Patience, solitude, Catholic upbringing contributed to development of her poetry

BY KAREN DIETLEIN
STAFF WRITER

As a teenager in Troy, Alice Fulton copied down the works of famous poets in her own handwriting as "a way to learn."

"My mother would find these pieces of paper around the house, with my handwriting and a Keats poem, and say, 'Well, that's good, Al!'" the poet told The Evangelist.

Ms. Fulton wasn't thinking of publishing award-winning poetry while a student at Catholic Central High School in Troy. At that time, she said, she was still "becoming serious" about poetry, voraciously reading large anthologies from cover to cover.

Learning poetry

Ms. Fulton would also spend hours transcribing song lyrics from her record collection in order to learn the musical qualities of language.

"You had to really strain to hear the words, and play the song over and over again," she said. "The effort of listening to get those words made me patient."

That patience, she noted, continues to be at the center of how her poems come into being. "The actual process of writing is related to seclusion, solitude and contemplation," she explained. "You need to clear away the business and the dreck, and begin with foundational questions: 'What's real? What haven't you written about yet?'"

Troy days

The solitude that comes into her writing today extends back to her experience at Catholic Central, the poet said.

Her teenage loneliness figures into a longer poem, "Maidenhead," in which she describes how during the cold winter months, girls at Catholic High would sunbathe by the gym in their uniforms, "trying to grab heat where they could." Among them, she recalled, was the "only black girl at Catholic High," who would sunbathe in an effort to "get blacker."

"I was a bad student at Catholic High," she recalled. "I forgot to go to my final French exam, and I couldn't graduate with my class. I'd had a graduation dress made, and it hung in the closet and was never worn. I called it my 'ungraduation dress.'"

What a poem is

Now a professor of English at Cornell University, Ms. Fulton incorporates social, religious and feminist issues into her works.

"A poem can't be an essay, and it can't be journalism," she explained. "The hard part is to take a stand on an issue without becoming preachy or didactic."

For Ms. Fulton, good poetry has "qualities of beauty and music," incorporating subtlety and complexity in order to "retain the interest of a reader through infinite readings. The best poems are ones that you can read again and again, and get different shades of meaning."

Looking back

Now a respected poet with a number of anthologies, awards and publications under her belt, Ms. Fulton reflects on the young writer she once was while looking at the young writers she teaches at Cornell.

"I couldn't write my young poems again," she said. "I'm not in that place anymore. When you're a young writer, everything is interesting. Everything in their life seems potential material for a poem, and that's a good place for a young writer to be."

As young poets grow in experience, she explained, they move less towards autobiographical poetry and more towards poetry of experience, of what she calls "looking in the window."

"The poetry of experience that I write is looking my own mind, heart, self and memory, coupling it with a social conscience, and thinking about the issues, people and wrongs of the world," she said.

(Alice Fulton will read from her works at the RPI Chapel and Cultural Center, March 4, 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.)

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