POETS’ CORNER

“The pure products of America go crazy,” William Carlos Williams noted in a poem in his 1923 book “Spring and All,” a national diagnosis offered by a physician-poet who may or may not have foreseen Unabombers, right-to-life assassins, world-Disneyification and “American Pies.”

But could he have foretold the zeitgeist on speed--the instant and endless contradictions of contemporary culture? Could he have foreseen the bold, chaotic varieties of present-day poetry, bravely continuing its dialogue with the Inexpressible, despite the occasional negative manifesto issued by self-appointed imans of American poetry? Might he have predicted Alice Fulton, a poet perhaps more in touch with the pure products of America--and their madness--than any other?

Readers are accustomed to lyric poems advancing with careful grace. Fulton’s lyrics travel at startling velocity, flitting through the multiple dimensions of contemporary physics and sensual math (the title of one of her earlier books) in ripples of scintillate diction like god particles. She runs pop culture, literary and political references through her linguistic search engine, locating elliptical emotional contexts for the highly particular elements of obsession.

Her new book, “Felt,” is fetishistic, wildly associative, demonically apt and simply eloquent, calling to mind Max Planck’s quote about the purpose of science as an “unresting endeavor” developing toward a vision which “poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.”

Fulton’s poetic intuition is a kind of apperceptive proof--never false, though she plays endlessly with notions of artificiality. It is on display to best effect in the poem “The Permeable Past Tense of Feel”) in which a single word resonates in its literal meaning (a textile) through the metaphor of fabric’s interwoven fibers to the interrelatedness of all creatures.

But “felt” is also a verb, the past tense of the verb “to feel.” “And though the world consists of everything/that is the case, I know/there must be ways to concentrate/the meanings of felt in one/just place.” Certainly, “felt,” the manufactured material, and “felt,” the part of speech and the universality of realized emotion, present a pure yet hybrid product, an oddly American product--familiar yet bizarre in its associations--but like the poems in this, her fifth book, the product is crazy-beautiful, expressive, original to a fault.

THE TETHER, By Carl Phillips, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 80 pp., $22

The power of invisible bonds informs the title of Carl Phillips’ new book of poems, “The Tether.” The hunting falcon is trained by the pull on the “rein” between its ankle and the falconer’s fist. This tether is gradually extended during this training process; soon it is no longer required because the bird has internalized the idea of restriction. Phillips’ concern in poem after poem here is with the ways in which we are connected to the world, to the subject-object, to Eros and history--through our own uneasy volition--its conscious and unconscious limitations and its ecstatic freedoms.

Phillips is a Latin scholar as well as an ambitious, searching lyric poet. He provides an object lesson on how Latin informs his diction and syntax in the remarkable poem “Roman Glass” by employing a long, Lucretius-like line, a prose line, to produce transcendent music and to enact the process of the sea working on a variety of ancient beach glass. “ ... [w]hatever pressure it is that, in effect, can/render a poetry FROM prose,/in the way, say, sharded glass becomes other and newly valued,/given a long enough/exposure to the ocean’s necessarily indifferent handling.” The bit of glass in his hand comes to represent the Roman Empire which, even in its failing final days, managed to be “holy” in its grand absoluteness, the consistent adherence to that enormous transparence which is, finally, “loss.”

In this dark time, as America asks questions following disaster and loss, Phillips’ poems argue for unsparing, inspired examination of that tethered falcon, the soul. He says, untethering the cliched spirit: “I think the soul wants/no mate/except body, what it has/already, I think/the body’s not a cage/ no,/but the necessary foil/ against which the soul/proves it was always/true.... “

Phillips is profoundly connected to a past that exists for him as a kind of parable that bleeds into the present, which he addresses with the most offhanded yet Rilkean intensity. He pares his lines down to almost nothing, yet his poems are immensely magnetic--they set up a dreamlike force field. And what better territory for us, for the inspired readers, the decipherers of truth, the pure products of America, to inhabit?