“Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles, they bundled him into his bed,” recited little Alice in front of her third grade class.
Now, years later, Alice Fulton is returning to her third-grade roots Thursday with her own poetry ““ no longer A. A. Milne’s ““ at the Hammer Museum in Westwood as part of the Hammer Poetry Readings series.
Fulton, who is currently the Ann S. Bowers Distinguished Professor of English at Cornell University, worked as a visiting professor at UCLA in 1991. Her reading tomorrow will be her third at the Hammer ““ her last visit was five years ago ““ and she looks forward to returning to UCLA.
“I think it is the most pleasant place I have ever taught,” said Fulton. “The students were wonderfully unconventional in some ways, but also smart and committed to their studies.”
Over the years, Fulton has acquired many awards acclaiming her numerous books of experimental poetry. The Library of Congress awarded “Felt,” a collection of her poems, the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. The Los Angeles Times also selected “Felt” as one of its “Best Books of 2001.”
“All poets try to take poetry away from the worn-out levels of diction, to take away the greeting card aspect, in order to return language to something that is fresh and connect with people because it is not worn-out or trite,” Fulton said.
Fulton is known for taking risks in her poetry. For example, at the Hammer reading, three of her poems will be interwoven with electronic music, written specifically for the poems by Los Angeles-born composer Joseph Klein.
“It will be interesting to hear the text and the words, to hear how the music is supporting and arguing with it,” Fulton said.
UCLA English Professor Stephen Yenser, who directs the undergraduate creative writing program within the English department at UCLA, oversees the poetry reading series at the Hammer. Yenser believes that poetry readings allow what is conventionally considered a written art to extend beyond that medium.
“If students are interested in poetry, it is important for them to see that it is an art that lives auditorily as well as literally ““ that is to say, it lives in the ear as well as on the page,” he said.
Yenser looks forward to Fulton’s reading and says the popularity of poetry readings has grown with time. According to Yenser, modern poets are skilled readers of their own work.
“I think that probably the variation of the proliferation of the media in recent years has made it more likely that poets will read,” Yenser said. “It is a development that came along with the development of the media.”
The poems read will be an accumulation from Fulton’s older and newer work, exhibiting her growth as a poet. Yenser expects Fulton’s reading at the Hammer tomorrow to be groundbreaking in both style and subject matter.
“She is formally very adept, but she is also experimental,” Yenser said. “Those two words often refer to different kinds of poets, the formalists on one hand and the experimentalists on the other. Alice cannot be categorized in that way. She does both.”
While some of her poems, such as “By Her Own Hand,” may be extremely emotional, others draw from issues of modern science. Ultimately, though, Fulton hopes her poetry resonates with the audience.
“All of the greatest, most profound questions are in poetry and in the most beautiful, succinct form,” Fulton
said. “You can memorize two lines from a poem and take them away with you in your heart for the rest of your life.”