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Lyric essay

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a...hybrid form of creative nonfiction

+Genesis

The Seneca Review is widely credited for the nomenclature and sudden popularity of the Lyric Essay (see its Fall, 1997 issue & subsequent issues; link on website)

Championed by writer John D’Agata (check out the anthology The Next American Essay)

Often described as a hybrid between nonfiction & poetry, but just as often, if not more often, manifests in myriad forms

One of the most growing and exciting areas of creative fiction right now, with lots of growing debate about the possibilities of the form

+Characteristics

Emphasis on use of language, employment of visual imagery, metaphor (not actually only the dominion of poets, but this is largely the “lyric” element of the lyric essay)

Experimentation with form “True” but less concerned with evidentiary means,

exhaustive argument, conventional methods of structure

Less concerned with a conclusion than it is with the questions it is posing or circling. Rather than read a lyric essay and conclude its theme, we might instead look for what types of questions it asks or circles around.

+Form

What you’ll see with many lyric essays are experimentations with form, and it’s constrictive to say “here are the forms of the lyric essay.”

Nonetheless, there are some forms that tend to be used with some frequency, as outlined in “Tell It Slant”

(But devising one’s own form is entirely appropriate)

+Constraints

This aspect of writing with a formal constraint also shares, of course, an element with formal poetry, in which certain types of poems rely on a set number of stanzas and certain patterns in stresses.

It also shares elements with a form of writing called Ouvroir de littérature potentielle.” Aka: Workshop of Potential Literature Nickname: OuLiPo

If lyric essays play with form constraints, OuliPo plays with micro-language constraints

Derived in the 60s by French writers and mathematicians as a form of constraining language to generate inspiration and new ways of creating writing structures and patterns and, thus language.

For example: lipograms, in which the writer chooses one (or more) letters and isn’t allowed to use them in a piece of writing, thus forcing the writer to become more inventive with the writing.

+Let’s Try an OuliPo

Choose one (or more) letters (hint: choosing vowels makes this a much more difficult exercise)

Write one paragraph about a room you know well: could be your bedroom, your childhood kitchen, it’s up to you.

Write the paragraph without your letter (letters) and see what types of choices you have to make around language, the way in which it (should) force your writing-brain to slow down.

Choosing Z isn’t cheating, but it’s not not cheating.

+Forms of the Lyric Essay

Flash Collage Braided Hermit Crab Prose Poetry

+Prose Poem/Flash Nonfiction

Flash creative nonfiction is a very popular form right now (see Brevity Magazine online for some of the best examples). These are very short—Brevity’s flash essays are 750 words or less).

Flash nonfiction—like a prose poem—hones in more on language and imagery—where the concise nature of the form requires close attention to each word

As with all poetry, this form also focuses on rhythm and cadence (although, again, poetry is not the only genre concerned with rhythm and cadence).

+Flash ANOTHER EPIC

BY DANTE DI STEPHANO

I have lived in important places, times

—Patrick Kavanagh

I could tell you everything that happened on Linden Street the year the Berlin Wall fell. That was the year the Hanrahan boy grew his hair to the middle of his back and rode his bike down the block at seven a.m. sharp every school day. The Perry twins, with red hair longer than the Hanrahan boy’s, vied for the affections of Dino Taglione and the older girl won. The pipes burst on 20 Linden, and we lost the love letters my grandmother had bundled in hatboxes and stored in a corner of the cellar. Masty Hubba danced for loosies and beer in front of the Brickyard Tavern all summer, and somebody kept stealing the copper gutters off Saint Mary’s rectory roof. Monsignor Brigandi kept replacing them, and he would curse and pray as he paced the block, throughout all the high holy days of Ordinary Time, like Achilles in his tent.

—

+COLLAGE

The idea behind collage is to fit together—in writing—otherwise fragmented pieces, in order to create a whole.

Super easy! (Super kidding). But there are many fine examples of collage essay to consider. For instanceDavid Shields’ piece “Life Story,” a lyric essay composed entirely of bumper sticker slogans, for example.

+Life story, david shields (1996)

What is the “shell” or received document(s) used for this piece?

What is the nature of these fragments? How would you describe the accumulation of these

aphorisms, structurally? In what way is this piece personal? In what was is it

universal? Looking at either language or content, where do you

find internal moments? Where are the external ones?

+Braided Essay

Like the collage, uses fragments to create a new whole; like certain forms of poetry, uses repetition, the reappearance of certain “strands” of the braid.

“Fourth State of Matter,” which we read earlier in the semester, is one example of a braided essay, because the author has two “strands” she weaves back and forth

A braided essay can also be significantly more fragmented than Beard’s piece (and shorter)

+Hermit Crab

The form itself is a metaphor, as you read in Tell It Slant. The hermit crab has no armor, so spends its (his/her? Unsure of hermit crab biology, I’m afraid) life occupying other creatures’ shells.

For example, in “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” Dinty Moore uses google maps as the “shell” to write his google maps essay.

Patrick Madden uses Ebay to write an “ebay essay, “Michael Martone’s Leftover Water Bottle.”

Other examples: An essay written in the form of an outline, an essay using only footnotes and no body, an essay in the form of a “how to” guide, an essay written as a personal ad, an essay written as a Craig’s List ad, an essay written as a series of Facebook posts, an essay using the form of a medical pain scale. The list goes on and is only limited by your own ideas.

+Google maps

Without the scaffolding of google maps, what genre of nonfiction might Dinty Moore’s essay on George Plimpton fall?

What is the story? What impact does it have on the reader to encounter

the piece in the form, and what does it afford Moore?

+Ebay essay

In Patrick Madden’s essay, he actually made an ebay listing for Michael Martone’s leftover water; the questions are real (although there may have been ringers).

What does this scaffolding provide in terms of the tone? What does the form allow Madden to convey without

directly stating it?

+“The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss, p. 28 In “The Pain Scale,” Eula Bliss uses the form of the pain

scale as her structure. Let’s look at that essay What are some of the external elements of this piece?

By external, we might also mean “reported,” elements that come from the external rather than the internal world.

What are some of the internal elements. By internal, we might mean personal, interior thoughts, reflections.

What is the result of the accumulation of these elements? This is another way of asking, what does the piece say in its entirety; what is it probing thematically?

+“Son of Mr. Green Jeans” by Dinty Moore (p. 389) What is the formal constraint of this piece? What thematic idea is Moore circling, querying in this

piece? What external elements does he look at? Give ma an

example. What are the personal or internal moments? Example:

+Querying the Lyric Essay

What is the form. If a received form, what type of “shell” or received document(s) used?

What is the nature of these fragments? How would you describe the accumulation of these

aphorisms, structurally? In what way is this piece personal? In what was is it

universal? Looking at either language or content, where do you

find internal moments? Where are the external ones?

+Genre & Form

Genre expectations change when the writer plays around with form.

Changing a narrative from linear to other morphs the “essay” into something “that is not quite nonfiction either.”

One way to consider the hermit crab form is to consider it as an appropriation of an existent form: for the sake of unsettling the text.

+Found objects

This device also borrows from other genres, from the epistolary novels that were part of the earliest form of the novel, as well as other realistic devices that exist in fiction: diaries, newspaper articles, real events, reports etc.

+In-class Lyric Essay Assignment

Write a rough draft of a collage essay. You may use any part of the magazines I’ve brought to start yourself out, or other fragments.

Goal: to use these fragments/pieces to create a whole other piece in which the fragments themselves accumulate—to make the sum greater than its parts.