Welcome Class! I just wanted to say hello and welcome you to the Lyric Essay Class blog. The class will be a combination of reading and responding to each others work and also published examples of the lyric essay....and most of our work will be done here! To get us started I am posting below a little Q&A a former student did with me about the Lyric Essay. Our assignment for tomorrow: Please introduce yourself by 8pm tomorrow night. Please let us know where you're from and what kind of project you'd like to work on this month. If you don't know yet...that is totally fine! Lyric Essay (at least for me) is all about process.

 Here's a little bit about me: (this picture sums it up)

OK, fine, I'll put it into words. I live and teach in North Carolina. Right now I am working on a book length lyric essay about the slums of Varanasi India, Jane Eye and Charlotte Bronte, tuberculosis (also known as consumption) and 19th century treatments, and the break up of my engagement to a giant man who very much resembled this bear. (Yes! All in one piece.) I am also working on a series of short cnf "fables" (lyric essays also often take this form) about my family and childhood. You can read one here.

Check out the Q&A below. In my next post,  I will give you some helpful links to start reading. Tomorrow, after everyone checks in, I'll give you your first assignment. Can't wait to get started. best, Sarah

The Lyric Essay Q&A

(Q: Gretchen Clark; A: Sarah Messer)

1) What is it about the lyric essay that speaks to 
you?




As a poet who often writes prose, I am interested in what non-fiction can borrow from the genre of poetry. The Lyric Essay offers yet another formal option, lying between poetry and essay, and including stellar qualities of both. The lyric essay is great for getting at a multi-faceted experience or a moment/recollection/idea/emotion that is non-linear.  Because the Lyric Essay is so often mosaic or fragmented in form,  it can get at an emotional truth beyond the facts of who what where when and why (journalism) or a constructed narrative (memoir). Instead of trying to make it linear, the Lyric Essay exists as a different option.

2) On the Seneca Review’s website they define lyric
 essays as a sub-genre that gives “primacy to
 artfulness over the conveying of information” as well 
as a style that can “forsake narrative line,  
discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor 
of idiosyncratic meditations.”  How do you define the lyric essay? 




Charles Baxter once said that you can do everything in prose that you can do in poetry except the line. The Lyric Essay takes this even further and includes lists, uses of white space, numbering, stanzas, etc.  The Lyric Essay looks different on the page than other prose, and is usually shorter than most traditional essays; whole books, however, have been written in the form of a Lyric Essay (see list at end of interview).  It’s a form that lets everything in, sometimes through absence (like Jenny Boulley’s brilliant book, “The Body,” comprised only of footnotes with the “body” of the text above blank.) Often fragmented, sometimes sections can stand on their own independent of other parts.

The Lyric Essay is CNF’s player in experimental forms in the same way that other sub-genres fall between familiar camps of poetry and fiction, – the prose poem, the short-short, the novella, the long poem, sequenced narrative poems, novel-in-verse, etc.  These in-between genres are not “ugly cousins;” they are NOT  a linguistic free-for-all, or a failure of something more mainstream. They do not happen out of randomness or because the writer was just lazy, self-absorbed or wanted to not make sense. They actually come from a traceable tradition of literature; they have their own rules. The Lyric Essay for example, cannot be fiction. If it was, it would be a prose poem or a short-short, or some other kind of experimental fiction. For a great example of lyric essays of the past 30 years, see The Next American Essay (Graywolf) anthology edited by John D’Agata.

3)  The lyric essay has also been described as being
 coy and dependant upon implication rather than 
concrete ideas, solid themes, and satisfying closures.
 How do you go about teaching this seemingly formless
 essay “form” to students?




I would disagree with the term “formless” – lyric essays must have a very quickly apparent form, they can’t be just word salad. A traditional essay leads the reader through each idea or memory with narrative voice, or analysis/argument. The Lyric Essay does the same thing, just through the architecture of its form. The form, infact, is the most important part – it teaches the reader how to “read” the essay, whether through numbered sections, white space,  stanzas, or  adopted non-traditional yet recognizable forms like a recipe,  a resume, or a catalogue. Would you say that a free-verse poem is formless? Of course not. In the same way that a free-verse poem has limitations and restrictions, so too does the lyric essay. For a great example of recognizable borrowed forms, check out Michael Martone’s new book “Contributor’s Note,” written (yes) only in the form of a contributors note in the back of a journal.

4) Lyric essays, as you know, can pull from various
 genres and writing sources like film, reportage, song
 format, and lists to enhance the piece.  Conversely,
 gaps, line breaks and white spaces are also mentioned
 as important aspects of the lyric essay.  In your 
opinion, what do you consider to be the indispensable
 ingredients of a good lyric essay?






