Poet Alice Fulton assumes the office of mentor A.R. Ammons

By Franklin Crawford

Alice Fulton's presence in 239 Goldwin Smith Hall is poetic justice incarnate. Fulton, a professor of English and honored poet, is back in her native state of New York, at the school where she earned her MFA and where she now occupies the office of the late A.R. Ammons, legendary teacher and luminary from whom she learned much about poetry and life.

English Professor Alice Fulton in her office in 239 Goldwin Smith Hall. Charles Harrington/University Photography

"Cornell is fortunate indeed to have a poet of Alice Fulton's stature," said Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha professor of English at Cornell. "What a fine consolation after the irreplaceable loss of Archie Ammons."

Fulton describes her return to Cornell as "serendipitous." After an 18-year professorship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Fulton arrived at Cornell in January with husband Hank De Leo to fill the faculty line vacated when Ammons died last year.

It is perhaps unfair to introduce Fulton by way of her beloved predecessor. Publisher's Weekly has compared her work to that of a different writer entirely, suggesting that Fulton "may be (Emily) Dickinson's postmodern heir," and her honors include a MacArthur "genius" grant.

However, Ammons was among Fulton's dearest friends and most important teachers. She read at the Ammons memorial last April, where President Hunter Rawlings announced her appointment. So her return to Cornell and to Ammons' office -- where he often kept his door wide open -- is a literal passage worth noting.

The second floor of Goldwin Smith was in the midst of a facelift when Fulton arrived. Translucent plastic sheets draped the halls and the corridor was a "ghostly membrane," she said, "someplace between a museum installation and the amniotic sac." Fulton had to "unveil" her new office door by lifting the plastic drapery.

"It was strange to raise that veil and see the door of Archie's office -- its panes of frosted glass with the same tiny chipped away piece where I used to peer in to see if he was there," she said. "The office was still the same sky blue -- Archie blue -- and his brown recliner was still there. I'd like to keep the room the same color -- and keep his chair."

Fulton is such a good fit at Cornell that it's easy to imagine she -- or the Muses -- planned it this way. Not so. "The chance for me to return was unforeseen and came as a wonderful surprise," she said. "There's a true community of writers and scholars at Cornell, people I deeply admire as artists and thinkers, and that atmosphere -- the spirit of a place -- is something that can't be legislated or forced."

Fulton has published five highly acclaimed works of poetry as well as a book of essays, and she's currently finishing a collection of short stories. Her most recent book, Felt, was chosen by The Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 2001. A New Yorker critic called Sensual Math, published in 1995, "electrifying and deeply moving."

Although her work has been celebrated, Fulton feels poetry should be "resistant and unsettling, rather than complacent or compliant. Poetry isn't about pleasing people. It comes from a different place entirely."

In Felt, Fulton explores emotive states so subtle they have yet to be named. But Felt also is a fabric made of tangled fibers, and this meaning led to poems about the interweaving of humans, animals and planet. "Another subject is privacy, the opening and closing of doors," she said. Fulton returned from culture's skeleton closet with a fresh treatment of our secrets -- and perhaps exorcised some demons -- in poems that scrutinize virginity, suicide, fetishes and failure.

She said Archie Ammons made her think about failure, in that he "wasn't a person who pretended to strength all the time. He felt at home with human frailty. In fact, he used to say that he found perfection frightening. What a relief it was to have that out in the open."

Fulton makes no bones about a poet's worth. "Poets are luxuries," she said. "I tell students it's a historical luxury to write poetry. It's a privilege. Over the ages, very few people have had time for this."

In the classroom, she assigns contemporary poetry books "that can be used as models, as something to riff on and converse with."

This semester, Fulton has taken the MFA poets under her wing and is teaching the graduate poetry seminar.

One of her ambitions is to offer courses that bridge the gap between the academic and the creative writing wings of the department, said Harry Shaw, English department chair. "Like the work of her mentor -- Archie -- her writing bridges an even larger gap than that between the sciences and the humanities," he said.

Science is a major influence for Fulton, who has written about the relation between poetry and complexity theory, for example. Her groundbreaking 1986 essay "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic" (included in Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry) proposes the term 'fractal verse' to describe an emerging form between order and chaos. A later essay, "Fractal Amplifications," introduces the notion of the "poem plane" and "writing in three dimensions."

While working on Felt, Fulton was teaching a graduate class in fractal poetics. "I enjoy teaching because students are good company. It's like having your own gang, or to put it more elegantly, your own salon."

Returning to thoughts of her own teacher, she noted that "Archie's open-door policy" was not merely literal. "It was a welcoming posture, a way of being in the world. I hope to keep the metaphorical door open. The actual door isn't so important."