal form of ornament, / the lace of shape.” Thus the “ornament,” the linguistic pyrotechnics, the ringing beyond the ringing, of these poems. In his well known essay “On Difficulty,” George Steiner says that “lexical resistance is the armature of meaning.” Speaking of Hölderlin, Steiner writes that the poetry of difficulty “attempts to break open the eroded or frozen shell of speech in order to compel to daylight and release the dynamics, the primal crystallizations of perception that may be at the root.” In the prodigious, dazzling forcefield of her new work, Fulton seems to be after something similar. “You have to listen,” she admonishes, “louder than you sing.”
Is there a more attentive listener than Alice Fulton? A more haunted and haunting singer? For now, I close her new book. But the poems still ring.
[Published by W.W. Norton on September 20, 2022, 121 pages, $$26.95 US/$35.95 CAN]