I have been an admirer of Alice Fulton’s poetry for several years now, and have used her evocative turns of phrase as the titles of two of my previous works. I had wanted to compose an actual setting of her poems for quite some time, but never found the appropriate medium—the words themselves just seemed too perfect to tamper with musically. It finally occurred to me that what I was really interested in creating was an elaboration of a poetry reading—after all, poets often “perform” their own works just as musicians do, so why not take that as a point of departure to create a sonic environment around the spoken words? These three poems from Fulton’s 2001 collection Felt lend themselves particularly well to such a setting.

Three Poems from Felt was first performed by Alice Fulton on 4 April 2005 at the University of North Texas.