lyric essay questions

Writing Without Limits: Understanding the Lyric Essay

Sean Glatch  |  February 28, 2023  |  7 Comments

In literary nonfiction, no form is quite as complicated as the lyric essay. Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.

For both poets and creative nonfiction writers, lyric essays are a gold standard of experimentation and language, but conquering the form takes lots of practice. What is a lyric essay, and how do you write one? Let’s break down this challenging CNF form, with lyric essay examples, before examining how you might approach it yourself.

Want to explore the lyric essay further? See our lyric essay writing course with instructor Gretchen Clark. 

What is a lyric essay?

The lyric essay combines the autobiographical information of a personal essay with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry. In the lyric essay, the rules of both poetry and prose become suggestions, because the form of the essay is constantly changing, adapting to the needs, ideas, and consciousness of the writer.

Lyric essay definition: The lyric essay combines autobiographical writing with the figurative language, forms, and experimentations of poetry.

Lyric essays are typically written in a poetic prose style . (We’ll expand on the difference between prose poetry and lyric essay shortly.) Lyric essays employ many of the poetic devices that poets use, including devices of repetition and rhetorical devices in literature.

That said, there are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment. While the form itself is an essay, there’s no reason you can’t break the bounds of expression.

One tactic, for example, is to incorporate poetry into the essay itself. You might start your essay with a normal paragraph, then describe something specific through a sonnet or villanelle , then express a different idea through a POV shift, a list, or some other form. Lyric essays can also borrow from the braided essay, the hermit crab, and other forms of creative nonfiction .

In truth, there’s very little that unifies all lyric essays, because they’re so wildly experimental. They’re also a bit tricky to define—the line between a lyric essay and the prose poem, in particular, is very hazy.

Rather than apply a one-size-fits-all definition for the lyric essay, which doesn’t exist, let’s pay close attention to how lyric essayists approach the open-ended form.

There are few conventions for the lyric essay, other than to experiment, experiment, experiment

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

At its simplest, the lyric essay’s prose style is different from that of the personal essay, or other forms of creative nonfiction.

Personal essay example

Here are the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

“We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.”

The prose in this personal essay excerpt is descriptive, linear, and easy to understand. Fennelly gives us the information we need to make sense of her world, as well as the foreshadow of what’s to come in her essay.

Lyric essay example

Now, take this excerpt from a lyric essay, “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

“The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.” 

The prose in Knight’s lyric essay cannot be read the same way as a personal essay might be. Here, Knight’s prose is a sort of experience—a way of exploring the dream through language as shifting and ethereal as dreams themselves. Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

Where the personal essay transcribes experiences, the lyric essay creates them.

For more examples of the craft, The Seneca Review and Eastern Iowa Review both have a growing archive of lyric essays submitted to their journals. In essence, there is no form to a lyric essay—rather, form and language are experimented with interchangeably, guided only by the narrative you seek to write.

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

Lyric essays are commonly confused with prose poetry . In truth, there is no clear line separating the two, and plenty of essays, including some of the lyric essay examples in this article, can also be called prose poems.

Well, what’s the difference? A prose poem, broadly defined, is a poem written in paragraphs. Unlike a traditional poem, the prose poem does not make use of line breaks: the line breaks simply occur at the end of the page. However, all other tactics of poetry are in the prose poet’s toolkit, and you can even play with poetry forms in the prose poem, such as writing the prose sonnet .

Lyric essays also blend the techniques of prose and poetry. Here are some general differences between the two:

• Lyric essays tend to be longer. A prose poem is rarely more than a page. Some lyric essays are longer than 20 pages.
• Lyric essays tend to be more experimental. One paragraph might be in prose, the next, poetry. The lyric essay might play more with forms like lists, dreams, public signs, or other types of media and text.
• Prose poems are often more stream-of-conscious. The prose poet often charts the flow of their consciousness on the page. Lyric essayists can do this, too, but there’s often a broader narrative organizing the piece, even if it’s not explicitly stated or recognizable.

The two share many similarities, too, including:

• An emphasis on language, musicality, and ambiguity.
• Rejection of “objective meaning” and the desire to set forth arguments.
• An unobstructed flow of ideas.
• Suggestiveness in thoughts and language, rather than concrete, explicit expressions.
• Surprising or unexpected juxtapositions .
• Ingenuity and play with language and form.

In short, there’s no clear dividing line between the two. Often, the label of whether a piece is a lyric essay or a prose poem is up to the writer.

Lyric Essay Examples

The following lyric essay examples are contemporary and have been previously published online. Pay attention to how the lyric essayists interweave the essay form with a poet’s attention to language, mystery, and musicality.

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

This lush, evocative lyric essay traverses the American landscape. The speaker reacts to this landscape finding poetry in the rundown, and seeing her own story—family trauma, religion, and the random forces that shape her childhood. Pay attention to how the essay defies conventional standards of self-expression. In between narrative paragraphs are lists, allusions, memories, and the many twists and turns that seem to accompany the narrator on their journey through Americana.

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

Notice how this gorgeous essay evolves down the spine of its central theme: the sleepless swallows. The narrator records her thoughts about the passage of time, her breast examination, her family and childhood, and the other thoughts that arise in her mind as she compares them, again and again, to the mysterious swallows who fly without sleep. This piece demonstrates how lyric essays can encompass a wide array of ideas and threads, creating a kaleidoscope of language for the reader to peer into, come away with something, peer into again, and always see something different.

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

This short, imagery -driven lyric essay evokes wonder at our seeming smallness, our seeming vastness. The narrator juxtaposes different ideas for what the body can become, playing with all our senses and creating odd, surprising connections. Read this short piece a few times. Ask yourself, why are certain items linked together in the same paragraph? What is the train of thought occurring in each new sentence, each new paragraph? How does the final paragraph wrap up the lyric essay, while also leaving it open ended? There’s much to interpret in this piece, so engage with it slowly, read it over several times.

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

This form of creative writing is tough for writers because there’s no proper formula for writing it. However, if you have a passion for imaginative forms and want to rise to the challenge, here are several different ways to write your essay.

1. Start with your narrative

Writing the lyrical essay is a lot like writing creative nonfiction: it starts with getting words on the page. Start with a simple outline of the story you’re looking to write. Focus on the main plot points and what you want to explore, then highlight the ideas or events that will be most difficult for you to write about. Often, the lyrical form offers the writer a new way to talk about something difficult. Where words fail, form is key. Combining difficult ideas and musicality allows you to find the right words when conventional language hasn’t worked.

Emilia Phillips’ lyric essay “ Lodge ” does exactly this, letting the story’s form emphasize its language and the narrative Phillips writes about dreams, traveling, and childhood emotions.

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

The lyric essay is liberated from form, rather than constrained by it. In a normal essay, you wouldn’t want your piece overrun by figurative language, but here, boundless metaphors are encouraged—so long as they aid your message. For some essayists, it might help to start by reimagining your story as an extended metaphor.

A great example of this is Zadie Smith’s essay “ The Lazy River ,” which uses the lazy river as an extended metaphor to criticize a certain “go with the flow” mindset.

Use extended metaphors as a base for the essay, then return to it during moments of transition or key insight. Writing this way might help ground your writing process while giving you new opportunities to play with form.

3. Investigate and braid different threads

Just like the braided essay , lyric essays can certainly braid different story lines together. If anything, the freedom to play with form makes braiding much easier and more exciting to investigate. How can you use poetic forms to braid different ideas together? Can you braid an extended metaphor with the main story? Can you separate the threads into a contrapuntal, then reunite them in prose?

A simple example of threading in lyric essay is Jane Harrington’s “ Ossein Pith .” Harrington intertwines the “you” and “I” of the story, letting each character meet only when the story explores moments of “hunger.”

Whichever threads you choose to write, use the freedom of the lyric essay to your advantage in exploring the story you’re trying to set down.

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

Some CNF writers might find it easier to write their essay, then go back and revise with the elements of poetic form and figurative language. If you choose to take this route, identify the parts of your draft that don’t seem to be working, then consider changing the form into something other than prose.

For example, you might write a story, then realize it would greatly benefit the prose if it was written using the poetic device of anaphora (a repetition device using a word or phrase at the beginning of a line or paragraph). Chen Li’s lyric essay “ Baudelaire Street ” does a great job of this, using the anaphora “I would ride past” to explore childhood memory.

When words don’t work, let the lyrical form intervene.

5. Write stream-of-conscious

Stream-of-consciousness is a writing technique in which the writer charts, word-for-word, the exact order of their unfiltered thoughts on the page.

If it isn’t obvious, this is easier said than done. We naturally think faster than we write, and we also have a tendency to filter our thoughts as we think them, to the point where many thoughts go unconsciously unnoticed. Unlearning this takes a lot of practice and skill.

Nonetheless, you might notice in the lyric essay examples we shared how the essayists followed different associations with their words, one thought flowing naturally into the next, circling around a subject rather than explicitly defining it. The stream-of-conscious technique is perfect for this kind of writing, then, because it earnestly excavates the mind, creating a kind of Rorschach test that the reader can look into, interpret, see for themselves.

This technique requires a lot of mastery, but if you’re keen on capturing your own consciousness, you may find that the lyric essay form is the perfect container to hold it in.

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

Creative nonfiction writers have an overt desire to engage their readers with insightful stories. When language fails, the lyrical essay comes to the rescue. Although this is a challenging form to master, practicing different forms of storytelling could pave new avenues for your next nonfiction piece. Try using one of these different ways to practice the lyric craft, and get writing your next CNF story!

[…] Sean “Writing Your Truth: Understanding the Lyric Essay.” writers.com. https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay published 19 May, 2020/ accessed 13 Oct, […]

[…] https://writers.com/understanding-the-lyric-essay […]

I agree with every factor that you have pointed out. Thank you for sharing your beautiful thoughts on this. A personal essay is writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining, and humorous piece that is often drawn from the writer’s personal experience and at times drawn from the current affairs of the world.

[…] been wanting to learn more about lyric essay, and this seems a natural transition from […]

thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for this. Here is an updated link to my essay Spiral: https://www.birdcoatquarterly.com/post/nicole-callihan

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A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

Poets can learn a lot from blurring genres. Whether getting inspiration from fiction proves effective in building characters or song-writing provides a musical tone, poetry intersects with a broader literary landscape. This shines through especially in lyric essays, a form that has inspired articles from the Poetry Foundation and Purdue Writing Lab , as well as become the concept for a 2015 anthology titled We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay.  

Put simply, the lyric essay is a hybrid, creative nonfiction form that combines the rich figurative language of poetry with the longer-form analysis and narrative of essay or memoir. Oftentimes, it emerges as a way to explore a big-picture idea with both imagery and rigor. These four examples provide an introduction to the writing style, as well as spotlight tips for creating your own.

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker . It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” This first line not only immediately propels the reader into Zauner’s grief, but it also reveals an example of the popular “braided essay” technique, which weaves together two distinct but somehow related experiences. 

Throughout the work, Zauner establishes a parallel between her and her mother’s relationship and traditional Korean food. “You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup,” Zauner writes, illuminating the deeply personal and mystifying experience of grieving through direct, sensory imagery.

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

Lyric essays blend poetic qualities and nonfiction qualities. Hadara Bar-Nadav illustrates this experimental nature in Selections from Babyland , a multi-part lyric essay that delves into experiences with infertility. Though Bar-Nadav’s writing throughout this piece showcases rhythmic anaphora—a definite poetic skill—it also plays with nonfiction forms not typically seen in poetry, including bullet points and a multiple-choice list. 

For example, when recounting unsolicited advice from others, Bar-Nadav presents their dialogue in the following way:

I heard about this great _____________.

a. acupuncturist

b. chiropractor

d. shamanic healer

e. orthodontist ( can straighter teeth really make me pregnant ?)

This unexpected visual approach feels reminiscent of an article or quiz—both popular nonfiction forms—and adds dimension and white space to the lyric essay.

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych , and her work has also appeared in an anthology of the best flash nonfiction. Her essay “Some Sort of Union,” published in Hippocampus Magazine , was a finalist in the magazine’s Best Creative Nonfiction contest. 

Since lyric essays are typically longer and more free verse than poems, they can be a way to address a larger idea or broader time period. Boutsikaris does this in “Some Sort of Union,” where the speaker drifts from an interaction with a romantic interest to her childhood. 

“They were neighbors, the girl and the air force paramedic. She could have seen his front door from her high-rise window if her window faced west rather than east,” Boutsikaris describes. “When she first met him two weeks ago, she’d been wearing all white, buying a wedge of cheap brie at the corner market.”

In the very next paragraph, Boutskiras shifts this perspective and timeline, writing, “The girl’s mother had been angry with her when she was a child. She had needed something from the girl that the girl did not know how to give. Not the way her mother hoped she would.”

As this example reveals, examining different perspectives and timelines within a lyric essay can flesh out a broader understanding of who a character is.

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

Like any other form of writing, lyric essays benefit from in-depth research. And while journalistic or scientific details can sometimes throw off the concise ecosystem and syntax of a poem, the lyric essay has room for this sprawling information.

In “What Fullness Is,” award-winning writer Roxane Gay contextualizes her own ideas and experiences with weight loss surgery through the history and culture surrounding the procedure. 

“The first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain,” Gay details. “He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was taken to Córdoba, where a doctor sewed his lips shut. Only able to drink through a straw, the former king lost enough weight after a time to return home and reclaim his kingdom.”

“The notion that thinness—and the attempt to force the fat body toward a state of culturally mandated discipline—begets great rewards is centuries old.”

Researching and knowing this history empowers Gay to make a strong central point in her essay.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of the techniques above to emulate in your own take on the lyric essay. Happy writing!

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Search form, sing, circle, leap: tracing the movements of the american lyric essay.

My journey into the expanse of the lyric essay began when I opened Maggie Nelson’s Bluets . At that time, I had been writing poetry for over ten years, exploring motherhood, mental health, and my Asian American heritage. I saw my work as lyric poetry that drew from the bloodlines of my first love, Sharon Olds, and her transformative poem, “Monarchs.”

Until Bluets , I had viewed the essay through the lens of my high school and undergraduate education: as a rigid box that enclosed a thesis supported by three or more paragraphs of argument sealed in by the packing tape of a conclusion. To me, there was no similarity between poetry’s lush landscape and the corrugated angles of prose.

But fifteen years after graduation from college, I sat on a worn chenille sofa in my living room with Bluets in my hands. I read Nelson’s first lines: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession . . .” The slim book fell from my fingers as a chord reverberated within me. My body knew that Nelson’s work was more than strict, formal prose. Within my marrow, Bluets sang and shifted; its music, undeniable. Why, when I read her prose, did my breath quicken, and my chest throb as if I was reading a poem? Where was Nelson’s thesis? Where were her essay’s harsh lines?

That was my introduction to the American lyric essay. A transmutable beast, the lyric essay roams a borderless landscape. I ride on its slick back, scanning the rolling hillsides. Prairie grass brushes against my thighs, sunlight ebbing in and out of towering clouds. The fragrance of honeysuckle weaves into the upturned earth’s musk. The lyric essay ambles and leaps, circling fields blue with cornflower.

In “Out of and Back into the Box: Redefining Essays and Options,” Melissa A. Goldthwaite explores the landscape of the essay. “The page,” she writes, “is an open field, not a box to fill with other box-like structures . . . There are few, if any, right angles in nature. I can think of no natural squares—just hills and uneven slopes, rounded flower petals, curved riverbank, beautifully twisted trees.” To Goldthwaite, the essay resides in many forms: “a tree, a glove, a fish, a fist, a container, an alternative, a poem, a story, and question.”

