fractal poetry

It's strange when I proposed the link between
fractals and poetry in the early 90's I'd never heard of
Alice Fulton,
I doubt that she has ever read any of my fractal poetry either...
My idea was more linked to Zipf's law than her way of thinking:
more order than chaos.


http://people.cornell.edu/pages/af89/books/content-faafl.html
Feeling as a Foreign Language:
The Good Strangeness of Poetry

"These deeply satisfying essays turn issues of form and content inside out, refusing old dichotomies and familiar answers. Alice Fulton points toward just how rich and strange postmodern poetry really is, or might be: something perennially surprising, uncharted, an art as slippery, fresh, and difficult as American experience now. This engaging book will delight and challenge readers of poetry, but it also offers serious pleasure to anyone who loves language."

Mark Doty


"Fractal, electric, Fulton lands the crackle of the thinking sensibility onto the page. Reading these essays, we see poetry in a new way, its flings and intuitions subject to a most exacting sort of calibration. Here is a book not just for poets, but for all thinking readers."

Sven Birkerts


In Feeling as a Foreign Language, award-winning writer 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? How does a writer become "the only Kangaroo among the Beauty"?

In these provocative, beautifully written essays, Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She 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."

In 1986 Alice Fulton first proposed the term fractal verse to describe an emerging form between order and chaos. Her groundbreaking essay, "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic," is reprinted in Feeling as a Foreign Language. A new essay, "Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions," proposes an important relationships between complexity theory and poetry. Fulton elaborates on fractal verse and she introduces the ideas of a "poem plane" and writing in three dimensions.

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