Response to Week 2's Reading Assignment

The Lyric Essay Reading Assignment 2

Joyas Volardores by Brian Doyle

This fairly conventional, accessible narrative moves from section to section by means of association:

1. Consider the hummingbird
2.  More on the bird, ending with vivid image of “each thunderous heart, the size of an infant’s fingernail.”
3. Focus on the bird’s heart and high metabolism, “the insane idea of flight.”
4. Moves from the tiny hummingbird heart to the largest possible heart–of a blue whale—a “house of a heart.”
5. Focus on numbers of chambers in the hearts of mammals & birds (4), reptiles (3), fish (2) insects and mollusks (1) and worms (up to 11 single-chambered hearts), moves into abstract by concluding with the universal “we all churn inside”
6. A universal and personal “we” talks about heart more in the way it tends to be depicted in literature—seat of emotion, relationship feeling and pain (the “constantly harrowed hear) memory, etc.  “We live in the house of the heart” repeats a phrase introduced in section 4.

I loved this essay, how it redeems the clichéd treatment of the heart in literature by considering it first as an organ in a bird, then in a whale, then finally in the last section talking frankly about the heart in the way we have grown used to, but with such powerful, fresh imagery and imaginative leaps that it feels new.

Take a Large Stockpot by Teresa Barnett

This accessible associative narrative moves from recipes with a mother’s marginalia to the topic of soup, with lyrical moments about how much the speaker loves soup, then seamlessly into an actual recipe for making a very specific soup that surprises in two ways: first, it is not one of her mother’s recipes but one from a friend’s Iranian father living in Southern CA; and second, even though we know it is Pomegranate soup, it is not what we expect—a roux makes it milky and wintry, not pungent and summer-bright.

One could actually follow the steps in this piece to make the soup. It closes with “Flavor will improve if allowed to cool,” an ending I did not find completely satisfying; I kept searching for some deeper meaning in that sentence, wondering for example if it was an allusion to Chekov’s dictum about how the hottest emotions are most effectively rendered by the coolest voices? The piece made me think in broader ways about how cooking, and esp. making soup, is an act we connect with family and home. Here, the author makes a soup from another (exiled) culture and so literally absorbs (eats) that culture’s notions of family and home. The writing is really good—clear, compressed, and packed with juicy, mouth-watering images. To me it seems hard to integrate a recipe into a larger, serious piece of writing, and I am impressed with how well it works here.

Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t, by Lia Purpura

This piece jumps all over the place, an essay with ADHD, but like many kids with ADHD is utterly charming. One reason it works is that it is clear the disparate topics have something in common, all being examples of hybrids. Another is the overall compression and brevity—a list like can get tiresome if it goes on too long, but this one didn’t. Another reason it worked was the voice—wryly funny, direct, frank and intimate—I felt invited in to see how the writer’ mind works, flashing from subject to subject as she pondered the notion of hybrids. Using direct dialogue, like what the friend say about chocolate covered potato chips was another effective way to keep the list from getting boring. I liked the range in the examples, from classical (satyr) to modern (Priuses), from animals to botany to holidays to food. I also liked the way the piece revealed things about the writer, her political orientation, her likes and dislikes.

Couldn’t Stop Watching by Sasha Steensen,

OK, I need some help with this one—I just don’t see the art here. To me it read like a series of journal entries typed up into an unshaped first draft. What is the point of this piece? Is the point not to have a point? If so, why should I want to read it? I was so little drawn in that no matter how I tried to pin my attention to the page, I found myself skimming, my mind going elsewhere. And what I did get through struck me in pretty negative ways—the voice sometimes sounding whiny and self-indulgent. None of the disparate subjects addressed seemed vital or even very interesting. Purpura got away with introducing a plethora of topics, but they were all clearly connected to her subject and the piece was very brief. This one was, for me, too long and rambling.