If an essay flows from form to form, how can it be contained? How can the lyric essay be defined? In my correspondence with Goldthwaite, she answered: there is always the desire to hem in prose, to categorize or label. Even the lyric essay can be “taught [or defined] in rigid ways.”

Perhaps my desire for a concrete answer stems from my training as a chemist and molecular biologist. In the laboratory, I titrated analytes to determine their concentration down to two decimal places. I swelled with satisfaction as I studied the immutable code for DNA strictly defined by the pairings of nucleic acids: adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. Though I left the scientific world nearly twenty years ago to become an artist and writer, the desire for precise measurements and definitions still lingers.

In my conversation with the poet Jos Charles, we ruminated on the question again: what is the lyric essay? Perhaps as Charles proposes, the definition of the lyric essay is a Western invention, one that readers try to impose on prose works. Am I trying to cram a mountain into the form of a dogwood blossom? When does the search for definitive truth end in the marring of beauty and wonder?

Werner Heisenberg, a leader in the field of quantum mechanics, proposed that it was impossible to pinpoint the precise location of an electron in space and also determine its momentum. From the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the shapes of electron orbitals were born. These orbitals take the form of spheres or intricate petals extending from an atom’s nucleus, showing the possible position of an electron at any given time. Perhaps Heisenberg’s principle can be applied to the lyric essay, so that its essence resides in an approximate form, a form that shifts according to time and space.

The term “lyric essay” was introduced by Deborah Tall and John D’Agata in the Seneca Review in 1997. This “dense” and “shapely form,” write Tall and D’Agata, “straddles the essay and the lyric poem . . . forsak[ing] narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.” In this way, the lyric essay “spirals in on itself, circling a single image or idea . . . [it] stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess.”

In her 2007 essay, “Mending Wall,” Judith Kitchen writes that “the job of the lyric essayist is to find the prosody of fact, finger the emotional instrument, play the intuitive and the intrinsic, but all in service to the music of the real. Even if it’s an imagined actuality. The aim is to make of , not up .” The musical lyric essay is a “lyre, not a liar.”

I believe that the intent of the lyric essay has shifted since “Mending Wall.” Though the lyric essay still searches out truth, it has become more and more uncertain of what the truth is. Its emphasis has changed from navigating a singular truth to reflecting multiple truths.

Why has the lyric essay become more uncertain? It may be, as the essayist Aviya Kushner proposes, that the world itself has become exponentially complex, making it difficult to pinpoint universal truths. Perhaps, the lyric essay reflects humanity’s fragmentation, the exchange of ultimate truths for the truths of individual experiences.

Even the definition of the lyric essay is evasive, the essay’s meaning shifting over time and space. This is where the scientist in me struggles. I dislike this level of uncertainty. The lyric essay shifts under my gaze, glinting like a emerald’s countless facets. I fear that by searching to define the lyric essay, I will become lost within its prism. I feel my way through the dazzling light, the reverberating haze.

I must come to some form of conclusion. How can I speak about something that seems impossible to define? Perhaps, as Jos Charles ponders, the lyric essay evades definition because the lyric essay doesn’t exist as a form. Instead of a lyric essay, perhaps there is, as the scholars Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins propose, a form of “lyric reading,” an agreement between the writer and reader. Perhaps the essay signals to the reader: Approach this piece lyrically. Once the reader enters this agreement, they succumb to the essay’s musicality, rhythm, leaps in logic, and fragmentation.

Though the lyric essay is a wild, changeable beast, attempts have been made to contain it. In the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays , Randon Billings Noble attempts to outline the lyric essay. The lyric essay, she states, is “a piece of writing with a visible/stand-out/unusual structure that explores/forecasts/gestures to an idea in an unexpected way.” Noble then motions toward some of the current forms of the lyric essay, including the segmented essay, separated into sections through number, title, or white space and the braided essay, with its woven, repeated themes.

In my mind, a pattern emerges, an outline within the mist. Though difficult to define, the lyric essay contains elements that separate it from the rigid forms of my high school and undergraduate years. Unlike the traditional essay that is bound to a thesis, the lyric essay is a cloud of thought hovering around a question. However, as Noble writes, though the lyric essay is “slippery,” it must take on the responsibilities of an essay, “to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking.” An essay, at its heart, is an exploration of truth, a straddling of black and white.

To me, the American lyric essay diverges from the traditional argument of the essay and its narrative counterpart, the personal essay, in three ways. Like a poem, the lyric essay might have honed rhythm and sound. It also diverges from narrative structures and instead revolves around themes. The lyric essay might also transition intuitively from concept to concept.

In this way, the lyric essay sings, circles, and leaps. These elements of the lyric essay can be explored through Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water , Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , and Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study .

In her extended craft essay, The Art of Syntax , Ellen Bryant Voigt argues that syntax propels the musicality and rhythm of lyric poetry. The language spoken by “ordinary human beings” is elevated to poetry by the “echoes of more regular patterns of song.” By linking verse to “ordinary” spoken language, Voigt bridges the gap between poetry and prose. In this way, I believe, syntax plays the same role in lyric essay as it does in lyric poetry: it drives the musicality of language, thus propelling the essay from beginning to end.

Syntax can be described as the chunking of language in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Syntax, Voigt adds, is a “flexible calculus” that creates meaning. Within the lyric essay, syntax unfurls a sonic landscape of expansive rhythm and song.

As the psychologists and researchers Laura Batterink and Helen J. Neville state, the human brain navigates syntax “outside the window of conscious awareness.” Since the areas of the brain that process syntax are adjacent to those that process music, the reader instantaneously experiences the music of lyrical language.

Robert Frost writes that “the surest way to reach the heart [of the reader] is through the ear . . . By arrangement and choice of words on the part of the poet, the effects of humor, pathos, hysteria, and anger, and in fact all effects, can be indicated or obtained.” When the reader encounters the cloud of the lyric essay, they instantaneously experience its music, its murmuring, electrical hum. This is especially true in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water , where syntax carries not only the rhythm and sound of her prose, but also its emotional intensity.

In her lyric essay collection, Yuknavitch navigates her chaotic childhood, her passion for swimming, and the power she summons through her transformation into a writer. In her first piece, “The Chronology of Water,” Yuknavitch harnesses the power of syntax. She writes: “The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge.”

Here, Yuknavitch carries the reader through the birth of the speaker’s stillborn daughter through what Voigt refers to as “right-branching” syntax. In this form, phrases extend outward carried by similar language. In this passage, the grammatical chunks are separated by the preposition “after” and the conjunction “then.”

Using right-branching syntax, Yuknavitch describes the scene in which the speaker’s daughter is passed from her to her sister, husband, and mother, and then out of the hospital room. At the end of this extended sentence, the right-branching syntax halts. Yuknavitch crafts the sentence in waves: “after . . . after . . . then . . . then . . . then . . .” until the rhythm breaks on the rocks of the independent clause: “the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge.” The abrupt change in syntax silences the essay’s musicality. There isn’t a miraculous revival; with the passing of her daughter, the speaker is left with grief.

When Yuknavitch’s language carries me away, I must depart from the marching tradition of prose and drift into the lyrical. With her, all I hear is the water and the sounds of mourning. This is the mystic power of the lyric essay: it sweeps the reader up into its wave. The lyric essay becomes the reader, the reader becomes the song.

Frost writes that “a sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words. It must do something more: it must convey a meaning by sound.” If the sentence can be seen as the poetic line, then syntax can work in two ways within prose: to complement the sentence’s flow or to be, as Voigt states, in “muscular opposition” to it.

Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water shows both of these abilities of syntax. In her essay “How to Ride a Bike,” Yuknavitch navigates the harrowing experience of her father forcing her to ride a bike down a steep hill:

Wind on my face my palms sting my knees hurt pressing backwards speed and speedspeedspeedspeed holding my breath and my skin tingling like it does in trees terrible spiders crawling my skin like up high as the grand canyon my head too hot turnturnturnturnturn I am turning I am braking I can’t feel my feet I can’t feel my legs I can’t feel my arms I can’t feel my hands my heart my father’s voice yelling good girl my father running down the hill my father who did this who pushed me my eyes closing my limbs going limp my letting go me letting go so sleepy so light floating floating objects speed eyes closed violent hitting object crashing nothing.

Here, Yuknavitch has chosen to break each sentence like a poetic line. In doing so, she has created a section of text that reads like a prose poem. The section is void of punctation until Yuknavitch lands on the collision with the “nothing.” In the absence of punctation, syntax governs the rhythm of the lines. The right-branching syntax of the repeated phrases: “. . . my palms sting my knees hurt . . .” in the beginning of the section churns like the pedals of a bike.

The compressed segments, “speedspeedspeedspeed” and “turnturnturnturnturn” act as turns within the prose poem, where syntactical tension matches the increased tension of the narrative. What follows are two right-branching segments: “I am turning I am braking I can’t feel / my feet I can’t feel my legs I can’t feel my arms I can’t feel my / hands my heart . . .” Again, syntax complements the narrative movement. As a reader, I am carried by the syntax, experiencing the speaker’s panic as the world spins out of control.

Sometimes, syntax can be used to restrain the flow of the sentence. In this case, syntax is in “muscular opposition” to the narrative. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Yuknavitch describes the four-week period in which her eleven-year-old self was ill with mononucleosis. During this time, she was under the supervision of her abusive father. Yuknavitch writes:

In my sickbed my father removed my sweat soaked clothing. My father redressed me in underwear and pretty night- gowns. My father stroked my hair. Kissed my skin. My father carried me to the bathtub and laid me down and washed me. Everywhere. My father dried me off in his arms and redressed me and carried me back to the bed. His skin the smell of ciga- rettes and Old Spice cologne. His yellowed fingers. The mountainous callous on his middle finger from all the years of holding a pen or pencil. His steel blue eyes. Twinning mine. The word “Baby.”

The syntax of the sentences is uneven, alternating between right-branched strands, such as “My father redressed me in underwear and pretty nightgowns. My father stroked my hair,” and chunks of sentence fragments: “Kissed my skin.”

As a reader, I desire to race through this piercing and troubling description, but Yuknavitch holds me to the page. The syntax of this section restrains the flow of the narrative, challenging me to take in the details one after the other, to experience, as Yuknavitch did, every excruciating moment. As Yuknavitch writes: “It’s language that’s letting me say that the days elongated, as if the very sun and moon had forsaken me. It’s narrative that makes things open up so I can tell this. It’s the yielding expanse of a white page.” With a steady, skilled hand, Yuknavitch holds back the current of the narrative using syntax that suspends the reader within the pain and power of the moment.

In “Mending Wall,” Kitchen makes a distinction between a lyrical essay and its lyric counterpart. “Any essay can be lyrical,” she writes, “as long as it pays attention to the sound of its language or the sweep of its cadences . . . A lyric essay, however, functions as a lyric .” Like the lyric poem, the lyric essay “swallows you . . . until you reside inside it.” In other words, an essay isn’t a lyric just because of its musical language. Rather than creating a linear narrative, the lyric essay encompasses the reader by circling an image or theme.

In some personal essays, the engine is the story. In “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide,” Tim Bascom provides pictorial representations of different forms of personal essay. Bascom describes the form, “narrative with a lift,” as a chronology with tension that “forces the reader into a climb.” Jo Anne Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter” is an example of this form. Bascom describes Beard’s essay as “a sequence of scenes [that] matches roughly the unfolding real events, but [has] suspense [that] pulls us along, represented by questions we want answered.”

Bascom also contemplates essays that are a “whorl of reflection.” These essays are “more topical or reflective,” eschewing the linear movement of time for a circling of a topic. This circling occurs organically, “allow[ing] for a wider variety of perspectives—illuminating the subject from multiple angles.”

I believe that some lyric essays are formed as these whorls. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is an example of elegant circling of image and theme. On the surface, Nelson’s long essay is the study of the color blue. The essay has 240 sections. Each section is interconnected with a focus on blue. “Each blue object,” Nelson muses, “could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe.”

Nelson finds blue in “shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles,” a lapis lazuli tooth, the eyes of a martyred saint. Nelson also describes the absence of blue: “There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.” When others ask about Nelson’s fixation on the color, she responds: “We don’t get to choose what or whom we love . . . We just don’t get to choose.”

The image of blue swims within the pages of Bluets , flashing in and out of each condensed section. Nelson’s images are strong and visceral, but by themselves, they would be unable to hold my attention for the entire essay. Under the layered blue images is the theme of grief over the loss of an intimate relationship. Nelson introduces this theme early in the essay, in section 8: “‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,’ wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any ‘blueness.’ Above all, I want to stop missing you.” Just as Nelson leans on blue, she had placed her faith in her intimate partner.

As the essay progresses, loss widens and deepens like a sea. Nelson writes: “We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object—this is the so-called systemic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you.”

Nelson provides scant details of her romantic partner. In sections 67–70, Nelson explores the mating habits of the satin bowerbird. The males, Nelson writes, “can attract thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show,” while the female “mates only once [and] incubates the eggs alone.” These sections hint at a loneliness caused by abandonment. Though the cause of the end of the relationship isn’t revealed, Nelson exposes its aftermath: “It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms.”

Bascom writes that “whorl of reflection” essays are driven not by plot, but by the intoxicating pleasure of new perspectives and insights. This is especially true for Bluets. A whorl of contemplation, it’s a lazy river that loops for countless miles. Within it, I sometimes drift along with the images of blue and themes of grief and loneliness. Sometimes, I stand up and push against them. This tension between push and pull keeps me engaged in Bluets , within its circling of blue.

In “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; or the Pleasures of Precision,” Karen Babine meditates on the “lyric mode” of the essay, which is driven by language, not narrative. Heidi Czerwiec states that “there are essays that are circuitous, nonlinear, that spiral around a central concept, incident or image, accruing meaning as they move. No forks, no false moves, no misdirection, only perhaps a pleasant disorientation as the writing twists and turns.” Though lyric essays are nonlinear, they still have centers that “hold.” Though Bluets isn’t driven by narrative, it circles around image and theme. In addition, there is an undergirding question that holds the essay in a state of tension: how will the speaker survive her grief? The answer is delivered in the one of the last sections of the essay:

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of our heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

As Nelson releases herself from the relationship, I also experience freedom and resurface from Bluets transformed.

Like a moth drawn to candlelight, I’m drawn back to exploring the form of the lyric essay. Through the haze of light refracted through dust and smoke, I seek its outline, first through the essay’s musical language and then through its circling of themes. In my conversation with the poet and essayist Chet’la Sebree, we discussed the “machinery” of the lyric essay. Lyric essays hinge on “having a poetic quality.” They are constructed like a poem, creating “sense and meaning” through associative leaps.

My discussion with Sebree makes me return to the work of Sharon Olds. It was within the pages of Satan Says that I encountered “Monarchs,” the poem that entranced me with images of creatures “floating / south to their transformation, crossing over / borders in the night, the diffuse blood-red / cloud of them . . .” Olds’s elegant line breaks allow her images to fluidly flow from one line to the next. Through these breaks, Olds also guides me through associative leaps, helping me connect the speaker to her first lover and the butterflies:

The hinged print of my blood on your thighs— a winged creature pinned there— and then you left, as you were to leave over and over, the butterflies moving in masses past my window . . .

Here, the intimacy is visceral. The speaker, lover, and monarchs are placed closely on the page so that my eye and mind make the connection between them.

Through reflecting on Sebree and Olds’s work, I came to believe that there is a link between poetry and the lyric essay when it comes to leaps of logic. Within both practices, syntax and white space help to guide readers over the gaps between images, thoughts, and themes.

During our time together, Sebree and I discussed her work with the lyric essay. As she wrote Field Study , Sebree asked herself: “How can [I] make an individual thought beautiful?” To Sebree, each thought is an “isolated cube of language.” I believe that each “cube” is connected through the bridge of syntax. Syntax is “sonically driven” and allows the lyric essay to make “musical sense.”

