As I read through the pieces assigned this week, I realized that a fair amount of what attracts me to the lyric essay is not necessarily the smashing together of forms, but the exceptional amount of control this collision requires. So I've progresses already!
"A NOTE ON THE LYRIC ESSAY
I have relied on Nick Flynn's definition of the lyric essay in part because it is elegant and in part because it is Nick Flynn (intellectual swoon):
Nick Flynn, feb 2007
The lyric essay has the potential to contain a great energy, in that it combines the limitations of non-fiction with the openness of poetry. It is this tension which interests me at the moment, this need to grapple with the world as it actually is,or appears to be, filtered through the transformative powers of poetry. The end result, ideally, is the world or an experience distilled to its essence--it can make the world or an individual's experience matter again. Or, to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "We must make living and dying important again."
Perhaps the lyric essay is simply our culture’s latest attempt to do this."
-AP
Thanks Angela! Nick certainly does wonders with the tiny short form in his memoirs. This is inspiring me to include "Same Again" from Another BS night in Suck City...This fits into the borrowed forms section of our class in a few weeks! Nice to have you here!
ReplyDeleteAngela, I am sitting here, feeling gun-shy to respond online to the reading, self conscious--and so I thought "I will read the thoughts of others first." I just finished teaching Nick's first memoir, Another BS Night, to high school Juniors and have been thinking/talking a lot about connections to the lyric essay, etc. I appreciate your reference here for so many reasons--the smallest of which (intellectual swoon, actually, total swoon of all sorts)--is my attraction to Nick's use of narrative in his memoirs, which read, to me, like long distance running kind of poems. He says things differently in his poetry, perhaps easier, and in sections like "Same Again--" but I feel his work and sweat in a poetic move toward narrative and shared coherence--a sort of let's know we can't know, together--kind of line. In his poetry, he knows, and we feel. The narrative is never, certainly, less--but it is a different kind of work. Which brings me back to The Seneca Review, and to Emma. I think I'm ready to begin. Thank you Angela, for your deep work and inspiring response!
ReplyDeleteOK now I am motivated to do what I should have done by now: read Nick Flynn. Wonder what he means, exactly, by the phrase "the limitations of prose?" Doesn't some poetry also "grapple with the world as it is or as it appears to be?"
ReplyDeleteWhen he speaks of the "limitations of prose," I take him quite literally -- prose, morso than poetry is bound by all sorts of rules that often prevent the sort of communication that poetry allows. Here I think of Emily Dickinson who was quite unstructured yet conveyed oodles of experience in her "telling it slant."
ReplyDeleteThe more comfortable we can get in the space in which we want to write, the more we can communicate what we intend to...Wittgenstein famously said: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
That is a round about way of saying that I think Flynn wants to be in a space where words can have a life of their own if we let them...