All those arcane allusions that not even a highly educated poet audience would get had the effect of making me feel excluded, condescended to. The piece was difficult but not, to my mind, in the good way. I think it was Reginald Shepherd who distinguished between two kinds of difficulty. One arises from mystery, complexity or evocation, where the writer in careful control of his material does not fill in all the blanks, leaving the reader to do some of  (and so be an active participant in) the work. Another kind of difficulty—opaqueness—arises from lack of control over (or perhaps it is deliberate eschewal of) writing technique. Obscurity from making esoteric allusions is another kind of opaqueness. Do I want depth and complexity in what I read? Yes. Mystery? Hell yes. But not opaqueness or obscurity, writing that can feel mannered and even manipulative.  

As with last week’s assignment, the piece I found the most challenging and least accessible sticks to me like a burr, forcing me to grapple with larger questions about art. Such as—must art communicate? Have “content” or “meaning?” This piece had content but no larger meaning that transcended its many subjects. It failed to communicate with me b/c I was not engaged enough to keep reading.

Seven Fathoms Down by Steven Church,

I really loved one and was really impressed by the quality of the writing. Also by the evidence of craft and thought that went into this essay, e.g., organizing it into seven sections, each with the word “fathom” in it and each one going deeper than the one before. Church starts at 1 fathom (6 ft) and ends at 7 fathoms (42 ft). 

The material in sections 1-6 is deliberately kept dry of emotion but in the last section we get a real story about a real boy who drowns, and the author has earned any feeling he wrings from his readers.

The essay begins with the cliché “warm the cockles of your heart” and then revives and refreshes it by looking at the phrase from every angle, dissecting it, exploring potentials offered by research (e.g. how the heart works), word etymology and word play, like punning (discussion about cockles as shellfish).

I liked the voice—no self-importance here, and associative leaps that, while surprising, somehow work (How does he achieve this?) The piece feels shaped, in a way that gave me much pleasure. The author put some work into this, showed respect for the reader by trying to create something that make connections, discoveries. (Maybe this is another way of expressing why I did not like Steensen’s essay—it felt to me like it somehow breaks the contract with the reader.)

I loved Church’s line (about the conch shell): “But it was an ear with a voice.”  The writing is crisp, clean, with wonderful sentence variety and strong, vivid images. I liked the clarity of the author’s vision on his subject and the clarity of its expression on the page. I liked that near the end he returns to the cockles that opened the essay, using them as verbs, rehabilitating the cliché:  “Tiny waves cockled against the lakeshore.” Note how he earns his title with the penultimate sentences in the last section:

I couldn't fathom how it would resonate through my consciousness, how these indiscriminate lines I now spool on to the page might bite into that day and drag it back up again. I couldn't fathom how I would still feel guilty that I couldn't do more. 

And I loved how the last sentence reverses the action of the piece, an actual and metaphorical body rising from where it has been submerged to the surface:

Part of me wanted to believe that the boy didn't actually die, that he would always exist below the surface of my thinking, like the ghost of an idea, as if he were just part of a story I tell again and again; but the thump of his body against the boat still reverberates up these sounding lines and rattles my grip on the present action of thought.

The Memory collective

was entertaining—little boxes you click on, then up comes a prose poem, a lyric poem, a short essay, a comic book, even a video. Several different authors/voices. There is whimsy here, a sense of play even when the subjects are serious. I like that the voices are somewhat effaced by being part of a collective; I liked that I did not feel talked down to or excluded but instead felt really invited in. I liked being able  participate–by clicking and by using senses (e.g. hearing visual) other than just the brain to get the message. It felt like jazzing around, improvising without being self-consciously edgy.  Knowing that each piece belonged to a different writer made it easier for me to accept the great variety of voices, subjects, and styles in each section--a craft observation helpful to me—if you want to present a whole lot of  very disparate material, you need to think about what vessel will work to contain it.  Here, technology (the little tabs) provides the structure that binds the disparate pieces—a great idea.