In Field Study , Sebree shaped each of the lyric essay’s sections around sound and musicality. In one section, Sebree reflects on the Women’s March and its significance to white women and how she regards the march as a woman of color. Sebree’s discussion of the march extends over five paragraphs of varying length:

The Women’s March meant a lot to a lot of women in my life.  By a lot of women in my life, I mean the 50% of my friends that are white.  With them, I don’t have to differentiate between “women” and “white women” because When I say “women,” at least 53% of the time people—and by “people,” I mean “white people”—will assume I mean “white women.”  These percentages are fake as fake news but this fact is not: white people see whiteness as universal.  There is no appropriate antonym for those of us who are not.

The first two paragraphs consist of one sentence each. In the second paragraph, Sebree uses assonance to create a couplet of “life” and “white.” This paragraph is carefully arranged so that “life” and “white” are placed in close visual proximity. The syntax of the sentence facilitates this visual coupling by placing the shorter dependent clause before the longer independent clause.

Within Field Study , associative leaps follow couplets. In the case of the Women’s March section, I am primed by the couplets to expect a shift in focus from Sebree’s description of her friends to the exclusion of Black women from the definition of “women.” The couplet, “life” and “white,” provides the reader and speaker an opportunity to “come up for air” before a plunge into the difficult topic of erasure. Sebree writes: “white people see whiteness / as universal.”

In Field Study , Sebree also uses white space to facilitate associative leaps. After the section about the Women’s March, Sebree adds a quote from Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda:

To say this . . . is great because it transcends its particularity to say something “human” . . . is to reveal . . . the stance that people of color are not human, only achieve the human in certain circumstances.   

Here, Sebree provides Rankine and Loffreda’s quote extra white space, their voices expanding within the essay’s visual and mental landscape. The white space helps the reader “meditate on the quote . . . [then] move back into [Sebree’s] language.”

In comparison, the Women’s March section that precedes Rankine and Loffreda’s quote is a larger block of text, leaving less space for the reader and meditation. As a reader, I can’t catch my breath and am immersed in Sebree’s thoughts about womanhood and racial exclusion. In this way, white space (or the lack of it) is a type of syntax. It acts as another way to group language and ideas.

Continuing the Journey

In the interview “John D’Agata Redefines the Essay,” D’Agata comments: “I like to think of the essay as an art form that tracks the evolution of consciousness as it rolls over the folds of a new idea, memory, or emotion. What I’ve always appreciated about the essay is the feeling that it gives me that it’s capturing the activity of human thought in real time.”

In this way, the lyric essay reflects the changing landscape of truth. Through this realization, the scientist in me has come to a place of acceptance—an acceptance of a truth not bound by rigid facts, but cradled in a cloud of shifting time and space. By capturing a moment of contemplation, the lyric essay captures the movement of the human spirit. This is the lyric essay’s gift to the world.

Like Heisenberg’s electron, the lyric essay roams a landscape of beauty and uncertainty. In the future, the lyric essay may transform into a beast that is unrecognizable to me in voice and motion. I will continue to revel in its wildness, a splendor that I cannot tame.  

Issue 164  Summer/Fall 2023

Previous: , next: , share triquarterly, about the author, sayuri matsuura ayers.

Sayuri Ayers is an essayist and poet from Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared on The Poetry Foundation website and in Gulf Stream Magazine , Hippocampus Magazine , CALYX , and Parentheses Journal . She is the author of two collections of poetry, Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press) and Mother/Wound (Full/Crescent Press) and two forthcoming collections, The Maiden in the Moon and The Woman , The River , from Porkbelly Press. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Sayuri has been supported by Kundiman, the Virginian Center for Creative Arts, The Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. To learn more, visit sayuriayers.com .

The Latest Word

An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Essays come in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms: they can be the five paragraph essays you wrote in school — maybe for or against gun control or on symbolism in The Great Gatsby . Essays can be personal narratives or argumentative pieces that appear on blogs or as newspaper editorials. They can be funny takes on modern life or works of literary criticism. They can even be book-length instead of short. Essays can be so many things!

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “lyric essay” and are wondering what that means. I’m here to help.

What is the Lyric Essay?

A quick definition of the term “lyric essay” is that it’s a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem.

Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it’s simply that in poetry the line breaks matter, and in prose they don’t. That’s it! So the lyric essay is prose, meaning where the line breaks fall doesn’t matter, but it has other similarities to what you find in poems.

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Lyric essays have what we call “poetic” prose. This kind of prose draws attention to its own use of language. Lyric essays set out to create certain effects with words, often, although not necessarily, aiming to create beauty. They are often condensed in the way poetry is, communicating depth and complexity in few words. Chances are, you will take your time reading them, to fully absorb what they are trying to say. They may be more suggestive than argumentative and communicate multiple meanings, maybe even contradictory ones.

Lyric essays often have lots of white space on their pages, as poems do. Sometimes they use the space of the page in creative ways, arranging chunks of text differently than regular paragraphs, or using only part of the page, for example. They sometimes include photos, drawings, documents, or other images to add to (or have some other relationship to) the meaning of the words.

Lyric essays can be about any subject. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. They can be philosophical or about nature or history or culture, or any combination of these things. What distinguishes them from other essays, which can also be about any subject, is their heightened attention to language. Also, they tend to deemphasize argument and carefully-researched explanations of the kind you find in expository essays . Lyric essays can argue and use research, but they are more likely to explore and suggest than explain and defend.

Now, you may be familiar with the term “ prose poem .” Even if you’re not, the term “prose poem” might sound exactly like what I’m describing here: a mix of poetry and prose. Prose poems are poetic pieces of writing without line breaks. So what is the difference between the lyric essay and the prose poem?

Honestly, I’m not sure. You could call some pieces of writing either term and both would be accurate. My sense, though, is that if you put prose and poetry on a continuum, with prose on one end and poetry on the other, and with prose poetry and the lyric essay somewhere in the middle, the prose poem would be closer to the poetry side and the lyric essay closer to the prose side.

Some pieces of writing just defy categorization, however. In the end, I think it’s best to call a work what the author wants it to be called, if it’s possible to determine what that is. If not, take your best guess.

Four Examples of the Lyric Essay

Below are some examples of my favorite lyric essays. The best way to learn about a genre is to read in it, after all, so consider giving one of these books a try!

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen counts as a lyric essay, but I want to highlight her lesser-known 2004 work. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence from the perspective of post-9/11 America. It combines words and images, particularly television images, to ponder our relationship to media and culture. Rankine writes in short sections, surrounded by lots of white space, that are personal, meditative, beautiful, and achingly sad.

Calamities by Renee Gladman

Calamities is a collection of lyric essays exploring language, imagination, and the writing life. All of the pieces, up until the last 14, open with “I began the day…” and then describe what she is thinking and experiencing as a writer, teacher, thinker, and person in the world. Many of the essays are straightforward, while some become dreamlike and poetic. The last 14 essays are the “calamities” of the title. Together, the essays capture the artistic mind at work, processing experience and slowly turning it into writing.

The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

The Self Unstable is a collection of short essays — or are they prose poems? — each about the length of a paragraph, one per page. Gabbert’s sentences read like aphorisms. They are short and declarative, and part of the fun of the book is thinking about how the ideas fit together. The essays are divided into sections with titles such as “The Self is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” The book is sharp, surprising, and delightful.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. Maggie Nelson’s subjects are many and include the color blue, in which she finds so much interest and meaning it will take your breath away. It’s also about suffering: she writes about a friend who became a quadriplegic after an accident, and she tells about her heartbreak after a difficult break-up. Bluets is meditative and philosophical, vulnerable and personal. It’s gorgeous, a book lovers of The Argonauts shouldn’t miss.

It’s probably no surprise that all of these books are published by small presses. Lyric essays are weird and genre-defying enough that the big publishers generally avoid them. This is just one more reason, among many, to read small presses!

If you’re looking for more essay recommendations, check out our list of 100 must-read essay collections and these 25 great essays you can read online for free .

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Lyric Essays

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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These resources discuss some terms and techniques that are useful to the beginning and intermediate creative nonfiction writer, and to instructors who are teaching creative nonfiction at these levels. The distinction between beginning and intermediate writing is provided for both students and instructors, and numerous sources are listed for more information about creative nonfiction tools and how to use them. A sample assignment sheet is also provided for instructors.

Because the lyric essay is a new, hybrid form that combines poetry with essay, this form should be taught only at the intermediate to advanced levels. Even professional essayists aren’t certain about what constitutes a lyric essay, and lyric essays disagree about what makes up the form. For example, some of the “lyric essays” in magazines like The Seneca Review have been selected for the Best American Poetry series, even though the “poems” were initially published as lyric essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL's resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses ). After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms, and focus more on language itself, rather than storyline. Contemporary author Sherman Alexie has written lyric essays, and to provide an example of this form, we provide an excerpt from his Captivity :

"He (my captor) gave me a biscuit, which I put in my

pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fear-

ing he had put something in it to make me love him.

FROM THE NARRATIVE OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON,

WHO WAS TAKEN CAPTIVE WHEN THE WAMPANOAG

DESTROYED LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETS, IN 1676"

"I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776 or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice?"

Alexie provides no straightforward narrative here, as in a personal essay; in fact, each numbered section is only loosely related to the others. Alexie doesn’t look into his past, as memoirists do. Rather, his lyric essay is a response to a quote he found, and which he uses as an epigraph to his essay.

Though the narrator’s voice seems to be speaking from the present, and addressing a woman who lived centuries ago, we can’t be certain that the narrator’s voice is Alexie’s voice. Is Alexie creating a narrator or persona to ask these questions? The concept and the way it’s delivered is similar to poetry. Poets often use epigraphs to write poems. The difference is that Alexie uses prose language to explore what this epigraph means to him.

Course Syllabus

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play

Experiment with form and explore the possibilities of this flexible genre..

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Each week provides:

• discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
• written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

• the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for instructor and/or peer review 
• additional optional writing exercises
• an optional video conference that is open to all students(and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

Week 2: Experiments with Form: Braided Essay and Hermit Crab Essay

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

Week 3: Lyric Vignette and the Prose Poem

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

Week 4: Witnessing the Self: Essays by Poets

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

Week 5: Hybrid Forms and the Documentary Impulse

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, Roz Chast and Maira Kalman for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

• Craft Essays
• Teaching Resources

Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay

What is a lyric essay? Lyric comes from the late sixteenth century: from French lyrique or Latin lyricus, from Greek lurikos, from lura ‘lyre.’

To the ear, “lyre” and “liar” sound the same, which I resist because I do not condone lying in essays, lyric or otherwise. But mythology tells us that the origins of the lyre come from a kind of lie.

Hermes, the gods’ messenger and something of a trickster, stole Apollo’s sacred cattle. Hermes tried to deny his theft but ultimately confessed. In atonement, he gave Apollo a new way to make music: the lyre. Later Apollo taught Orpheus how to play the lyre and Orpheus became the best musician and poet known to humankind. He charmed trees, rocks, and rivers. While sailing with the Argonauts he overpowered the Sirens with his songs, allowing the ship and its crew to pass safely on their quest to find the Golden Fleece. And when his wife died, he sang his way into the underworld to retrieve her. His music was so powerful it could almost—almost—raise the dead.

Lyric essays have the same power to soothe, to harrow, to persuade, to move, to raise, to rouse, to overcome.

Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has the responsibilities of any essay: to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking (however subtle). The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

I came to define a lyric essay as:

a piece of writing with a visible / stand-out / unusual structure that explores / forecasts / gestures to an idea in an unexpected way

But about that visible / stand-out / unusual structure, that unexpected idea: Lyric essays are tricky. If you try to mount one to a spreading board, it’s likely to dodge the pin and fly away. If you try to press one between two slides, it might find a way to ooze down your sleeve. And if you try to set it within a taxonomy, it will pose the same problems as the platypus—a mammal, but one that lays eggs; semiaquatic, living in both water and on land; and venomous, a trait that belongs mostly to reptiles and insects. It will run away if on land—its gait that of a furry alligator—or swim off in the undulating way of beavers. Either way it can threaten you with a poisoned spur before it ripples off.

Despite its resistance to categorization, there are four broad forms of the lyric essay that are worth trying to define:

Flash Essays

origin Middle English (in the sense ‘splash water about’): probably imitative; compare with flush and splash

I define flash essays as being one thousand words or fewer. They are short, sharp, and clarifying. The shortest ones illuminate a moment or a realization the way a flash of light can illuminate a scene. Longer ones may take a little more time but regardless of their length, the meaning of the essay resonates more strongly than its word count might suggest.

Lightning flashes, as do cameras, flares, signals, and explosions; all show a brief moment in a larger scene. A small syringe can deliver a powerful drug. A capsule can too—unless it dissolves in a glass of water to reveal a paper flower. Regardless of their content, flash essays are imitative of their form. They give the reader a splash of a moment and leave us flushed with emotion and meaning.

Segmented Essays

origin late sixteenth century (as a term in geometry): from Latin segmentum, from secare ‘to cut’

Segmented essays are divided into segments that might be numbered or titled or simply separated with a space break.

These spaces—white space, blank space—allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest each segment before moving on to the next. Each section may contain something new, but all still belong cogently to the whole.

Segmented essays are also known as

(origin late Middle English: from French, or from Latin fragmentum, from frangere ‘to break’)

(origin mid-nineteenth century: from Greek parataxis, from para- ‘beside’ + taxis ‘arrangement’; from tassein ‘arrange’)

(origin early twentieth century: from French, literally ‘gluing’)

(origin late Middle English: from French mosaïque, based on Latin musi(v)um ‘decoration with small square stones,’ perhaps ultimately from Greek mousa ‘a muse’)

How you think of an essay may influence how you write it. Citrus fruits come in segments; so do worms. Each segment is part of an organic whole. But a fragmented essay may be broken on purpose and a collage deliberately glued together.

Braided Essays

origin Old English bregdan ‘make a sudden movement,’ also ‘interweave,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch breien (verb)

Braided essays are segmented essays whose sections have a repeating pattern—the way each strand of a braid returns to take its place in the center.

Each time a particular strand returns, its meaning is enriched by the other threads you’ve read through.

You can braid hair for containment or ornamentation. You can braid fibers into a basket to carry something or into a rope to tie something. Maybe it’s something you want to hold fast. Or maybe it’s to tense a kite against the wind—to fly.

Hermit Crab Essays

origin Middle English: from Old French hermite, from late Latin eremita, from Greek eremites, from eremos ‘solitary’

origin late sixteenth century (referring to hawks, meaning ‘claw or fight each other’): from Low German krabben

Hermit crab essays, as Brenda Miller named them in Tell It Slant , borrow another form of writing as their structure the way a hermit crab borrows another’s shell. These extraliterary structures can protect vulnerable content (the way the shell protects the crab), but they can also act as firm containers for content that might be intellectually or emotionally difficult, prodigious, or otherwise messy.

In life hermit crabs aren’t hermits at all; they’re quite social. And in a way hermit crab essays are too, because they depend on a network of other extraliterary forms of writing—recipes, labels, album notes—and what we already know of them.

I’ve always thought that a hermit crab’s front looks like a hand reaching out of the shell, a gesture that draws the onlooker inwards. Instead of needing a shell that protects, the contents of a hermit crab essay might lie in wait—like the pellets in a shotgun shell or a plumule of a seed—ready to burst beyond the confines of the form and take root in the reader’s mind.

But some of these forms overlap. A lyric essay can be many things at once—flash and braided, segmented and hermit crab—the way a square is also a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral. One shape, but many ways of naming it.

