write an essay on lyric

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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19 January 2024

An Insider’s Guide to Writing the Perfect Lyrical Essay

As the name might suggest, the lyrical essay or the lyric essay is a literary hybrid, combining features of poetry, essay, and often memoir . The lyrical essay is a form of creative non-fiction that has become more popular over the last decade.

There has been much written about what lyrical essays are and aren’t, and many writers have strong opinions about them, either declaring them expressive and playful, or self-indulgent and nonsensical. 

Today, you’ll learn what a lyrical essay is, what literary elements and techniques they usually employ, and how they depart from other forms of writing and why writers might choose to write them. You’ll also find recommendations for some top lyrical essays to start familiarising yourself with.  

What is the lyrical essay?

Lyrical essays combine the rich, figurative language and musicality of poetry with the long-form focus of the essay. A lyrical essay is like the poem in its shapeliness and rhythmic style, but it also borrows from elements of the essay, using narrative to explore a particular topic in an extended way. 

What makes this form of writing so distinctive is that it draws attention to its own use of language. Like poems, lyrical essays create certain effects with the words they choose, and are condensed in the way poetry is, attempting to communicate complexity and depth in as few words as possible. 

What makes a good lyrical essay? 

As with essays and poems, lyrical essays can be about any subject. Many lyrical essays tend to engage with topics such as philosophy, art, culture, history , beauty, politics, and nature, or a mixture of these subjects. They typically focus on a series of images of a person, place, or object, with the aim of evoking emotion in the reader by using very sensory details. A lyrical essay is written in an intimate voice, usually in the first person with a conversational and informal tone. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. 

While lyrical essays take on the longer-form shape of essays, they are not organized as a narrative, with one event unfolding in a chronological or even logical order. Instead, the writer usually creates a series of fragmented images using figurative language and poetic techniques in a looser, more playful way. Some lyrical essayists draw on research and fact to inform their writing, but lyrical essays are usually more suggestive and explorative than they are definitive or conclusive. 

Creative techniques

Like poems, lyric essays often use white space creatively. Text can be displayed in chunks, bullet points, and on only parts of the page, rather than conforming to the typical paragraph structure you’d find in normal prose. Lyric essays might include asterisks, double spaces, and numbers to frame parts of the writing in new ways. They sometimes include drawings, documents, photos, or other images that add meaning to the words in some way. 

As with poetry, reading lyrical essays can be an intense experience. Instead of being immersed in narrative and plot, the reader is immersed in structure and form, always being reminded of how the language is shifting. Lyric essays are playful, and as such, they can surprise and delight you with their ingenuity. 

Lyrical essays usually contain some of the following techniques and features: 

• Poetic language – alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme
• Figurative language – metaphors and similes
• Intimate voice and tone – first person in a conversational and friendly style 
• Imagery – sensory images of people, places, things, objects, and ideas
• Variety –  an array of sentence styles and patterns  
• Questions – posed for the reader to answer 
• Juxtaposition and contradiction 
• Rhythm or rhythmic prose
• Creative presentation of text – text displayed in a fragmented way, with white space, asterisks, subtitles etc to separate or highlight sections of the essay
• Inconclusive ending – often ends without answering the questions posed in the essay

Literary reception

One of the most popular criticisms of the lyrical essay is that they are self-indulgent. Some writers and readers feel strongly that lyrical essays are simply disjointed thoughts that are strung together without any order and that they go nowhere. Some people criticise them as a stream of consciousness, but that is also what others like about them. Those who defend lyrical essays think that they are one of the most exciting and unique forms of writing. 

Deborah Tall, an American writer, poet and teacher, explains that the fragmented nature of lyrical essays is what makes them so interesting. She said that lyrical essays take shape “mosaically” and that their power and importance are “visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.” She goes on to say that the story a lyrical essay tells “may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme”. But she celebrates this very fact, as it is this unique construction that elucidates meaning.

Lyrical essays allow writers the freedom to push poetic prose until an important and emotional message pops from the page. 

