Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Award-winning poet Alice Fulton will speak and read from her work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 20, in the Valley Library Main Rotunda on the Oregon State University campus. The reading is the first in the 2005-06 Visiting Writers Series, sponsored by the OSU English Department, the Valley Library and the Office of the Provost. A book signing will follow.

Fulton has published six collections of poetry: "Cascade Experiment," "Palladium," "Felt," "Sensual Math," "Powers of Congress," and "Dance Script with Electric Ballerina." She also is one of the nation's most imaginative critics of poetry. Her book, "Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry," collects her strongest essays on poetic structure, originality and influence.

As many of the titles reveal, her work merges an obsession with the play of language and a fascination with the way poetry accommodates multiple lenses - from science, technology, mythology, theory and the arts - allowing a more profound understanding of the human situation.

Critic A.R. Ammons has praised the "great integrative force" of her poems. Several of her works, including "Give: a Sequence Reimagining Daphne and Apollo" (from "Sensual Math"), have been adapted for musical performance.

Fulton's poems often engage and question popular culture, advertising and the media. Her questioning of the doctrinaire, ability to strip away the film of convention, and embracing of the eccentric have led many critics to point to Fulton as poet Emily Dickinson's direct descendent.

Critic Kathleen Rooney sets Fulton apart from her peers, saying, "Alice Fulton is not a safe poet; she's a daring, ambitious, and risk-taking one…. Time and again Fulton has proven herself willing, unlike so many of her contemporaries, to take chances in her work."

Fulton has received many accolades including the Associated Writing Program Award in poetry for "Dance Script with Electric Ballerina," the National Book Award for "Palladium," a McArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award and the Ingram Merrill Award. In 2002 her collection of poems "Felt" received the prestigious Rebekah Johnson Bobbit National Prize for Poetry.

Fulton's reading, like the rest of the Visiting Writer series, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact 541-737-3244 or [email protected].