Orpheus’s lyre accompanied him through all sorts of adventures. It traveled with him as deep as the underworld and after his death was sent by Zeus to live among the stars. You can see its constellation—Lyra—in the summer months if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter months if you live in the Southern. This feels like an apt metaphor for the lyric essay: The stars are there, but their shape is what your mind brings to them.

A version of this essay was published as the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays .

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection  Be with Me Always   was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays,  A Harp in the Stars ,  was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of  The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity,  and  Creative Nonfiction . Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine  After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low Residency MFA Program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website,  www.randonbillingsnoble.com .

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What’s Missing Here? A Fragmentary, Lyric Essay About Fragmentary, Lyric Essays

Julie marie wade on the mode that never quite feels finished.

“Perhaps the lyric essay is an occasion to take what we typically set aside between parentheses and liberate that content—a chance to reevaluate what a text is actually about. Peripherals as centerpieces. Tangents as main roads.”

Did I say this aloud, perched at the head of the seminar table? We like to pretend there is no head in postmodern academia—decentralized authority and all—but of course there is. Plenty of (symbolic) decapitations, too. The head is the end of the table closest to the board—where the markers live now, where the chalk used to live: closest seat to the site of public inscription, closest seat to the door.

But I might have said this standing alone, in front of the bathroom mirror—pretending my students were there, perched on the dingy white shelves behind the glass: some with bristles like a new toothbrush, some with tablets like the contents of an old prescription bottle. Everything is multivalent now.

(Regardless: I talk to my students in my head, even when I am not sitting at the head of the table.)

“Or perhaps the entire lyric essay should be placed between parentheses,” I say. “Parentheses as the new seams—emphasis on letting them show.”

Once a student asked me if I had ever considered the lyric essay as a kind of transcendental experience. “Like how, you know, transcendentalism is all about going beyond the given or the status quo. And the lyric essay does that, right? It goes beyond poetry in one way, and it goes beyond prose in another. It’s kind of mystical, right?”

There is no way to calculate—no equation to illustrate—how often my students instruct and delight me. HashtagHoratianPlatitude. HashtagDelectandoPariterqueMonendo.

“Like this?” I asked, with a quick sketch in my composition book:

“I don’t know, man. I don’t think of math as very mystical,” the student said, leaning—not slumping—as only a young sage can.

“But you are saying the lyric essay can raise other genres to a higher power, right?”

Horace would have dug this moment: our elective humanities class spilling from the designated science building. Late afternoon light through a lattice of wisp-white clouds. In the periphery: Lone iguana lumbering across the lawn. Lone kayak slicing through the brackish water. Some native trees cozying up to some non-native trees, their roots inevitably commingling. Hybrids everywhere, as far as the eye could see, and then beyond that, ad infinitum .

You’ll never guess what happened next: My student high-fived me—like this was 1985, not 2015; like we were players on the same team (and weren’t we, after all?)—set & spike, pass & dunk, instruct & delight.

“Right!” A memory can only fade or flourish. That palm-slap echoes in perpetuity.

“The hardest thing you may ever do in your literary life is to write a lyric essay—that feels finished to you; that you’re comfortable sharing with others; that you’re confident should be called a lyric essay at all.”

“Is this supposed to be a pep talk?” Bless the skeptics, for they shall inherit the class.

I raise my hand in the universal symbol for wait. In this moment, I remember how the same word signifies both wait and hope in Spanish. ( Esperar .) I want my students to do both, simultaneously.

“Hear me out. If you make this attempt, humbly and honestly and with your whole heart, the next hardest thing you may ever do in your literary life is to stop writing lyric essays.”

My hand is still poised in the wait position, which is identical, I realize, to the stop position. Yet wait and stop are not true synonyms, are they? And hope and stop are verging on antonyms, aren’t they? (Body language may be the most inscrutable language of all.)

“So you think lyric essays are addictive or something?” Bless the skeptics—bless them again—for they shall inherit the page.

“Hmm … generative, let’s say. The desire to write lyric essays seems to multiply over time. We continue to surprise ourselves when we write them, and then paradoxically, we come to expect to be surprised.”

( Esperar also means “to expect”—doesn’t it?)

When I tell my students they will remember lines and images from their college workshops for many years—some, perhaps, for the rest of their lives—I’m not sure if they believe me. Here’s what I offer as proof:

In the city where I went to school, there were twenty-six parallel streets, each named with a single letter of the alphabet. I had walked down five of them at most. When I rode the bus, I never knew precisely where I was going or coming from. I didn’t have a car or a map or a phone, and GPS hadn’t been invented yet. In so many ways, I was porous as a sieve.

Our freshman year a girl named Rachel wrote a self-referential piece—we didn’t call them lyric essays yet, though it might have been—set at the intersection of “Division” and “I.”

How poetic! I thought. What a mind-puzzle—trying to imagine everything the self could be divisible by:

I / Parents   I/ Religion   I/ Scholarships  I/ Work Study   I/ Vocation  I/ Desire

Months passed, maybe a year. One night I glanced out the window of my roommate’s car. We were idling at a stoplight on a street I didn’t recognize. When I looked up, I saw the slim green arrow of a sign: Division Avenue.

“It’s real,” I murmured.

“What do you mean?” Becky asked, fiddling with the radio.

I craned my neck for a glimpse of the cross street. It couldn’t be—and yet—it was!

“This is the corner of Division and I!”

“Just think about it—we’re at the intersection of Division and I!”

The light changed, and Becky flung the car into gear. There followed a pause long enough to qualify as a caesura. At last, she said, “Okay. I guess that is kinda cool.”

Here’s another: I remember how my friend Kara once described the dormer windows in an old house on Capitol Hill. She wrote that they were “wavy-gazy and made the world look sort of fucked.”

I didn’t know yet that you could hyphenate two adjectives to make a deluxe adjective—doubling the impact of the modifier, especially if the two hinged words were sonically resonant. (And “wavy-gazy,” well—that was straight-up assonant.)

Plus: I didn’t know that profanity was permissible in our writing, even sometimes apropos.  At this time, I knew the meaning of the word apropos but didn’t even know how to spell it.

One day I would see apropos written down but not recognize it as the word I knew in context. I would pronounce it “a-PROP-ose,” then wonder if I had stumbled upon a typo.

Like many things, I don’t remember when I learned to connect the spelling of apropos with its meaning, or when I learned per se was not “per say,” or when I realized I sometimes I thought of Kara and Becky and Rachel when I should have been thinking about my boyfriend—even sometimes when I was with my boyfriend. (He was majoring in English, too, but I found his diction far less memorable overall.)

“The lyric essay is not thesis-driven. It’s not about making an argument or defending a claim. You’re writing to discover what you want to say or why you feel a certain way about something. If you’re bothered or beguiled or in a state of mixed emotion, and the reason for your feelings doesn’t seem entirely clear, the lyric essay is an opportunity to probe that uncertain place and see what it yields.”

Sometimes they are undergrads, twenty bodies at separate desks, all facing forward while I stand backlit by the shiny white board. Sometimes they are grad students, only twelve, clustered around the seminar table while I sit at the undisputed, if understated, head. It doesn’t matter the composition of the room or the experience of the writers therein. This part I say to everyone, every term, and often more than once. My students will all need a lot of reminding, just as I do.

(A Post-it note on my desk shows an empty set. Outside it lurks the question—“What’s missing here?”—posed in my smallest script.)

“Most writing asks you to be vigilant in your noticing. Pay attention is the creative writer’s credo. We jot down observations, importing concrete nouns from the external world. We eavesdrop to perfect our understanding of dialogue, the natural rhythms of speech. Smells, tastes, textures—we understand it’s our calling to attend to them all. But the lyric essay asks you to do something even harder than noticing what’s there. The lyric essay asks you to notice what isn’t.”

I went to dances and dried my corsages. I kept letters from boys who liked me and took the time to write. Later, I wore a locket with a picture of a man inside. (I believe they call this confirmation bias .) The locket was shaped like a heart. It tarnished easily, which only tightened my resolve to keep it clean and bright. I may still have it somewhere. My heart was full, not empty, you see. I was responsive to touch. (We always held hands.) I was thoughtful and playful, attentive and kind. I listened when he confided. I laughed at his jokes. We kissed in public and more than kissed in private. (I wasn’t a tease.) When I cried at the sad parts in movies, he always wrapped his arm around. For years, I saved everything down to the stubs, but even the stubs couldn’t save me from what I couldn’t say.

“Subtract what you know from a text, and there you have the subtext.” Or—as my mother used to say, her palms splayed wide— Voilà!

I am stunned as I recall that I spoke French as a child. My mother was fluent. She taught me the French words alongside the English words, and I pictured them like two parallel ladders of language I could climb.

Sometimes in the grocery store, we would speak only French to each other, to the astonishment of everyone around. It was our little game. We enjoyed being surprising, but the subtext was being impressive or even perhaps being exclusionary. That’s what we really enjoyed.

When Dee, the woman in the blue apron with the whitest hair I had ever seen—a shock of white, for not a trace of color remained—smiled at us in the Albertson’s checkout line, I curtsied the way my ballet teacher taught me, clasped the bag in my small hand, and murmured Merci . My good manners were not lost in translation.

“Lyric essays are often investigations of the Underneath—what only seems invisible because it must be excavated, brought to light. We cannot, however, take this light-bringing lightly.”

When I was ten years old, my parents told me they were going to dig up our backyard and replace the long green lawn with a swimming pool. This had always been my mother’s dream, even in Seattle. She assumed it was everyone else’s dream, too, even in Seattle. Bulldozers came. The lilac bushes at the side of the house were uprooted and later replanted. Portions of the fence were taken down and later rebuilt. It took a long time to dig such a deep hole. Neighbors complained about the noise. Someone came one night and slashed the bulldozer’s tires. (Another slow-down. Another set-back.) All year we lived in ruins.

Eventually, the hole was finished, the dirt covered over with a smooth white surface. I remember when the workmen said I could walk into the pool if I wanted—there was no water yet, just empty space, more walled emptiness than I had ever encountered before. In my sneakers with the cat at my heels, I traipsed down the steps into the shallow end, then descended the gradual hill toward the deep end. There I stood at the would-be bottom, where the water would someday soon cover my head by a four full feet. When I looked up, the sky seemed so much further away. The cat laid down on the drain, which must have been warmed by the sun.

I didn’t know about lyric essays then, but I often think about the view from the empty deep end of the dry swimming pool when I talk about lyric essays now. The space felt strange and somehow dangerous, yet there was also an undeniable allure. I tell my students it’s hard work plumbing what’s under the surface. We don’t always know what we’ll find.

That day in the pool, I looked up and saw a ladder dangling from the right-side wall. It was so high I couldn’t reach it, even if I stretched my arms. I would need water to buoy me even to the bottom rung. For symmetry, I thought, there should have been a second ladder on the left-side wall.  And that’s when I remembered, suddenly, with a shock as white as Dee’s hair: I couldn’t recall a word of French anymore! I had lost my second ladder. When did this happen? I licked my dry lips. I tried to wet my parched mouth. How did this happen? There I was, standing inside a literal absence, noticing that a whole language had vanished from my sight, my ear, my grasp.

I live in Florida now. I have for seven years. In fact, I moved to Florida to teach the lyric essay, audacious as that sounds, but hear me out. I think “lyric essay” is the name we give to something that resists being named. It’s the placeholder for an ultimately unsayable thing.

After ten years of teaching many literatures—some of which approached the threshold of the lyric essay but none of which passed through—I came to Florida to pursue this layered, voluminous, irreducible thing. I came to Florida to soak in it.

“That’s a sub-genre of creative nonfiction, right?” Is it ?

“You’re moving to the sub-tropics, aren’t you?” I am!

On the interview, my soon-to-be boss drove me around Miami for four full hours. The city itself is a layered, voluminous, irreducible thing. I love it irrationally and without hope of mastery, which in the end might be the only way to love anything.

My soon-to-be boss said, “We have found ourselves without a memoirist on the faculty.” I liked him instantly. I liked the word choice of “found ourselves without,” the sweet and the sad commingling.

He told me, “Students want to learn how to write about their lives, their experiences—not just casually but as an art form, with attention to craft.” (I nodded.) “But there’s another thing, too. They’re asking about—” and here he may have lowered his voice, with that blend of reverent hesitancy most suited to this subject—“ the lyrical essay. ” (I nodded again.) “So, you’re familiar with it, then?”

“Yes,” I smiled, “I am.”

Familiar was a good word, perhaps the best word, to describe my relationship with this kind of writing. The lyric essay and I are kin. I know the lyric essay in a way that feels as deep and intuitive, as troubling and unreasonable, as my own family ties have become.

“Can you give me some context for the lyrical essay?” he asked. At just this moment, we may have been standing on the sculpted grounds of the Biltmore Hotel. Or: We may have been traffic-jammed in the throbbing heart of Brickell. Or: We may have been crossing the spectacular causeway that rises then plunges onto Key Biscayne.

“Do you ever look at a word like, say, parenthesis , and suddenly you can’t stop seeing the parts of it?”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Like how there’s a parent there, in parenthesis , and how parentheses can sometimes seem like a timeout in the middle of a sentence—something a parent might sentence a child to?”

“Okay,” he said. He seemed to be mulling, which I took as a good sign.

“You see, a lyric essayist might notice something like that and then might use the nature of parentheses themselves to guide an exploration of a parent-child relationship.”

I wanted to say something brilliant, to win him over right then and there, so he would go back to the other creative writers and say, “It’s her ! We must hire her !”

But brilliance is hard to produce on command. I could only say what I thought I knew.  “This is an approach to writing that seeks out the smallest door—sometimes a door found within words themselves—and uses that door to access the largest”—I may have said hardest —“rooms.”

I heard it then, the low rumble at the back of his throat: “Hmm.” And then again: “Hmm.”

Years before Overstock.com, people shopped at surplus stores—or at least my mother did, and my mother was the first people I knew. (She was only one, true, but she seemed like a multitude.)

The Sears Surplus Store in Burien, Washington, was a frequent destination of ours. Other Sears stores shipped their excess merchandise there, where it was piled high, rarely sorted, and left to the customers who were willing to rummage. So many bins to plunge into! So many shelves laden with re-taped boxes and dented cans! ( Excess seemed to include items missing pieces or found to be defective.) Orphaned socks. Shoes without laces. A shower nozzle Bubble-Wrapped with a hand-written tag— AS IS.

I liked the alliterative nature of the store’s name, but I did not like the store itself, which was grungy and stale, a trial for the senses. There were unswept floors, patches of defiled carpet, sickly yellow lights that flickered and whined, and in the distance, always the sound of something breaking.

“We don’t even know what we’re looking for!” I’d grouse to my mother rather than rolling up my sleeves and pitching in. “There’s too much here already, and they just keep adding more and more.”

I see now my mother was my first role model for what it takes to make a lyric essay. The context was all wrong, but the meaning was right, precisely. She handed me her purse to hold, then wiped the sweat that pooled above her lip. “If you don’t learn how to be a good scavenger,” my mother grinned— oh, she was in her element then! —“how do you ever expect to find a worthy treasure?”

Facebook Post, February 19, 2016, 11:58 am:

Reading lyric essays at St. Thomas University this morning. In meaningless and/or profound statistics—also known as lyric math—the current priest-to-iguana ratio on campus is 6 to 2 in favor of the priests. Somehow, though, the iguanas are winning.

An aspiring writer comments: ♥ Lyric math ♥ I love your brain!

I reply: May your love of lyric essays likewise grow, exponentially! ♥

Growing up, like many kids who loved a class called language arts, I internalized a false binary (to visualize: an arbitrary wall) between what we call art and what we call science. “Yet here we are today,” I tell my students, palms splayed wide, “members of the College of Arts & Sciences. Notice it’s an ampersand that joins them, aligns them. Art and science playing together on the same team.”

