ALICE FULTON [19.573]

ALICE FULTON  

Nacida en 1952 en Troy, Nueva York, Alice Fulton asistió a escuelas católicas en su ciudad natal. Comenzó a escribir poesía durante los años setenta. En 1978, obtuvo una licenciatura en escritura creativa en el Empire State College de Albany, Nueva York y, en 1982, una maestría en artes plásticas de la Universidad de Cornell, donde estudió con AR Ammons. Se casó con el artista Hank De Leo en 1980.

En 1983, se convirtió en profesora asistente de Inglés en la Universidad de Michigan, donde permaneció hasta 2001. Fulton también ha sido profesor visitante de escritura creativa en Vermont College; La Universidad de California, Los Ángeles; Universidad del Estado de Ohio; Y la Universidad de Carolina del Norte, Wilmington. Durante la década de 1990, Fulton fue juez de muchos premios de poesía, incluyendo el Premio Nacional del Libro, la Selección de Poesía Lamont, el Premio de Poesía Akron y el Premio Walt Whitman. En 2002, se unió a la facultad de la Universidad de Cornell, convirtiéndose en la Ann S. Bowers Profesor de Inglés en 2004.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA.

POESÍA

Anchors of Light, Swamp Press (Oneonta, NY), 1979.

Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia), 1983.

Palladium, University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1986.

Powers of Congress, David Godine (Boston), 1990; reissued by Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2001.

Sensual Math, Norton (New York), 1995.

Felt: Poems, Norton, 2001.

Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems, Norton, 2004.

Barely Composed, Norton, 2015.

FICCIÓN

The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family’s Century, Norton, 2008.

OTROS

Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1999.

Contributor to magazines, including New Yorker, Poetry, and Georgia Review. Author of short stories, song lyrics, and critical essays.

Cúspide, de Alice Fulton [trad.]

«Yo», la cúspide erógena

de la mente y el mundo, ve la rosa

revistiendo el pico de un ave

y llama al amanecer azul eclesiástico.

       Pero Yo necesita lecciones de comportamiento.

Cómo, a las 3 de la mañana, hallar el silo

por su más denso cilindro en la oscuridad,

refracta la cáscara hasta que crece

en el contraste más profundo de la noche

y la noche se vuelve un positivo

junto al faro apagado.

“I,” the erogenous cusp

of mind and world, sees the rose

lining of a bird’s beak

and calls the dawn a churchly blue.

       But I need lessons in deportment.

How, at three a.m., to find the silo

by its denser cylinder on dark,

refract the husk until it grows

in deeper contrast to the night

and night becomes a positive

beside the lighthouse without light.

Alice Fulton, from “Cusp.”

After the Angelectomy 

And where my organ of veneration should be—

wormwood and gall. Grudge sliver.

Wailbone, iron, bitters. I mean to say the miniature

waterfalls have all dried up in this miniature

place where day is duty cubed, time is time on task

and every mind optimized for compliance.

Time to delint my black denim traveling stuff.

The flourescent major highlighter has dimmed

to minor. I'm so dying I wrote

when I meant to write so tired.

And when I sleep I dream only that

I'm sleeping. Please see my black stuff's

dusted off. Night has no dilution anxieties,

but only the infinites are happy:

Math. Time. Everything happy goes

to many decimal places

while flesh passes through

gradations of glory. I visualized it,

the nurse said of the bedsore. Everything exists

at the courtesy of everything else.

Please see that my grave is kept clean.

Beloveds, finite things

in which the infinite endangered itself,

excarnate to memory and the divine substance

has limited liability. You're kind,

I tell the infinite. Too kind.

Aunt Madelyn At The White Sale 

Here is the kingdom of irregulars, 

land of no-two-alike, 

I hunt furiously 

useful towels. Closets simmering with 

terry, linen, beach or tea 

can never be full 

enough to stop these sprees. 

Hoarding is relative 

to love or fear, but not to need. Mother stockpiled 

soap in step-on cans. 

When the lid snapped back, 

instead of grinds, grease, skins, it was good 

to get a whiff 

of the bars, neat and brightly wrapped as gifts. 

Waving us off on dates, she'd yell "Be back by twelve 

and don't come home 

if you get killed." But I wasn't killed, 

easy as that seemed. I hadn't figured on 

life's pigheadedness: 

how the breath and pulse are triggered by a hardwon 

inability to unexist. How death is 

tightfisted. I thought 

at first there'd been a car crash: my voice soared, brilliant 

and bubbling with drugs: oh, that that too too 

euphoric 

stutter should be mine! 

Then, with a coziness worse than constraint, they 

spoke of the cerebral pinch I'd been in, praised 

the luck that chucked me 

back to sanitized light. Where towels absorb their weight 

in chaos. Where I am serene. 

Like those damn orchids— 

vivid, blizzardy sprays Tom and I trucked 

out West that time, and, one by one, heat or dark 

got them: my brainwaves. 

The last was that dendrobium...or is 

that my medication? See? Last week I went 

and rang the wrong bell 

after twenty-odd years of visiting 

my beaming, well-meaning sister. 

I worry now 

about another sister who manages neither 

smiles nor meaning. Those years I coaxed her through 

treatments, hoping— 

if not for her thanks or love, then what? 

Nothing...but the nothing I've received 

has me shuddering. 

Rage makes my blood astringent as witch hazel. 

I'll pretend not to see them pretend not to 

see my infirmities: 

My restless hands. Idling. Pilling the spread. 

Of course, you can get killed at home and that's something 

Mother never mentioned. My mind drifts 

to my friend Miriam, that deadly fire—I see again 

her pleasant, stocky face. "Mada, we're sharp 

as ever," she said last time, 

but she was fooled. With luck she slept right through. 

Outside snowflakes lift, float sideways, and seem 

to say "ground has nothing 

to do with me!" But this is silly. 

Though I can't trace one among the calm bustle 

of shoppers, I tell myself 

they are falling, they do touch earth, and they 

never rise at all.

Because We Never Practiced With 

The Escape Chamber 

we had to read the instructions as we sank.

In a hand like carded lace. Not nuclear warheads

on the sea's floor nor the violet flow over the reactor

will outlive this sorrowful rhyme. Vain halo! My project

becalmed, I'll find I've built a monument

more passing than a breeze. It will cost us,

Pobrecito. We can't buy a prayer. Did you call

my name or was that the floorboard

wheezing? These memories won't get any bigger,

will they? I think something is coming that will

vastly improve our quietude. I'm growing

snow crystals from vapor in anticipation and praying

for the velvet-cushioned kneeler that I need to pray.

I made this little sound for you to wait in.

It befalls us. An exchanged glance, reflective spasm.

Is it a fantastically unlaminated question set in flesh

or valentine that wears the air as its apparel?

If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still

a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient

may kiss and tell. Does the vessel have edges?

Or is it all connectedness, an embedding to be stretched

or bent. Imagine being simultaneously alive,

bound in both directions with a bow! Is it diachronic,

a phenomenon that changes over time? Without ardor

theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per-

severing, styling something blobbish and macabre

into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift

that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue.

Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.

– Alice Fulton (from ‘Barely Composed')

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