Recommended Lyrical Essays

What’s missing here a fragmentary, lyric essay about fragmentary, lyric essays by julia marie wade (from a harp in the stars: an anthology of lyric essays ).

What’s Missing Here? is an extraordinary piece of meta-writing – a lyrical essay about lyrical essays – from author and Professor of creative fiction, Julia Marie Wade. It is an absolute joy to read, at once challenging and fun, and also highly informative as it uses the techniques of lyrical essays to explain what they are and what they can do.

It’s one of the best examples of a clever and engaging lyrical essay, and it’s from a fantastic collection that is worth delving into if you’re interested in learning more about this unique literary hybrid. 

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Claudia Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence in post-9/11 America.

Rankine writes in short sections surrounded by white space and uses images of the television to explore our relationship to the media. It’s a powerful look at culture that is meditative and achingly sad from one of America’s best poets. 

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is a genre-busting writer who defies classification. Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting famous blue figures including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Leonard Cohen, and Andy Warhol along the way. While its narrator sets out to muse about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a friend.

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. It’s a vulnerable, personal, and philosophical lyrical essay, full of innovation and grace. 

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Lyric Essays

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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.

An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

An introduction to the lyric essay, how it differs from other nonfiction, and some excellent examples to get you started.

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: Structure and Content Essay (Article)

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

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.

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How to Use Lyrics in Essay Writing

Lyrics are an effective tool that can help you make your writing more emotional and better express some ideas. For example, if some song perfectly illustrates your point, you can cite its lyrics if the type of your essay allows you to do so. Learn more about using lyrics in writing with College Writers .

Sometimes, you may not have enough fresh ideas, brainstorming on some topic over and over again, but suddenly you hear a song that expresses your thoughts clearly, in a concise way. If this situation looks familiar to you, it means that you may try to use such a song in your essay. In addition, it’s a great way to make your academic text less boring.

However, using songs in writing may turn out to be not an easy task because of copyright issues. Fortunately, there is no law that would determine the number of words you’re allowed to use in your texts. The main thing is to use in-text citations and to write a proper reference page so that you won’t need to worry about plagiarism.

How to Quote Songs

There are many different citation formats, such as APA, MLA, Harvard, etc. Every citation style has its requirements that you should follow. What these styles have in common is that you should use both in-text citations in parentheses and a references list. The way you should write citations for lyrics may vary.

For example, when quoting lyrics in MLA style, you should provide the artist’s name after the quote, in parentheses. When writing citations according to Harvard or APA format, you should also include the year and the number of the track on the album.

When citing songs, you should always use quotation marks. However, if your quote is several lines long, you should use a block quote, indenting the citation from the paragraph.

How to Quote Lyrics in References

You should also make notes in the references list, providing the name of the album that contains the song. For instance, when writing references according to MLA style, you should include an artist’s name first, followed by the name of the album, the recording studio, and the date. You might also specify the format:

The Artist. The Album. Studio, 1995. CD.

If you’ve used a website instead of a physical copy, you should provide the URL, after the year.

When writing references in Harvard or APA format, they should look like this:

The Artist. (1995). The Album. [CD]. City: Recording Studio (Recorded 1994).

Quotation Marks vs. Italics

When citing songs, many students cannot figure out whether they should use quotation marks or italics. Fortunately, there are simple rules: write the title of a song in quotation marks, and italicize the names of albums and CDs.

Keep in mind that if the title of the song ends with an exclamation point or question mark, they must stay within quotation marks. However, the punctuation may also go beyond the quotation marks if it’s not a part of the title.

Final Thoughts

We recommend that you keep in mind the following tips when citing songs in your essays.

• Avoid clichés. Some songs are too popular and some lyrics are cited too often so they won’t help you support a specific point.
• Don’t try to include as many lyrics as you can. If you want to cite a big fragment of a song, the best way to do it is to paraphrase. Select a few lines that are directly related to your argument and cite them.
• Think of what your readers will imagine. Songs are poetic so they evoke certain images in your readers’ minds. If you’ve selected lyrics that don’t serve this purpose, we recommend that you try to describe your thoughts in another way.

