The Blue Penny Quarterly, Summer '96

Making the Abstract Physical:
On Fulton's Sensual Math

Sensual Math , by Alice Fulton. W.W. Norton. $17.95.

n "The Priming is a Negligee," the opening poem of Sensual Math, Alice Fulton compares the priming of a canvas, the undercoat applied to prepare it for paint, to a negligee, an undergarment worn to prepare lovers for sex. Fulton sees art as union, as the coming-together of minds in the act of creation. Her interest, though, is not so much in the moment of union in art--the moment, as Dickinson describes it, when your hair stands on end--but in the foreplay that precedes that moment, the engagement of words or images that produces an excitation of mind and sense. For Fulton, that's what art is about. That's where the real pleasure is. She is more interested in the negligee than the moment when the negligee is dropped and "The lovers get so excited/ to think--nothing comes between them./ There is nothing between them." With the negligee off, "That's how they can consume each other,/ sand each other sore." The tension between appetite and consumption, between sexual attraction and sexual completion becomes a controlling metaphor for the way art works.

Fulton's interest in art, here and in earlier collections, includes the consideration of popular cultural forms, especially song; and she plays with popular songs and singers, often humorously, throughout the collection. She is especially interested in the fuzzy sentimentality typical of popular art's viewpoint, in contrast to the tougher, more demanding insights central to the more serious uses of art. In "Some Cool" the narrator/poet provides an example. It's Christmas and she's stringing her tree:

I have this string of pig lights for the tree.
Each hog is rendered into darlingness,
rendered in the nerve-dense rose
of lips, tongue, palm, sole. Of the inside
of the eyes and nose.
They wear green bows.

The cute string of pig lights, however, calls up other associations for the poet.

Driving home these bitterly Michigan nights,
I often pass the silver bins of pigs
en route to the packing house. Four tiers to a trailer.
A massive physical wish to live
blasts out the slits
as the intimate winter streams in.
A dumb mammal groan pours out and December pours in
freezing the vestments of their skin
to the metal sides, riddling me
with bleakness as I see it. As I see it,

it's culturally incorrect to think
of this when stringing pig lights on the tree.
It's chronic me.

And it's chronic poetry, since the "me" here is the poet. The vision of this poet is not sentimental, as is the vision manifested in the string of pig lights. The voice and vision of this poet--and by extension--poetry, is not fuzzy and sentimental enough for mainstream culture:

Now when people ask what kind of poetry I write
I say the poetry of cultural incorrectness--
out of step and--does that help?

I use my head
voice and my chest voice.
I forget voice
and syntax, trying to add
so many tones to words that words
become a world all by themselves.
I forget syntax
and put some street in it. I write

for the born-again infidels
whose skepticism begins at the soles
of the feet and climbs the body,
nerve by nerve....

This description of the narrator's writing is about as good a description of Alice Fulton's voice as you're likely to find. She compares this voice with the popular voice of a popular singer, Elvis Presly. As a Christmas gift, the poet-narrator has been given a copy of Elvis's Favorite Recipes, which suggest Elvis's voice:

For a gut level of comfort,
close your eyes, smell the pork chops frying,
put on "Big Boss Man" and imagine
the King will be coming any minute.

"Some Cool" is simultaneously a brilliant, harrowing, and funny poem, about many things, but principally concerned with contrasting the vision typical of popular culture with the deeper vision typical of poetry and art. Her interest in contrasting the vision of popular culture with the artist's vision is central to Sensual Math.

Elvis makes a number of appearances in these poems, as do a variety of male idols, including Rudolph Valentino and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra appears, hilariously, in the final section of the book, "A Sequence Reimagining Daphne & Apollo." Fulton--here and in her previous collections--is interested in critiquing the relationship between women and culture. Male idols come in handy to the task. Here's part of her description of Sinatra-as-Apollo:

He could lip-sync in ten languages and was globally marketed
as General Voice
Swoon Pope and chairman of the Bored, though provincial

to the bone,
he called any place outside Parnassus "Darke Country,
Ohio."
Jove was "the Big J"; a good time "a little hey-hey."
Himself he dubbed
The Republic Thunderbolt....

Sinatra-Elvis-Apollo pursues Dickinson-Oakley-Daphne throughout the final section of Sensual Math, where her fate is essentially the same as in Ovid's version of the myth: she's turned into a tree. In Fulton version, however, we get the tree's point of view, and the tree is not happy about being made one with Daphne:

... Heavenly hurt. I recognized the presence
of design.
She moved through my zen nap like a queen--
yes Your Deviance--
riding up like a skirt, abrading my chambers and rays till she
crowned. Oh,
she was a sensation. It was not consensual, let me tell you.
Whose "no"
can never mean "no"? I was opened and she was spiralbound
as nature/culture,
the great divide, broke down.

Turned into a tree by her River-god father, Daphne's spirit is contained. (Apollo doesn't mind: "He liked her better as a tree. 'Girls are trees' / was his belief.") The tree observes:

.... I noticed she became
more babyish
as the centuries passed by. She couldn't walk, had no control
over her body,
and often babbled rather that talked: "Sis-boom-bah. Doobie-
doobie-doo.
Oo boy or oo girl?" Frivolous. Gerber's gibberish.

There's still hope, thankfully, for Daphne, as we learn in the opening lines of the poem:

She'll get out of this one somehow. Someday she'll break
our engagement
with a wraparound roll-off or axel full twist
dismount,
followed by a blast of wind that puts an end to this
grotesque togetherness.

Fulton reinvents the Daphne and Apollo myth with humor, impressive intelligence, and most of all, passion. Her stance as a poet is passionate; and that passionate stance is perhaps nowhere more prominent than in the music of her language as it is evidenced throughout her work and especially in the Daphne and Apollo sequence. The music of Fulton's poetry is one of its particular strengths. For examples of this, pick up any of her books and read at random. Her poems, spoken out loud or "heard" in the process of reading, offer a subtle, magnificent jazz: a music for the intellect, felt on the tongue and in the body, resonating in the mind.

And nowhere is the music of Fulton's poetry more stirring than in Sensual Math.