When they share, my students report similar divisions in their own educational histories. They say they learned early on to separate activities for the “right brain” (creative) from activities for the “left brain” (analytical). When they prepared for different sections of their standardized tests, they almost always found the verbal questions “fun,” the quantitative questions “hard.”

“Must these two experiences be mutually exclusive?” I ask. “Because I’m here to tell you the lyric essay is the hardest fun you can have.” They laugh because they are beginning to believe me.

My students also learned early on to assign genders to their disciplines of study—“girl stuff” versus “boy stuff.” They recount how the girl stuff of spelling and sentence-making and story-telling, while undeniably pleasurable, was treated by some parents and teachers alike as comparably frivolous to the boy stuff, with its ledgers and numbers and chemicals that burbled in a cup. In the end, everyone, regardless of their future majors, came to believe that boy stuff was serious— meaningful math, salient science—better than girl stuff, and ultimately more valuable.

“It’s not just an arbitrary wall either,” they say, borrowing my metaphor. “You see it on campus, too—where the money goes, where the investments are made.” I’m not arguing. My students, deft noticers that they are, cite a leaky roof and shingles falling from the English building, while the university boasts “comprehensive upgrades” and “state-of-the-art facilities” in buildings where biology and chemistry are housed. They suggest we are living with divisions that cannot be ignored. They are right, of course, right down to their corpus callosums.

“So,” I say, “one mission for the lyric essayist is to identify and render on the page these kinds of incongruities, inequalities , and by doing so, we can challenge them. We can shine a probing light into places certain powers that be may not want us to look. Don’t ever let anyone tell you lyric essays can’t be political.”

The students are agitated, in a good way. They’re thinking about lyric essays as epistles, lyric essays as petitions and caveats and campaigns.

“To do our best work,” I say, “we need to mobilize all our resources—not only of structure and form but even the nuances of language itself. We need to mine every lexicon available to us, not just words we think of as ‘poet-words.’ In a lyric essay, we can bring multiple languages and kinds of discourse together.”

Someone raises a hand. “Is this your roundabout way of telling us the lyric essay isn’t actually more art than science?”

I shake my head. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if the lyric essay is more art than science. I’m not even sure the lyric essay belongs under the genre-banner of creative nonfiction at all . ”

“Well, how would you classify it then?” someone asks without raising a hand.

“ Mystery ,” I say, and now I surprise myself with this sudden stroke of certainty, like emerging from heavy fog into sun. Some of my students giggle, but all the ears in the room have perked up. “I think lyric essays should be catalogued with the mysteries.” I am even more certain the second time I say it.

“So, just to clarify—do you mean the whodunnits or like, the paranormal stuff?”

“Yes,” I smile. “ Exactly .”

_____________________________________

From A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays , edited by Randon Billings Noble, courtesy University of Nebraska Press. 

Julie Marie Wade

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Lyric Essays: Structure and Content Essay (Article)

Lyric essays are essentially hybrids between poems, non fiction, fiction and essays. Although this form of writing ranges widely in terms of structure and content, all lyric essays possess some qualities of logic and rhythm. Writers must think about the content of their essay quite critically and must also be critical of the diction of the piece. At first glance, one may assume that a lyric essay is actually a typical prose, nonetheless, this piece of writing is much shorter than expected and that instead of separating ideas through the use of line breaks, the lyric writer often prefers writing continuously.

What makes the lyric essay unique?

A Lyric essay differs from typical prose or poems because it does not get in depth in terms of its ideas. It gives hints and clues on certain aspects and then leaves the rest to readers for interpretation. Lyric essay writers are fond of utilizing juxtaposition, connotation and imagery to advance their arguments and this makes such pieces quite precise.

Are lyric essays similar to other pieces of writing?

Like most other essays, lyric essay are written in order to make sense of the world around us. Lyric writers do not refrain from using longer narrative sections and this is what makes them so similar to non fiction essays.

Lyric essays are very similar to poems because they do not represent ideas directly or objectively. Poems and lyric essays both embrace complexity, poetic language and ingenuity in order to make sense of one’s surrounding. Lyric essay writers, like their poetry counterparts, prefer focusing on emotionality rather than story telling.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, November 26). Lyric Essays: Structure and Content. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lyric-essays-structure-and-content/

"Lyric Essays: Structure and Content." IvyPanda , 26 Nov. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/lyric-essays-structure-and-content/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Lyric Essays: Structure and Content'. 26 November.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Lyric Essays: Structure and Content." November 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lyric-essays-structure-and-content/.

1. IvyPanda . "Lyric Essays: Structure and Content." November 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lyric-essays-structure-and-content/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Lyric Essays: Structure and Content." November 26, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lyric-essays-structure-and-content/.

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Citizen: An American Lyric

By claudia rankine, citizen: an american lyric essay questions, to whom does rankine refer when she uses the pronoun 'you' throughout the book.

'You' is an open-ended pronoun, just as every other pronoun becomes throughout the book. Rankine demonstrates a detachment from the pronoun 'I' by juxtaposing the personal sense of self with the self that is entangled with history through race. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that 'you' can hold no more meaning than 'I', because it has the same function: to address a single entity, which is actually a false conglomeration of incongruent factors. If 'you' refers to anything at all, it must be more than what we think of as a person whom the reader might address or who might address the reader. 'You' refers to the reader, the author, and everybody else alongside each of their historical selves. It is a wide-open invitation.

How does Rankine use negative space in telling the story of Citizen ?

There are two prime examples of Rankine's brilliant utilization of negative space in this book. The first comes with the introduction of Serena Williams against a "sharp white background," to quote Zora Neale Hurston. The tennis court with its umpires and crowds serves as a negative space upon which Serena is cast like a shadow. The second example is a little more obvious: there are no words to two poems at the end of Section VI, indicating another sort of negative space. Rankine utilizes this effect in order to demonstrate both an inability to describe the heinousness of the acts indicated in the titles and also the inability to continue writing at all. This negative space shows exhaustion nearly to the point of giving up. But the book continues on, just as Serena returns to the court.

Some critics have said that Citizen only presents content, whereas others have said that it has an agenda to teach readers a particular lesson. Is one of these opinions correct? Why or why not?

Of course, neither critical opinion is "correct," but for the purpose of argument, we might say that Rankine's goal in writing this book was more aligned with that of the first critical opinion. Instead of telling the reader that race is a false entity, that there is no science behind it, and that all assumptions based on race are really based on immaterial and therefore incorrect judgment, she instead relies on example to demonstrate this lesson. By taking up an unbiased tone - one that simply details the emotional experience of one who is not racist, but who witnesses racist acts - Citizen accomplishes a presentation that speaks for itself without pressing an agenda.

Pick an image from the pages of Citizen to dissect. Explain why it appears in a particular section and give a brief interpretation of what it might mean in the context of the poem.

The Jim Crow Road sign placed atop a backward stop sign in a residential neighborhood appears in the first three pages of the text. Of particular importance is the line that precedes it: "The route is often associative" (1). The street sign appears in this section to demonstrate just that point. We have what seems to be an innocent scene, a quiet suburban neighborhood in the heart of America and what seems only to be a sign to indicate one's place on a map also indicates one's place outside of the map. The Jim Crow Road sign tells everybody where they are and where they should go, but depending on the color of one's skin, those destinations must be different. It foreshadows Rankine's heavy reliance on Zora Neale Hurston's powerful words: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background."

What was the most surprising microaggression that you read in the text and why?

The most surprising microaggression was the one incited by none other than the author herself. When the police had been called by her neighbor on her friend, who waited outside her home for her, the narrator's response was to ask her friend to simply make phone calls in the backyard next time. Since he is not the criminal that the narrator's neighbor thought he was, he said that he would call anywhere and anytime he liked. He was right. The narrator had been trying to protect him from others' racist tendencies without considering that this very act made a racist out of her.

Citizen: An American Lyric Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, “Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight.” How do sports in particular encourage spectators and officials to assume influence or even ownership over the bodies of

In context, the author is referring to the weight of memory, the racial insults, the slights, and the mistreatment by other players. The question itself responds to an incident at the 2004 U.S. Open, during which, Williams loses her temper after a...

Question about the Citizen book!

Rankine switches between several speakers, although the reader may not be informed of these switches at all. In interviews, Rankine says that the stories are collected from a wide range of different people: black, white, male, and female. At...

Like in Sections IV and III, Rankine puts special focus on the body and its potentials to be made known. In particular, the narrator considers what her own voice sounds like. This has many meanings. The voice is a symbol for the self. We often say...

Study Guide for Citizen: An American Lyric

Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Citizen: An American Lyric
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Essays for Citizen: An American Lyric

Citizen: An American Lyric essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.

• Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine’s Citizen   
• Reading Between Lines of Citizen
• Poetry, Politcs, and Personal Reflection: Redefining the Lyric in Claudia Rankine's Citizen
• Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation
• Citizen: A Discourse on our Post-Racial Society

Lesson Plan for Citizen: An American Lyric

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What is a Lyric Essay

To understand the essence of a lyric composition, it is necessary to concentrate on the form and content of this assignment. A lyric essay is a kind of writing, which presents a blend of prose and poetry. The character of the text is always personal. It reflects the thoughts and feelings of the author working on it. By its form and content, a lyric essay resembles a prose poem. While crafting the piece, a writer applies a variety of ideas, images and stylistic means. Those can be connected to people, objects, nature, feeling, phenomena etc.

Exists no limitation when it concerns a lyric essay. The core ideas can be different starting from personal experience and ending with the application of various means to evoke reader’s emotions. There is no stated template. The text is organised individually by each author. The main aim is to produce a certain effect on the target audience. The composition may present a series of fragments creating certain lyrical mood, which is preserved throughout the whole text thanks to the relevant and successful usage of poetic language.

Lyric Essay Topics

The lyric essay presents a hybrid form of creative writing mediating between non-fiction and poetry. The main focus of the piece is usually made on employment of visual images, metaphors and symbols. The structuring and form of the composition of this type have no limits as well as its topicality. For that reason, the choice of a topic is an easy task, even if the scholarly supervisor provides no options to choose from.

A variety of topics exist, which can be chosen as a basis for a lyrical essay. Primarily, it is possible to discuss some feelings, emotions, which an author has experienced. The format of the lyric composition allows application of various stylistic devices and techniques, which may be handy in rendering his thoughts. Apart from that, it is possible to choose a certain piece of art, music or poetry and comprise a text, which will be a reflection on these.

Guidelines on Writing Lyric Essays

A lyric essay is a kind of personal essay, which presents a writer’s reflection on a certain issue or artistic piece. For that reason, the form and structuring of this essay may be chosen by each author individually. The essential task of a writer preparing this essay is to focus on the application of poetic language and one’s creative thinking abilities. Poetic and figurative language is a compulsory element of the successful lyric essay. Reach imagery background should also be created by a writer working of this type of text.

Exists a variety of techniques that are to be applied while dealing with poetic writing. The list includes making an accent on the connotation of notions presented, posing questions to the target audience, waking up the imagination of a target reader, encouraging of the associative thinking, creation of a particular tone and rhythm and application of a series of fragments. To craft a lyric composition, it is essential to apply poetic languaging and to set a right mood.

How to Start a Lyric Essay

Exists no permanent structure for the lyric essay. Each composition represents a simple experiment with form and content. That is why it is difficult to describe each structural and sensing element of a lyric piece. Formally, the structure includes lead-in part, main body section and ending.

To start a lyric essay, an author has to set the general mood for the whole composition, To do it successfully, one needs to choose the appropriate wording. An introductory part has to attract the reader’s attention and encourage to continue reading the composition. It is also important to create an effective thesis. It should clearly describe the main idea of a writer. Apart from that, a writer will need to refer to it throughout the whole piece. Properly compiled thesis secures a 100% success of a composition.

Essay Body Paragraphs

The lyric essay body paragraphs compilation depends on a type of the essay. That is why one should always take it into account. The core body of a prose poem essay should be built with the application of different poetic devices and images. One can apply assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme. A metaphor is an indispensable tool to be used to the main body of prose poem essay type.

The main body of a college essay has to comprise a series of fragments. Here a writer can combine poetry, prose and music. Each paragraph should be separated by epigraph or subtitles. The braided essay should be concentrated on a clear topic. However, an author can apply various sources of info. Here one can present multiple ideas, use quotations, popular sayings and other references.

“Hermit crab” main essay body resembles a product created from another essay. It is a mixture of various genres and art and literary pieces that are used to create something new – a new lyrical composition.

Lyric Essay Conclusion

Lyric essay conclusion has to comprise a summary of whole writing. It should summarise all the ideas presented in a main body of the essay and be a closing element for the composition. By reading a concluding part, an author should clearly understand, what was the piece about. There should be a reference to a thesis. Apart from that, the conclusion should present a logical ending of your writing and create a pleasant feeling in a soul of your target reader.

Lyric Essay Outline

A creation of outline for a lyric essay does not presuppose following of an established pattern. It is impossible to map out a clear structure of a framework, as the form can be variated. However, a writer has to bear in mind the fact that the material should be organised logically and coherently. A text should comprise an introductory part, main body and a conclusion. Due to a biased nature of a lyric essay, it is impossible to establish clear writing rules. It gives space for creativity and imagination, and the author can decide on an outline structure by himself.

Lyric Essay Examples

For members of colleges and universities having to deal with the production of the lyric essay for the first time, it may be challenging to understand the nature of the assignment. Apart from that, one cannot perceive the quality of the essay and grab all the peculiarities by simply consulting rules. For that reasons, a good strategy will be to turn to examples. On the web exists a variety of examples illustrating the form and content of a proper lyric essay.

Be consulting a lyric essay example an author has a chance to see how theory can be applied in practice. Apart from that, one can get inspired and borrow various ideas of writing this kind of composition. It may be difficult, at first glance. But as soon as you try writing a lyric essay, you will enjoy both the process and your final example.

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Article Contents

Bluets and the lyric essay, emerson’s ‘experience’, bluets and the string of beads.

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Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

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Georgia Walton, Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , English: Journal of the English Association , Volume 72, Issue 276-277, Spring-Summer 2023, Pages 55–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efad012

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This article examines the previously underacknowledged influence of nineteenth-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the contemporary essayist and memoirist Maggie Nelson, in particular the 2009 book-length essay Bluets . Nelson’s hybrid texts have often been seen as key examples of the quintessentially contemporary genre of the lyric essay. My argument here complicates the claims of originality that have been made for this genre and instead identifies Nelson’s formal concerns as the product of a profound engagement with a nineteenth-century model. Through my analysis of Bluets , I suggest that Emerson’s influence is key to understanding Nelson’s formal hybridity and, in turn, her particular representation of the relationship between the subject and the world. Through her engagement with Emerson, Nelson arrives at an understanding of subjecthood that is based on a radical dependency but that is also individually defined and self-sufficient.

People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. 1

Nelson suggests that Emerson’s essays complicate the claims of originality that have sometimes been made for the recent proliferation of hybrid texts by Anne Boyer, Claudia Rankine, and Olivia Laing that all mix the literary with the documentary and the personal with the critical. 2 Emerson’s essays inhabit a space between literature and philosophy. They combine theoretical observations on the world and the self with a poetic, gestural mode of expression. The legacy of his aphoristic, ‘sentence by sentence’ style of writing is evident in Nelson’s own prose, which can be seen for instance in the way in which it moves fluidly from one idea to another. In addition to this evidence of his impact on style, she regularly quotes from his essays in her published works; though mentioned only once in The Argonauts , he is frequently cited in the earlier memoir Bluets (2009) and referenced in the critical works, The Art of Cruelty (2011) and On Freedom (2021). Despite Nelson’s clear indebtedness to Emerson both in these works and elsewhere, critics and reviewers alike have not acknowledged his recurrent appearance in, or influence on, her writing. This is, in part, because he is one of numerous references in her work. Nelson is known for the way in which she repeatedly cites artists, philosophers, and critical theorists alongside personal reflection. For instance, she regularly quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roland Barthes. Critics have emphasized her inheritance from writers such as Eileen Myles, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, concentrating on her texts’ investments in queer theory. 3 However, Emerson, to whom she repeatedly returns in multiple texts, is an overlooked influence on her work.