It all depends. There is no formula, except (like I said above) that the form should be easily apparent to the reader, even if it is strange and different. It’s up to the author to play with form, the way that one might do with poetry, figuring out line-length, number of stanzas, etc.

5) And what about meaning?  Meaning is paramount to 
personal/creative nonfiction essay writing but it
 seems to be a rather ambiguous and sometimes absent 
part of the lyric.  Do you consider meaning to be an
 optional tool for use in the lyric essay?
 



I would argue that a different kind of meaning is being conveyed. One that is much more imagistic, perhaps about form itself, about thought or memory or ways of remembering or seeing. Perhaps because it is so often fragmented, a lyric essay can be more emotionally “true” than a more traditional form that tells you what the writer is feeling or thinking directly. The unique form lends feeling to content. The Lyric Essay doesn’t explain meaning or hit us over the head with it. But to be honest, there’s no concrete ground (or definition) of “meaning” in any form. Meaning shifts with the level of reader, with the intent of the writer towards that reader. The Lyric Essay more easily follows these shifts, the shiftiness of meaning, and it lets the reader decide.

6)And if meaning is not mandatory what do writers of 
the lyric essay use to construct their words around? 

Again, I would clarify and add, “if concrete and linear meaning is not mandatory.” Like experimental writing or abstract art,  the lyric essay can be about writing itself; it can be about thinking and about language as a medium on the page, much the same way that abstract art can be about paint or color (the way Jackson Pollock is about paint and movement, gesture)





7)  Are dialogue, scene and character important in the
 lyric essay?  If not, where does the power to convey 
in these types of essays come from?




These can certainly be elements, can be involved. But the driving force of the lyric essay is the form – its fragmented, arranged, mosaic nature. The form holds it together and leads us. Other elements important to great poems are also important – like image, symbol, voice, associative leaps, etc.

8)What do you think a lyric essay gives a reader 
that a traditional piece of personal essay or creative 
nonfiction doesn’t?

It might jar them into thinking or feeling a different way about a subject. It might make them work (which can be good) and resonate in a different way.




9)  What common elements do you feel the personal
 essay and the lyric essay share?




 The word essay means “attempt.” To go forth with an idea or an image without knowing if you are going to succeed. An essay feels like a problem or an examiniation. Both the Lyric Essay and the Personal Essay are associative and thought-driven, and (while the display varies) conceptual. As Cynthia Ozick writes in ‘Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’: “No one is freer than the essayist – free to leap out in any direction, to hope from thought to thought, to begin with the finish and finish with the middle, or eschew beginning and end and keep only a middle. The marvel of it is that out of this apparent causelessness, out of this scattering of idiosyncratic seeing and telling, a coherent world is made. It is coherent because after all,  an essayist must be an artist and every artist, whatever the means, arrives at a sound and singular imaginative frame – or call it on a minor scale, a cosmogony.”

10) Who are your top three picks for stellar lyric 
essay writers?

There are so many! Here are a few people dabbling in the lyric essay or writing cnf in unique and different ways:

Annie Dillard,  Terry Tempest Williams,  Albert Goldbarth, John D’Agata, Brian Lennon, Thailia Field, Jenny Boulley, Michael Martone, Lia Purpera, Carol Maso,  David Shields, Guy Davenport,   Anne Carson, Joanne Beard, Amy Benson, Brad Land…the list goes on and on.




11)  What part does poetry play in building a good 
lyric essay?  Do you feel you need to be knowledgeable 
in poetry and how it works to be successful at the 
lyric essay?




As in any genre, an emphasis on the image, on the cadence of a line is important. Juxaposition, collage,  an ability to play with white space and understand what it can do for the piece. But mostly, it’s important to think like a poet. To believe that all genres are just more variation on form. Forms available for your choosing. In the end, its whatever fits the work/content/intent best. Often I use the Lyric Essay for process, as a way to get at something, and  it changes into a more traditional form later. Experiment!  Never feel trapped in one for or another, be free. Your ideas and possibilities for your writing should be as vast as the sky, but your attention to form and your understanding of its subtle nuances should be as fine as cake flour. This is how I think of it anyway.

12)  Lastly, which poets would you recommend reading 
to get a better sense of the poetic aspects that can
 be weaved into lyric essay writing? 

I think any poet would be great, but here are a few whose work already saunters into the camp of Lyric Essay or uses CNF: Lyn Hejinian, Mary Ruefle,  Claudia Rankine, Tyehimba Jess,  Joe Wenderoth, again, there are so many.

I hope this makes sense and can be useful in some way. Thank you for these great questions and best of luck with your writing.