The Leap in Poetry and the Essay & Creating an Architecture for Confession or Epiphany

Dear Class,

As always, I feel honored by your responses to this week’s reading – so thoughtful, close, evocative (poetic!) and right on in my opinion. I wanted to write a little bit about my thoughts on the selections and also some thoughts in general about what the lyric essay can do.

Last week we were loosely looking at the lyric essay and narrative – how form/white space can break up a narrative, allow the writer/reader to start over, come at a story from a different point of view; we used the words pixilated, prism-like, fragment, mosaic. I am not done thinking about this both simple and complex notion – how DOES sections and white space interrupt or add/enhance a narrative? What does it do to and for the reader? In some ways it can definitely get to some greater truth, life and memory and perception being inherently fragmented. This is something I want us to keep thinking about and exploring.

Anyway, onward. This week, however, I wanted to look at how the lyric essay is like a poem. Two thoughts on this: the first is the idea of “the leap” (coined by Robert Bly), and the second, the essay/poem being a kind of architecture for the conveyance of a pure confession/ pure emotion/ otherwise (in any other context) sappy idea.

1. “Leaping Poetry” -- it’s that moment where the poem is trucking along and then suddenly a thought, image, statement, confession, epiphany comes in from seemingly left field. When done right, a whole hallway of doors instantly open in my mind; or the elevator suddenly drops three floors. We’re caught by surprise, but in a good way. This could also be called “the associative leap” mentioned in the Seneca Review intro about the lyric essay. Here’s a good illustration in the form of a famous poem by James Wright (I am sure you’ve all seen it, but here it is).

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

By James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

Yup. Check out that last line. So odd, yet so much like the human mind. Sometimes I like to describe the essay as "a map of the mind." The lyric poem is very similar. 

I was thinking about this Leaping reading Joyas Volardores this week, which seems to be a favorite for many of you. In particular, the sentence that ends the piece, which is a kind of catalogue of strange thing next to strange thing (leaping) : You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

What about that line about the cat? This list is destabilizing. One thing after another. It creates a kind of fraction of emotion (good thing/scarey thing) and the result is a kind of heartache, a queesiness. Atleast for me. 

Another thing I admire about this piece is it’s sneaky ability to accomplish my second point. How does this writer get away with this kind of line? So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.  Or We all churn inside.  Yet, by the time we reach those lines, we are completely set up for them. Not narratively (because this is jumping all around) but figuratively. He has set us up with such close examinations of the humming bird heart, then the whale heart then this transitional paragraph (more list-making): Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

That’s how he does it. I feel that it’s masterful and I also feel that it’s sneaky. And this is why I love it.

2. I want to sing some praises (as you all did) for Stephen Church and his piece in Diagram. Which is also pretty sneaky, brilliant, and pretty much includes all CNF genres in one – essay, history, science writing, and of course memoir, and it’s in the form of a lyric essay. I get the sense though that the writing of this essay and what came out also snuck up on Stephen Church (in the act of writing). Even if this is the case, it feels like the whole piece is leading up to this one emotional truth: I watched this boy die; I can’t fathom it. Like a great traditional essay, he totally sets us up for it: He brings in his children right away, he talks about cockles and how they are like lips/a mouth. We are distracted by his discussion of language but all the imagery, if you look back, is pointing in one direction….to set up this drowning. The image of the catfish like a corps for example. His trepidation around water verses his son who plunges into the waves. The use of “fathom” as measurement that then gets turned over in the last paragraph. It’s everywhere. Like Loryn said, I feel like this is an essay that you can return and return to. It seems to be using the form to jump from one thing to the next, but I feel like it’s a train moving quickly forward.

3. As for the other selections. Sometimes I give you things just to see what you might think – to show you what is out there. I love the way Lia Purpera plays with this leaping idea literally back and forth with her discussion of the hybrid. My favorite: the chocolate covered potato chip. Such a perfect metaphor. I love as well how much this piece is about writing.

Another piece about writing – Sasha Steensen – is the most experimental of this bunch. I was actually thinking of taking it out of the reading and maybe including it later. But I’m glad, in the end, that it stayed and you read it. The Volta (where it was published) is an experimental on-line journal linked to Dada and Language poetry and poetics (if that helps). Rebecca (I think) talked about Language Poetry, and yes, this kind of falls into that camp but wearing the team-jersey of Lyric Essay. To me this piece is about sentences, but its also about sex and languaging. It does something to my brain (including the images and diagrams and maps) that is not unlike what reading Gertrude Stein does to my brain. I don’t understand it always, but I also don’t dislike or discount it. I walk away with images and word upon words. I am attracted to this writer’s voice. I love Lesley’s reading of this piece…but I admit, I feel like this is speaking more to poets than to prosers. It does however illustrate a good point. When the leaps are perhaps too big between sections, what happens? People feel lost or bored or annoyingly toyed with. The piece becomes “more important to the writer than the reader” it is the definition of idiosyncratic. And meaning takes a back seat perhaps for something else to be forefronted – the texture of language perhaps. Anyway, I know it was the most difficult, and thanks for taking a stab at it.

And the Barnett and the Memory Lab are just to show you what is possible. Sometimes picking a form (like a recipe) can actually cause you to write something different than just sitting down with a full page and a blank screen. It adds a form/structure to the act which then shapes how the content comes out.

I am a big proponent of “Procedural Poetics” or using different procedures in the act of writing. Write a piece only on index cards; type it on an old fashioned type writer using only half a folded piece of paper; erase an already existing text. Use found text as titles or within the piece itself –text from non-literary sources like recipes, medical journals, old car ownership manuals. These are ways to capture tone and diction. A way to play around and get started. Let me know if you are interested in this and we can do some experiments. Anyway, hope this helps and that you have some ideas for your next writing assignment!