In this article I directly address her inheritance from him in Bluets , showing how he influences both the formal construction of this hybrid memoir and, in turn, the way in which it represents subjecthood as fundamentally intersubjective and relational. I read Bluets in relation to Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ (1844). My analysis focusses on a trope common to both Emerson and Nelson; I suggest that the fragmentary form of Bluets is profoundly influenced by Emerson’s statement in ‘Experience’ (1844) that ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue’. 4 The numbered propositions of Nelson’s text function as sequential beads, or lenses, through which its ‘I’ sees the world. At the same time, the closed off beads in Bluets represent the relationship between the subjects and the other as oppositional, the self is defined against the other.

The circular image of the bead is a type of, what Caroline Levine has called a, ‘bounded whole’. 5 It offers ways of delineating between the internal and the external. The negotiation of what is within and what is without the boundaries of selfhood is key to Nelson’s use of this image. Though it erects a boundary, what it contains is neither fixed nor monolithic. Levine sees the forms of literary texts as able to hold difference and bring together contrasting elements. Furthermore, she writes that while unifying forms ‘impos[e] limits’, they also ‘makes thinking possible’. 6 The circular image that Nelson borrows from Emerson offers these affordances. The beads are defined forms, but they juxtapose changing ideas and contrasting perspectives, structuring thought in order to articulate it. In doing so they signify a discrete identity, but one that is also pliable, able to be challenged, altered, and influenced.

The combination of subjective experience and theoretical or philosophical engagement is a key aspect of Emerson’s writing. His essays expound the primacy of individual perspective and both his work and that of his fellow transcendentalists is associated with philosophies of individualism. Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), a key example of this concern in his work, explains the importance of developing an independent outlook. He writes there, that ‘the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude’. 7 As well as this individualistic attitude, his essays are characterized by the use of metaphor and image through which they articulate their idiosyncratic perspectives. They are also well-known for their lack of logic and the inconsistency of statements both within and between them. This is something that Emerson explicitly endorses as, for instance, in ‘Self-Reliance’ where he famously proclaims that ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’. 8 Borrowing from Emerson’s use of metaphor and symbolism, Nelson develops an imagistic and densely patterned style with a strong impression of formal unity through which she represents individual identity as self-contained and defined. Though, as I go on to show here, both this formal unity and defined identity are also mutable and able to hold difference. In this manner she also inherits from the multiplicity and refusal of consistency that characterizes Emerson’s work.

My suggestion that Nelson’s engagement with Emerson allows her to arrive at a mode of writing that emphasizes intersubjectivity and relationality may seem at odds with his suggestion in ‘Self-Reliance’ that ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’. 9 Emerson explicitly rejects the idea of society, seeing it as promoting conformity and suppressing the distinctiveness of individual subjects. Instead, he sees independent thought as central to personhood. However, my suggestion that he influences Nelson’s representation of an interrelated subjectivity fits in with recent critical work on him and other transcendentalist writers such as Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman. Benjamin Reiss has applied the insights of disability studies to show that transcendentalism was not a purely individualistic enterprise. Through biographically focussed readings of Emerson, Fuller and Whitman, he argues that they ‘all felt the material effects of disability on their own capacity to produce work [and] were attuned to the importance of interdependency’. 10 My reading of Emerson’s impact on Nelson’s work thus corresponds with recent critical re-evaluations of his writing. Emerson’s influence on the formal construction of Nelson’s texts causes her to arrive at an idea of selfhood that is both self-reliant and interdependent.

In the quotation with which I began, Nelson describes Emerson as a forerunner to contemporary works of ‘creative nonfiction’. This is a catch-all term that implies the use of literary techniques to present a factual account. While Nelson’s writing can be classified under this broad umbrella, the term itself is too vague to be particularly helpful. Instead, following on from the work of John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, I categorize Bluets as a ‘lyric essay’. 11 These are works that combine elements of poetry and of essays. The term connotes the poetic style of writing in Nelson’s texts as well as their combination of theoretical and personal themes. Because of this it is more encompassing than the terms autotheory and critical autobiography which have often been used to describe the works of Nelson and others (such as Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk). 12 Those terms emphasize the mixture of theoretical and autobiographical modes in Nelson’s writing. However, these are only two of the three elements of Nelson’s formal hybridity that interest me here – the personal and the theoretical, but not the poetic. The lyric essay suggests all three. In particular it suggests a link with lyric poetry, a form that is often seen to be the expression or representation of a particular subjectivity. However, the relationship between D’Agata and Tall’s term and previous definitions of the lyric is somewhat undertheorized, something I rectify here. In my analysis of Nelson’s texts, I consider some of the connections between lyric essays and lyric poetry.

One of the main ways I do this is through a discussion of the figure of apostrophe, a key element of the latter form. Apostrophe, as a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses an absent person, concept, or thing, is fundamentally linked to the way in which the subject defines themself against, or relates to, the other. Therefore, it is the most pertinent feature of the lyric to the argument of this chapter. In particular, I show how Nelson subverts apostrophe’s suggestion of an absent other through the use of an epistolary form. This is a decision that she explicitly refers to in the text. In Bluets , when discussing Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ (1971), she writes: ‘The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line – “Sincerely, L. Cohen” – as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter’. 13 The epistolary form subverts apostrophe because, though it addresses an absent other, it is usually with the intention that that other will eventually read it. Therefore, though a self-contained expression of an individual perspective, it is a form of communication designed to convey thought and feeling to a particular individual. Bluets is addressed to a you, though as I go on to show, its aim to communicate effectively with an other is accompanied by varying levels of anxiety.

Bluets is an important example of a lyric essay and is often discussed in articles that theorize the form more generally. 14 It is laid out in 240 short propositions which contain personal, philosophical, and critical reflections on the colour blue. These fragmentary propositions are arranged in a free-flowing stream. Though all written in prose, they are composed in a lyrical, rhythmic style reminiscent of poetry. Nelson shifts between them without a sense of chronology or particular thematic linkage (aside from the focus on blue). Despite the lack of perceivable logic, there are characters and narrative threads that run throughout, creating subtle coherence. The most important of these are the end of a relationship with a lover who is dubbed the ‘prince of blue’ and the care of a friend rendered quadriplegic after a cycling accident. 15 As the focus on blue suggests, the book expresses and explores the experiences of heartbreak, grief, and solitude.

Critical work on Nelson’s texts has primarily discussed her blend of critical theory and personal reflection. The later book The Argonauts has been the focus of the most scholarly attention, much of this looking at the ways in which it is both influenced by and extends twentieth-century queer and feminist traditions of confessional writing. 16 Likewise, Bluets has also been the focus of critical work which encompasses queer themes, for instance its engagement with twentieth-century figures such as Derek Jarman, but with an additional focus on its form. 17 Here, I identify an alternative genealogy which reads the text in relation to nineteenth-century forms and ideas about subjectivity. While the vast majority of critical attention to Nelson’s work has looked at these twentieth-century influences, one article does attend to Emerson’s presence in The Argonauts , however this remains focussed on her engagements with queer theory. Katie Collins argues that Nelson’s text borrows the concept of ‘thinning’ from Emerson as a way of revisioning the ‘queer negativity’ of Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ 18 My argument also shows how Nelson invokes Emerson to move away from the pessimism of some twentieth-century schools of thought. However, I attend instead to the way in which the hybrid form of Bluets is shaped through an engagement with Emerson which in turn helps her to conceive of the subject as composite and socially formed.

Bluets opens with a hypothesis: ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.’ 19 What follows is a stream of consciousness meditation on the colour blue. Though Nelson’s prose is free flowing and digressive, these meditations are organized into numbered propositions that are at most 200 words long. In these propositions Nelson discusses blues found in artworks, literature, song lyrics, film, nature, and the built environment. For example, she positions references to works by Joseph Cornell, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Andy Warhol, and Leonard Cohen alongside descriptions of scraps of tarpaulin and the nest of the male bowerbird who collects blue objects for his elaborate mating ritual. As she details her love of blue objects and artworks, she also references the experiments and inventions of scientists such as Isaac Newton and Horace Bénédict de Sassaure who investigated the nature of colour perception and tried to measure the blue of the sky. Throughout these meandering meditations, Nelson reflects on the nature of sensory perception and its relationship to emotion; the text plays on the idea of ‘the blues’ as a depressive emotional state. Its magpie-like (or bowerbird-like) arrangement of blue objects, artworks, and anecdotes works as a conduit for Nelson’s consideration of grief, loneliness, and depression. In Bluets then, as well as being representative of personal emotion, the colour blue is also a vehicle for phenomenological enquiry. Nelson uses its multiple manifestations and connotations to broach questions about the ways in which the subject perceives the world. I suggest here that these combined uses of the colour blue means that it functions in Bluets as a metaphor for the form of the lyric essay itself. It represents the qualities that the lyric essay is seen to hybridize: namely the presentation of an individual perspective, complex, evocative language, the deployment of critical arguments based on observation, and the critical appraisal of art and literature. In order to develop this line of argument, I will now briefly reflect on the critical definition of this form.

The lyric essay is a sub-genre or offshoot of the term creative non-fiction and both are a product of the creative writing courses and writing workshops in American universities that grew exponentially in the late twentieth century. 20 Ned Stuckey-French argues that the term lyric essay was coined in reaction to the idea that essays present empirically verifiable information in a systematic manner. 21 Indeed, in the introduction to the Seneca Review Special Issue on the form, D’Agata and Tall define it as borrowing from the poem ‘in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language’ and from the essay ‘in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form’. 22 They argue that it encompasses both ‘poetic essays’ and ‘essayistic poems’ that ‘give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information’. 23 The main feature of the lyric essay is then its refusal to present its content in the systematic or argumentative manner usually associated with critical writing. It does this particularly through its allusion to poetry. D’Agata and Tall use the word lyric in order to signify a poetic mode of expression or a self-consciously literary use of language. However, as I briefly suggested above, it does more than signify the ‘imaginative’ use of form. Instead, it implies links with lyric poetry, a relationship I will now set out in more depth.

In what is arguably the most important critical study of the lyric, Jonathon Culler writes that the conventional idea of the lyric poet was of a writer who ‘absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity’ (though Culler challenges this idea, it endures in critical conceptions of the form). 24 Nelson’s employment of Emersonian imagery in Bluets creates the unity that Culler describes. Through the focus on blue and the use of Emerson’s string of beads, Nelson creates a densely patterned text with an internal cohesion. In fact, the circular motif that imposes this unity is itself a metaphor for the subjectivity that the work expresses. This unity is both produced by and helps to develop the representation of a defined sense of self in the text. Moreover, Culler says that lyric poems ‘illuminate or interpret the world for us’. 25 This definition bears many similarities to D’Agata and Tall’s seminal definition of the lyric essay in that it combines attention to the world with an imaginative mode. This imaginative mode of expression is an expression of subjectivity. Both the lyric essay and the lyric poem dramatize the subject viewing the world. The lyric essay differs from lyric poetry then, in its closer ties to the essay’s ‘allegiance to fact’. It self-consciously reworks a form that relies on systematic argument and ‘fact’ but undercuts these through the deployment and consideration of its own subjective viewpoint.

Both these modes are encompassed in Nelson’s use of the colour blue. In Bluets , blue is an observable part of the external world and thus subject to scientific enquiry; it is the medium and subject of visual, literary, and musical artists; and it is a condition of inner life, an affective state. The first and last of these are, to some extent, paradoxical ways of approaching knowledge. This paradox is one of the central features of the lyric essay which includes facts, empirical evidence, and analysis alongside its articulation of personal ways of seeing. Throughout Bluets , through her myriad uses of the colour blue, Nelson tries to reconcile these two ways of thinking about experience and knowledge.

79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,’ wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, not matter what its hue, can be deadly. 26

Emerson speaks of the inner mood metaphorically colouring the individual’s observation of the world. In Bluets , Nelson literalizes this metaphor. The text is filled with blue objects, through which its speaker considers the external world and her relationships with others. By collaging references to blue things, Nelson creates a blue bead through which she invites her reader to view the world. Indeed, this literalism can be seen in the text when, a few pages after this proposition, Nelson continues to refer to Emerson’s metaphor. The speaker says, ‘I have made efforts, however fitful, to live within other beads’, before telling us how she bought a tin of yellow paint and painted her whole apartment with it. 27 The string of beads offers a method for thinking about the way in which the form of Bluets produces the relationship between the self and the external world. The metaphor has two connotations that are present in Bluets : first, that the inner life and experience of the external world are mediated through vision, and secondly, that the subject moves through multiple different ways of relating to the world. Through her primary subject of the colour blue, Nelson uses vision to understand the relationship between inner life and observation and through the text’s shifting numbered propositions, she represents experience as ever-changing and sequential. Alexandra Parsons sees Wittgenstein and Goethe as the ‘primary influences’ on Nelson’s use of colour as a way of exploring how to communicate experiences of pain (either emotional or physical). 28 I instead suggest here that Emerson’s metaphor of the string of beads, and its concomitant idea of coloured lenses, are central to understanding the way in which Bluets negotiates empirical and personal modes of writing.

The two modes that the lyric essay hybridizes are also evident in Emerson’s essays, which are often seen to inhabit a space between philosophy and literature. They reject the systematic construction of argument and refuse to develop specific moral positions. As Stanley Cavell writes, Emerson was a writer ‘famously intimidated by formal argument’. 29 This quality in his work has often led to a confusion about where to place him in terms of discipline: are his essays philosophy or literature? Though Cavell’s work on Emerson has done much to rehabilitate him as a philosopher in the twentieth century, as Joseph Urbas points out, Cavell’s readings themselves refuse logical parameters. 30 This refusal to present logical arguments both within Emerson’s work and in his, arguably, most influential recent critic, allows us to trace a tradition of philosophical writing that refuses coherence and the formal conventions of argument. Thus, we see the boundary between literature and philosophy being challenged within the latter discipline also. The lyric essay develops a scholar-subject and thus challenges the idea of knowledge as something verifiable and objective. In the work of Cavell, we find an example of Emerson-influenced philosophical work that also does this. ‘Experience’, composed in the wake of the death of Emerson’s young son Waldo is notable in his oeuvre for the way in which it draws on personal experience while also offering abstracted and philosophical propositions.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. 31

Emerson characterizes mood as colour in order to show how an individual’s emotions alter the way in which they look at the world. This alteration is both literal and figurative. He speaks of nature and books; the reference to nature suggests the literal and immediate act of seeing the physical world, whereas books suggest intellectual, artistic, and emotional consideration of it. Both types of knowledge acquisition are transformed by the state of mind in which the subject arrives at them. For Emerson this highly subjective empirical experience is a changeable phenomenon; the subject moves through different perspectives or ‘moods’, which continuously alters her experience of the world. The metaphor is fundamentally about vision. Emerson sees the beads as lenses. Whilst lenses enable vision, they also limit it. They provide a frame or boundary which forecloses any wider vantage point. The bead itself is a ‘bounded whole’, a self-contained and fixed circle that has a limiting power to cohere. This cohesion is here the self-contained logic of depression; the subject trapped within their own bead can only see the world through their own perspective, which takes on an internal and, to them, inarguable logic. Emerson’s image of the mountain further resists notions of an expansive vision. This image suggests that, though we might think we can reach a point at which we can survey the world from a position of detachment, what we really see is the foundation of our perspective. He thus suggests that the idea of critical detachment or claims to objectivity are forms of self-knowledge, or knowledge produced by the self. You can only ever see from the ground on which you are standing. The subject is only able to gain more insight into their own embodied position.

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 32

In this celebrated image, Emerson describes a complete dissolution of the ego and of the body through the act of looking. The observer becomes one with the thing that she observes, here nature in its entirety. This is completely reversed in ‘Experience’ where the object of observation is entirely transformed by the inner emotional state of the viewer. Indeed, in the later essay, he writes that, ‘Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them’ rather than the erosion of the seer that is found in the transparent eyeball. 33 With the transparent eyeball there is an immediacy to the act of looking, the subject is represented as comprising of pure unmediated vision. In ‘Experience’ the beads repeat the spherical imagery and transparent nature of the eyeball, but instead the subject is trapped within them, rather than dissolving itself. Furthermore, in ‘Nature’, all space and time is collapsed into the expansive vision of a single moment. This is something that is also inverted with the string of beads. In this later metaphor, vision is limited, constrained but also linear. The subject moves from one perspective to another but cannot access either the expansive vision found in ‘Nature’ or their own previous perspectives. As Emerson writes in ‘Circles’ – a line that Nelson partially quotes in bluet 234. – ‘Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow’. 34 The string of beads suggests a perspective that is limited and changeable but not cumulative.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature – in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries) – that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 38

Throughout the text, the colour blue alternates between being a way of seeing and an object of desire or observation. Here it is the latter. Typical modes of mastery such as owning, and ingesting are not available, so the speaker hypothesizes about situations in which she might attempt to learn more about blue: immersing herself in it, using it to decorate her own body, and using it as a tool of artistic representation. In her equation of desire and research, Nelson emphasizes the erotics of scholarship, suggesting that the pursuit of knowledge is motivated by eros. However, none of these actions afford access to the colour itself. Instead, the speaker remains painfully separated from the object, the blue which she cannot access. This means that her knowledge is limited, she cannot gain a full knowledge of what she observes.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simple language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me”. 89. As if we could scrape the colour off the iris and still see. 39

In this passage, blue becomes a part of the apparatus of sight. In this way, Nelson’s speaker occupies a comparable position to that found in Emerson’s string of beads; her perception of the external world cannot be divorced from her inner life. The very lens with which one views the world is coloured by mood. Nelson’s metaphor here collapses Emerson’s transparent eyeball and string of beads together. The colour of the iris becomes the coloured glass of the bead. In the passage this has the effect of recognizing the impossibility of separating one’s depression from oneself. In using the colour of the iris as a metaphor for subjective viewpoint, Nelson collapses the subjective viewpoint with the object, or cathexis, here the colour blue. Despite saying that she does not want to live within blue – ‘For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it’ – Nelson makes the colour of the eye itself the mode of engaging with the world. The speaker thus takes up an auto-erotic position, in which the cathected object is part of her own body. In doing so she collapses the distance between subject and object.

She hopes to achieve this integration through the act of writing, in particular through writing a letter. As I suggested in the introduction to this article, Nelson structures her lyric essays as letters as a subversion of the lyric apostrophe. Discussing the trope more generally Culler argues that ‘the vocative of apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship that helps to constitute him’. 40 The use of apostrophe is ‘an invocation of the muse’ that cements the poet’s own status as a poet. 41 Furthermore, it also has a sorrowful and elegiac tone. As Denis Flannery shows ‘apostrophe is caught up with mourning and the elegiac, a capacity to articulate and direct grief’. 42 This elegiac mode is apparent in both Bluets and ‘Experience’ which explicitly reflect on loss, loneliness, and grief. However, both Emerson and Nelson resist the conventional element of apostrophe as invoking the muse purely for the development of the poetic subjectivity. Instead, they aim for a more communicative mode that really hopes to address the absent other rather than merely define themselves against it. A genuine interest in the addressee is evident throughout Emerson’s work. A prolific letter writer, he was attentive to the way in which the writing subject was constructed in relation to the recipient. Furthermore, as a popular public speaker Emerson was used to writing for an audience whom he would perform in front of. As Tom F. Wright has shown, Emerson’s essays questioned the relationship between the individual and the self by being constructed as though they were addressing an embodied audience. 43 They transform apostrophe then, by imagining a present other rather than an absent one. In this, they are written with the express desire of communicating something to a receptive listener in that moment.

There remains the question of how the apostrophe works as it is adapted for the lyric essay. I suggest here that it operates as an assertion of the position of an empirical observer of the world while also being concerned with the subject position of a poet. Therefore, the subject of the lyric essay is simultaneously constructed as both scholar and poet which, in turn, redefines the scholar-subject more generally as a lyrical subjective position. This presents a challenge to traditional ideas about the construction of knowledge. The knowledge in the lyric essay is always being presented as highly subjective and therefore rejects the notion of a truth that exists outside of individual perception. Bluets presents any critical analysis or research about blue through the lens of an idiosyncratic perspective that is coloured by mood and affect. Therefore, its speaker is both observer and feeling subject. This view does not correspond with previous criticism on the lyric essay. In an article in which she analyses Bluets , Corrina Cook argues that ‘the lyric essay’s narrator is best understood not as a speaker at all, but as a listener’. 44 Though I agree that Bluets sees subjecthood as interrelational and therefore receptive (perhaps through the act of listening) to the external world, Nelson’s subversion of apostrophe shows the text to be one entirely about articulating one’s own viewpoint through writing.

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter around with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you. 45

In this passage Nelson rejects the mystery and romance of the unsayable or the incommunicable. In doing so, she refuses the conventions of apostrophe. Instead of addressing an absent other through whom she constructs an authorial voice, she states explicitly that she wrote in order to communicate something. The presence of this unread letter in the text represents an anxiety about the communicative potential of writing. But perhaps, also a delusion about the nature of the relationship between writer and addressee in letter-writing. Nelson’s ex-boyfriend transforms the letter into a symbol and, in doing so, renders its content irrelevant. This is a gendered relation that recalls unread or undisclosed letters throughout the Western canon, for example in Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) or Thomas Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles (1891). Lacan’s reading of Poe’s story sees the holder of letter of the title as ‘exud[ing] the […] odor di femina’. 46 He argues that the letter – the content of which is never revealed to the reader – is a ‘pure-signifier’ and ‘by nature symbol only of absence’. 47 The unread letter is thus a signifier of feminine lack or absence. Lacan argues that a chain of triangulated intersubjective relationships is organized around the letter. In Bluets , Nelson and the receiver of the letter are involved in a love triangle with a third woman. 48 She is unhappy when she sees a photo of her lover with the other woman wearing the blue shirt he claimed to have worn especially for her on their last meeting. 49 Nelson is hurt by her own replaceability in this intersubjective relation. Her anger at the unread letter is an anger at being reduced to a lack in the male symbolic order. The loss of this letter signifies the failure of the female subject to be heard in male systems of communication. With the unread letter in the text Nelson both articulates an anxiety about the letter that is Bluets , but also challenges male psychoanalytic discourse that reduces feminine language to symbols and lacks. Through the form of the letter, Nelson resists the use of apostrophe. Addressing her writing to a reader who refuses to read it, but whom she intended to engage with it. Nevertheless, though the epistolary form is an attempt to subvert apostrophe, it here continues to be addressed to an unhearing, unreading other.

However, though it may not always succeed in conveying thought and feeling precisely to another, the act of writing structures thought. This sense of structure is found in the string of beads as they appear in ‘Experience’. Despite the multiplicity of, and distinction between, the perspectives that the beads suggest, there is a thread of continuity that runs through them. Emerson writes, ‘Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung’. This wire suggests some stable idea of identity and selfhood. Though moods may change, they have a vein of consistency running through them. This iron wire provides a strong yet flexible thread running through the centre of the beads. The sequential nature of the string of beads picks up the stair metaphor with which Emerson begins Experience’ and that we have already seen in the Introduction. In the stair metaphor, the subject seems to have vision beyond their current position; they stand atop their accumulated experience, upon which they can look down. However, Emerson describes a particular moment of becoming aware to this; ‘we’ are jolted into the realization of our position in a trajectory. The awareness of the past is only vague – ‘there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended [emphasis mine]’ – and the future remains unknown. Emerson thus suggests some sense of stable identity, though one that we are only occasionally aware of. The figure suddenly alert to their position on the stair occupies the same space as the figure on the mountain who realizes she can only see from her own situation. However, it is only a momentary realization, instead the subject is usually contained within their own ‘dream’ or ‘illusion’.

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times – now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river – how could either of us tell the difference? 51

Nelson describes the way in which disparate perspectives or viewpoints are fashioned into a linear, seemingly free-flowing narrative. The finished text imposes narrative structure onto the experiences being described. This leads to the diminishment of affect. Different moods are balanced by one another. Parsons argues that ‘ Bluets generates meaning through juxtaposition’. 52 The text is narrated in an almost detached, gestural mode and sense is made through the relationship between the different moments. Just as a photo album juxtaposes moments in a life, so too, does Bluets . The string of beads thus becomes a useful way of thinking about the way in which the self is narrativized; the subject can only perceive their experience as linear, but it is singular moments organized into a linear narrative. This is where the essayistic element of the lyric essay can be seen most prominently. The essay form also systematizes and organizes knowledge or ideas into a linear order, unlike a more traditionally poetic mode in which there is often unity and repetition in images and sounds. The form of Bluets structures thought. It both contains and organizes knowledge and subjectivity, but through this structuring it creates a distance from the affective experience described.

This ambivalence about affect is stereotypically Emersonian. In a highly influential departure from previous critical work on ‘Experience’, Sharon Cameron argues that the essay is an ‘impersonal’ text. 53 She shows that Emerson’s partial description of the effect of his son’s death on his world view represents the erasure of personal subjectivity. Bluets similarly mediates its representation of the personal through a certain detachment. It speaks from the self, but also analyses the self. Through the metaphor of the string of beads, both Emerson and Nelson collapse the subject with the object through the act of writing. In doing so, they both exalt the personal but simultaneously present it as a fiction that is produced through the text.

Author Biography

Georgia Walton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI). She works on American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L503848/1].

Maggie Nelson, ‘American Classics that Influenced the Writing of The Argonauts ’, Library of America (2015) < https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/660-maggie-nelson-american-classics-that-influenced-the-writing-of-_the-argonauts > [accessed 1 July 2021].

Boyer’s 2019 The Undying is part cancer memoir, part examination of the culture and systems that surround sickness and medical care in the USA. Rankine’s bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) combines elements of poetry, essays, and documentary in its portrayal of race relations in America. Laing’s The Lonely City (2017) draws on personal experience whilst also analysing representations of loneliness in visual art.

See the five articles included in ‘Dossier: The Argonauts as Queer Object’, Angelaki , 23:1 (2018) 187–213.

Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 30.

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 27.

Levine, p. 47.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in Collected Works , II, pp. 25–52 (p. 31).

Ibid., p. 33.

Ibid., p. 25.

Rachel Heffner-Burns et al., ‘The Year in Conferences—2020’, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture , 67:1 (2021), 279–348 (p. 346).

John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, ‘New Terrain: The Lyric Essay’, Seneca Review , 72:1 (1997), 7–8.

See Laura Di Summa Koop, ‘Critical Autobiography: A New Genre?’ Journal of Aesthetics & Culture , 9:1 (2017), 1–12.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2009), p. 41.

See Joe Parson’s ‘Walking with a Purpose: The Essay in Contemporary Nonfiction’, Textual Practice , 32:8 (2018), 1277–99 and Corrina Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, New Writing , 16:1 (2019), 100–15.

Bluets , p. 6.

It was the popularity of The Argonauts on both sides of the Atlantic that led to the reissue of Bluets in the UK and a general rise in critical interest in Nelson’s earlier works.

Alexandra Parsons, ‘A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman’s Chroma and Maggie Nelson's Bluets ’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , 33:2 (2018), 375–93.

Katie Collins, ‘The Morbidity of Maternity: Radical Receptivity in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts ’, Criticism , 61:3 (2019), 311–34 (pp. 312, 314).

Bluets , p. 1.

In 1986 the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) noted that ‘the fastest growing creative writing programs are in nonfiction’; Mary Rose, Associated Writing Programs, Telephone Conversation (2 November 2000), quoted by Douglas Hesse, ‘The Place of Creative Nonfiction’, in Creative Nonfiction , a special issue of College English 65:3 (2003), 237–41 (p. 238).

Ned Stuckey-French, ‘Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present , ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 293–312.

D’Agata and Tall, p. 7.

Jonathan Culler, The Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 5.

Bluets , pp. 30–31.

Ibid., p. 31.

Parsons, p. 384.

Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.

Joseph Urbas, ‘How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 31:4 (2017), 557–574.

Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Collected Works I, pp. 7–45 (p. 10).

Emerson, ‘Circles’, in Collected Works, II, pp. 177–90 (p. 182), quoted in Bluets , p. 94.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia , trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 201–18 (p. 205).

Bluets , p. 30.

Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Ibid., p. 34.

Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe’, Diacritics , 7:4 (1977), 59–69 (p. 68).

Denis Flannery, ‘Absence, Resistance and Visitable Pasts: David Bowie, Todd Haynes, Henry James’, Continuum , 31:4 (2017), 542–51 (p. 549).

Tom F. Wright, ‘Carlyle, Emerson and the Voiced Essay’, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present ed. by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 206–22.

Cook, ‘Listening the Lyric Essay’, p. 103.

Bluets , p. 71.

Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in The Purloined Poe (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 28–54, p. 48.

Ibid., pp. 32, 39.

A love triangle is also the subject of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.

Bluets , p. 46.

Bluets , p. 77.

Ibid., p. 74.

Parsons, p. 385.

Sharon Cameron, ‘Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience”’, in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Illinois: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 53–78 (p. 53).

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Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry and Nonfiction Play//SELF-GUIDED

Self-guided five-week course begins March 25th

Early bird price until February 29th

Instructor: Self-Guided (with a group)

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Students go through the course as a group. This is the self-guided version of the class, so there is no instructor feedback.

Each week provides:

discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers

written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for for peer comments

additional optional writing exercises

WEEK 1: LYRIC MODELS: SPACE AND COLLAGE

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

WEEK 2: EXPERIMENTS WITH FORM: BRAIDED ESSAY AND HERMIT CRAB ESSAY

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

WEEK 3: LYRIC VIGNETTE AND THE PROSE POEM

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

WEEK 4: WITNESSING THE SELF: ESSAYS BY POETS

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

WEEK 5: HYBRID FORMS AND THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, and Alison Bechdel for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

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Citizen: An American Lyric

54 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Discussion Questions

Consider the multidisciplinary nature of Citizen . Discuss the interplay of words, visual elements, and the overall structure of the book. Why did Rankine make her choices? What would be lost if the artwork, for example, were to be removed from the book?

The majority of Citizen is written in the second-person point of view , which places the reader squarely at the center of the narrative as “you.” Consider the impact that the second-person voice has in relation to the reader’s racial identity. How might a reader identifying as white might receive the text differently from readers identifying as non-white?

Consider the artwork that illustrates Citizen. Select one visual element and examine it in the context of the book as a whole. In what ways does this particular piece of art affect and/or symbolize the narrative? Discuss the piece’s placement in the text overall, and also how it interplays with the immediately adjacent text.

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Lyric Essay Examples, a Complete Guide for You to Succeed

– Lyric Essay Examples –

The lyrical essay is a subgenre of the personal essay. It is based on images and ideas of a particular theme. In this article, I will discuss the lyrical essay and many things you have to know about the Lyric Essay.

The lyrical essay is a type of personal essay that combine both prose and poetry. It is often crafted like a prose poem.

The writer uses a series of images or ideas, not a narrative or argument, to craft the essay. The image can be of a person, place, thing, or object. The idea can be anything.

The writer attempts to recreate the experience and evoke emotion in the reader by using sensory details, a description that expresses what the writer sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and feels.

The lyrical essay is not organized as a narrative, with one event unfolding after the next. Nor is it organized in chronological order.

Instead, the writer creates a series of fragmented images using poetic languages, such as alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and rhythm.

In 1997, The Seneca Review created the lyrical essay. This literary journal, publishing twice a year, defines the literary essay as follows:

• Combines prose and poetry

‣ Constructed from the distillation of ideas

• Mentions but doesn’t expound

‣ Suggestive but not exhaustive

• Relies on associations, imagery, and connotation

‣ Refers to other genres, such as film, music, literature

• Arranged in fragments as a mosaic

‣ Based on stories that are metaphors

• Based on intimate voice

‣ Crafted with lyrical language

The lyrical essay is usually fragmented. The writer creates a series of images using sensory details.

Each image represents a fragment of detail, which are separated by double spaces, asterisks, or numbers. It is also suggestive.

The writer implicitly suggests meaning. It is meditative. The reader ponders the words and emotions expressed in those words. It is often inconclusive.

The writer provides no final point for the reader to take away. If you are interested in reading examples of a lyrical essay, visit The Seneca Review.

Lyric Essay Examples: Categories of the Lyrical Essay

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, in “Tell IT Slant,” identify four categories of lyrical essay:

1. The prose poem or flash nonfiction essay

2. The college essay

3. The braided essay

4. The “Hermit Crab” essay

The Prose Poem.  It is crafted like prose but reads like a poem. It is written in sentences, not verse. The writer uses poetic devices, such as imagery, symbolism, simile, metaphor to create a prose poem of one or more paragraphs. The writer also uses literary prose by using alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

The College Essay. Like the art collage, the collage of a lyrical essay is based on a collection of fragments from different sources.

For instance, prose, poetry, quotation might be combined. The use of juxtaposition is used. The writer separates each section with white space, an asterisk, subtitles, epigraph.

The Braided Essay. It relies on the lyrical examination of a particular topic. The writer uses fragments of detail from different sources.

According to Brenda Miller in “Tell IT Slant”, the writer fragments the essay into separate pieces that repeat throughout the essay.

There is a weaving of different ideas, such as quotations, descriptions, facts, lists, poet language, imagery.

This essay also allows for an outside voice to provide details, along with the writer’s voice and experiences. The purpose of the outside voice is to shadow the writer’s voice, according to Brenda Miller in “Tell IT Slant.”

The “Hermit Crab” Essay. This type of lyrical essay is created from the shell of another, like the hermit crab that lives the life within the shell of another mollusc or snail.

It borrows from fiction, poetry, description, personal narrative, instructions, questions and answers, diary, itinerary, table of contents, songs, recipes, collection of favourite CDs, that are used as a shell to construct something new.

For additional information about the lyrical essay, you can read “Tell It Slant”, a short text on writing creative nonfiction, focusing on the personal essay, and its various subgenres . To read examples of the lyrical essay, visit the Seneca Review.

Features of Lyrical Essay

The lyrical essay has these features:

1. The writer crafts sentences that have rhythm, like a prose poem. Paces and stressed syllables determine a rhythm. Iambic pentameter is the most common type of rhythm.

It is based on a pattern of five iambic feet. Yet, writers often just count the number of stressed syllables in a line to determine the rhythmic structure of their prose.

A short sentence speeds up the pace. A long sentence slows down the pace.

2. The writer creates lyrical prose that sounds musical by using alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

3. The writer constructs the essay with fragments of detail. Each fragment is separated by white space, asterisk, title, or number.

4. The essay is often inclusive. Instead, the writer focuses on evoking emotion in the reader, and the reader must draw his or her conclusion.

Writers who have popularized the lyrical essay are:

• Eula Biss, author of “No Man’s Land” and many lyrical essays, including “The Pain Scale” which can be read online. (Conduct a Google Search)

‣ David Shields, author of the book “Reality Hunger.”

• John D’Agata, author of the book “The Lifespan of Fact”

‣ The Seneca Review, a literary journal that publishes lyrical essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL’s resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses).

After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms and focus more on language itself, rather than the storyline.

Lyric Essay Examples: Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop

The blacksmith of Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop is getting old.

At noon, he sits napping at its doorway. In the balmy sunshine, his gray hair sparkles with the same silver glints as those on his reading glasses. He and his old hillbilly assistant are both dozing, one in a chair, the other by the fireside.  He is probably yet again dreaming of me holding a spinning top and asking him to make a strong axle so that I can slam other kids’ tops beyond recognition. Or maybe he wonders again why the crazy truanting kids are standing barefoot on the main road at high noon for a showdown of manly valor, until rawish red shards of candied and glazed plums roll out of their mouths and drop onto the scorching asphalt pavement. To the left of the blacksmith shop, across narrow Citizen Street, is the small town’s former distillery and a row of tall coconut trees, the tallest of which is its chimney. Since the distillery relocated to the new urban district, the chimney looks more like a lonely Royal Palm, towering over the vacant buildings as the guardian of the town’s sky. He recalls that under the coconut trees were a line of pedicabs waiting for passengers. In the year that he became a father, his wife cried out in pain at midnight; he dashed across the street and woke up Old Li who was asleep in his pedicab and who then rushed them to Xu’s Ob-Gyn clinic, where his wife gave birth to their eldest son. That winter it was unusually warm, and the clangor of striking iron was particularly solid and pleasant to the ear. He even worked late into the night. Well, for the sake of his wife and his son, he had to keep his nose to the grindstone—it’s all because he didn’t become a father until after forty. Back then, young ladies who worked at the Happiness Teahouse would always come, in their pajamas, to eat oyster vermicelli outside the shop in the early afternoon. Around the corner, the mad woman “Tin-pot Clinger” was once again giving cookery lessons to the kids who had gathered to play marbles. “Tin-pot Clinger,” do you know her? She was actually a well-educated teacher, and quite neat and chaste, unlike those loony women who were unkempt and always sleeping around. It’s only that she suffered from an emotional blow. So, you’ve never heard her telling stories? Alas, today’s children only know about going to MTV lounges and electronic toy stores; nobody buys axles for spinning tops anymore. Everything is changing. In the past, when typhoons came, only the section of town around the distillery got flooded. Nowadays, ditchwater and rainwater all converge in front of the shop. Those pedicabs—no, they’re iron bullock carts now—almost turn into motorboats. Two successive mayors are both from around here. Last time around, the son of the coffin shop owner was out campaigning. The folks of the Citizen Street community always come together in fair weather and foul: everyone cast a vote for him. That kid is very aware of the decorum; he hands delivered MSG to every household in return. Election campaigns back then were much simpler; it’s nothing like these past few years when you see campaign vehicles and flyers everywhere, with some newer vehicles sporting green flags and green ribbons. Hmm, it’s all the same however they do it. In the old days, there was only one party, and only one person stood for election. That was just fine—things were quiet and efficient, and we still got freebies. He’s been to that coffin shop. One year, a typhoon blew a foreign ship from the inner to the outer bay, slashing it in half and leading to the death of several foreigners. The coffin shop sent for him and had him deliver some thicker iron nails to the shop to fasten the coffins. Two weeks later, he returned to collect his due. While he was walking into that dark, long, and narrow shop—Oh My, what the heck—someone climbed out of a coffin! Turned out that was the master of the shop; he said it was a cool place to take his midday nap. The blacksmith of Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop is getting old. At noon, he sits napping at its doorway; he dreams of that row of coconut trees being sawn open the way coffins are. He wakes up, and sees the young ladies from the Happiness Hair Salon playing badminton at the end of the street. His old hillbilly assistant has already set up the fire in the furnace, taken out a red-hot piece of iron, and is waiting for his orders. The old blacksmith raises his hammer, aiming at the big hammer of his hillbilly assistant, and once again starts making his anvil ring: cling, clang, cling, clang.

Lyric essay is a term that some writers of creative nonfiction use to describe a type of creative essay that blends a lyrical, poetic sensibility with intellectual engagement.

Although it may include personal elements, it is not a memoir or personal essay, where the primary subject is the writer’s own experience. “Lyric Essay Examples”

Not all creative essayists have embraced the term, however, which makes it a classification in this community. “Lyric Essay Examples”

If you have any questions concerning this Lyric Essay Examples, you can drop it in the comment section. Do well to are this article with your friends.

Comments are closed.

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Song lyrics are getting simpler, more repetitive: Study

You're not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky aging music fans everywhere.

A team of European researchers analyzed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.

Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan—who rose to fame in the 1960s—has won a Nobel Prize in literature.

Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria's University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.

But she emphasized that lyrics can be a "mirror of society" which reflect how a culture's values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.

"What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape—from how music is sold to how music is produced," Zangerle told AFP.

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal Scientific Reports , the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

"Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive," Zangerle summarized.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as "me" or "mine" becoming much more popular.

'Easier to memorize'

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said—adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

"Rap music has become more angry than the other genres," she added.

The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.

Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.

Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre's heyday, rather than its present.

Another way that music has changed is that "the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not," Zangerle said.

Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.

Put simply, songs with more choruses that repeat basic lyrics appear to be more popular.

"Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorize," Zangerle said.

"This is also something that I experience when I listen to the radio."

Journal information: Scientific Reports

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The Evening

Florida’s top court allowed a six-week abortion ban.

Also, an Israeli strike killed top Iranian commanders, Iran said. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.

By Matthew Cullen

The Florida Supreme Court ruled today that the State Constitution’s privacy protections do not extend to abortion. The move overturns decades of precedent and clears the way for a ban on abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy to take effect within 30 days.

The ban, enacted last year by the state’s Republican-led government, will alter the landscape of abortion access across the American South, where women have long traveled to Florida from states with little to no access. Soon, women seeking abortions will very likely have to travel much further because few know they are pregnant at six weeks.

In a separate decision released at the same time, the court unanimously ruled that a proposed constitutional amendment to expand abortion access could appear on ballots in November. The measure, which would require support from 60 percent of voters, would guarantee the right to an abortion in the state up until a fetus is considered viable at around 24 weeks.

The rulings encapsulated, in a single state on a single day, how the country has grappled with abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Florida is the latest among more than 20 states where abortion opponents have further restricted the procedure. It is also now the largest state in which supporters of abortion rights have secured a ballot measure — a step they see as crucial in preserving abortion access, and a topic that has energized Democratic voters.

An Israeli strike killed top Iranian commanders, Iran said

An airstrike launched by Israel today destroyed a building belonging to the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed at least three Iranian generals, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement. Four other officers were killed.

Four Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that Israel had carried out the attack. The strike targeted a secret meeting between Iranian intelligence officials and Palestinian militants to discuss the war in Gaza, Iranian officials said.

Among those killed was General Mohamad Reza Zahedi, who oversaw Iran’s covert military operations in Syria and Lebanon. The strike appeared to be among the deadliest in a yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel.

Iran’s ambassador to Syria said, “This attack will have our fierce response.”

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under rising pressure. Divisions over military exemptions given to ultra-Orthodox Jews could collapse his coalition and force elections .

Ukraine aid could clear Congress within weeks

When Speaker Mike Johnson was asked yesterday about his plan for sending aid to Ukraine, he made it clear that he was no longer debating whether to advance the aid, but rather how to. This suggests that billions in Ukraine funding could pass Congress within weeks , despite vehement opposition from hard-right Republicans.

Johnson may tie the aid for Kyiv to a measure that would force President Biden to reverse a moratorium on liquefied natural gas exports. Republicans would see it as a political victory against the president’s climate agenda, and it would unblock a proposed export terminal in Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

Hospitals must get consent for pelvic exams, H.H.S. said

The Department of Health and Human Services sent a letter to the country’s teaching hospitals and medical schools today, saying that they must obtain written informed consent from patients before they undergo sensitive examinations, like pelvis and prostate exams. Institutions could lose Medicare funding if they don’t comply .

The effort was prompted by a Times article in 2020 that detailed the practice of examinations on nonconsenting patients, some of which were done under anesthesia, were medically unnecessary and, in some cases, were only for the educational benefit of medical trainees.

More top news

Baltimore: Officials said that they would open a temporary alternate shipping channel around the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge .

California: Half a million fast-food workers got their minimum wage bumped to $20 an hour .

Misinformation: Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of Donald Trump and attacking President Biden, researchers said.

Turkey: Opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured surprise victories in local elections that could serve as a check on his power.

Politics: Infusing Christianity into his movement, Trump is ending his rallies by evoking an evangelical altar call .

Health: A person was infected by the H5N1 bird flu in Texas after contact with cattle, the second case in people in the U.S. and the first since 2022.

Weather: A nor’easter is forecast to bring snow, rain, high winds and coastal flooding to the Northeast, starting tomorrow.

A.I.: An M.I.T. labor economist argued that the technology will deliver the largest productivity gains to less-experienced workers and benefit the middle class .

Law: The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to hear an appeal from Brenda Andrew, which claims that sex shaming by prosecutors sent her to death row .

China: A billionaire who helped produce the science-fiction hit “3 Body Problem” was poisoned to death by a disgruntled executive, who now faces the death penalty .

TIME TO UNWIND

A marquee matchup.

There’s still nearly a week until the N.C.A.A. will crown this year’s women’s basketball champion, but tonight’s Elite Eight contest between Iowa and L.S.U. is very likely the tournament’s most eagerly awaited game. Iowa’s superstar Caitlin Clark, in her final year in college, will battle against last year’s champion, L.S.U., and their star, Angel Reese.

It just may be the biggest day for women’s basketball in decades , and a lot of money is sure to be legally gambled throughout the night — a growing trend that has the N.C.A.A. worried .

For those watching, you won’t miss L.S.U. coach Kim Mulkey in her sparkling, sequined pantsuits.

Can you spot the salt?

Most Americans consume far more sodium than federal health officials recommend. The excess, officials say, can increase your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. But cutting back can be challenging because many people don’t even realize which foods are high in sodium.

Take our quiz to see if you can spot the biggest salt bombs .

Dinner table topics

Cute education: One policy consultant uses adorable baby videos to explain concepts in child development.

Safety first: How much would you pay to make sure that you never saw off a finger ?

Party at the spa: Some brides are trading boozy bachelorette parties for wellness retreats .

Attention, cheaters: New York appears poised to decriminalize adultery .

WHAT TO DO TONIGHT

Cook: These chile crisp chicken cutlets get their zest from an easy marinade.

Watch: Stream these movies before they leave Netflix this month .

Read: Harlan Ellison’s “Greatest Hits” is one of the best new paperbacks to check out .

Listen: We’re listening to new songs by St. Vincent, Ani DiFranco and Camila Cabello .

Style: Tread carefully with sandals in the workplace, our critic wrote .

Stroll: Urban rambling is a good way to find both friendship and fitness.

Compete: Take this week’s Flashback history quiz .

Play: Here are today’s Spelling Bee , Wordle and Mini Crossword . Find all our games here .

ONE LAST THING

A man with a song about almost everything.

Brett Martin, a magazine writer who you’ve probably never heard of, recently came across a decade-old song on Spotify titled “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes.” To his surprise, the lyrics were about him.

Martin had stumbled upon the work of Matt Farley, who over the last two decades has written and released more than 24,000 songs about almost anything you might look up online . Some of Farley’s songs end up finding listeners, earning him just shy of $200,000 last year, one halfpenny at a time.

Have an unconventional evening.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Matthew

We welcome your feedback. Write to us at [email protected] .