Using lyrics when writing academic essays is a good idea. However, we recommend that you check out our tips and make sure that you know how to do it properly so that your paper will look professional.

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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.

Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay

Amy Bonnaffons

1. THE WHITE SPACES

Suppose you want to write, in prose, about a slippery subject that refuses definition. Something like water, or the color blue. Like the word “lyric,” or the word “essay.”

Beginning, you balk at the question of form. One long block of prose seems to suggest a linear accretion of meaning, building to a thesis—but the more you poke at your subject, the more it seems to spread in all directions, to touch everything you’ve ever touched.

Often, “lyric essayists” like Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, and Eula Biss solve this problem, or represent it, by using white space. Each paragraph (Nelson prefers “proposition”), like a stanza of poetry, becomes a little island of text, lapped by whiteness—set against blankness, and in relation to the others. Like music, lyric paragraphs make use of silence. They draw attention to their own density. In navigating them, the reader (perhaps confused, perhaps delighted) becomes a stakeholder in their meaning.

What do the white spaces signify? What does their silence say?

John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, editors of the literary journal Seneca Review, are generally credited with the institutionalization of the “lyric essay” as a genre. In the introduction to a 2007 issue specially dedicated to the term, they write: “The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, ‘It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive.’”

In emphasizing the gaps, we run the risk of casting the lyric as diminutive: it “suggests,” or “merely mentions.” Do such verbs imply an anorexic refusal to “expound?” Or can the lyric essay give rise to a different kind of amplitude?

In her book Lyric Time, Sharon Cameron refers to the voice of the lyric poet as inherently “choral,” since it takes place outside of linear (narrative) time and can thus synthesize multiple temporalities into a single utterance. The lyric essay, though it unfolds over a longer span of time, might be seen as accomplishing something similar: a Whitmanesque multitude refracted through a singular voice.

Plurality is one consequence of fragmentation. Perhaps the lyric essay is strengthened not by unidirectional “expounding” but by a lateral spread accompanying its movement through linear time, as its “propositions” multiply.

Recently, scholars in various fields have begun to critique linear models of meaning-making in favor of the sprawling “network” or “rhizome.” Caroline Levine writes in her book Forms, “networks might seem altogether formless, perhaps even the antithesis of form.” Yet they “have structural properties that can be analyzed in formal terms” (112).

The white spaces might be read as the necessary separations between nodes of a network, or as intervals between distinct voices that together form a chord. The essay’s plurality might become a kind of extended grasp: “As Henry James put it…‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere’” (Levine 130).

Or we might view the recent emergence of networks and rhizomes as evidence that there are more ways of conceiving of structures—more ways of reading—than we might have previously granted.

My aim is not to advocate for the lyric essay, or for a particular method of reading lyric essays—rather, I want to read the category “lyric essay” as a text, keeping in mind that the form’s greatest innovation may be an invitation into heightened awareness of our reading strategies: of individual texts, and of genre itself.

2. LYRIC DOORS

Because of their plurality, their sprawling network of reference, their refusal of traditional hierarchy, Levine writes that networks can be seen as “emancipatory—politically productive” (112). Productive of what, in this case? Emancipatory for whom?

Tall and D’Agata write, “Perhaps we’re drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity.” They trust their contemporary readers to grant that objectivity is a myth—an an assumption upon which earlier lyric theorists, defending the legitimacy of their field against the presumed objectivity of “science” and “reason,” could not necessarily count.

D’Agata and Tall do not define the word “lyric,” but by deducing its qualities from those they set it against, we can tell that they associate it with a) the unmythlike fact of subjectivity and b) some kind of back door. Or, well, at least not the front.

Maybe lyric slips through a side entrance; maybe it tunnels into the basement; maybe it parachutes onto the roof and slides down the chimney. Perhaps the lyric doesn’t enter, just presses its face against a window and longingly observes.

Even in the context of poetry, the meaning of “lyric” is elusive. In their introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins write, “A resistance to definition may be the best basis for definition of the lyric—and of poetry—we currently have” (2). Lyric is often defined by what it is not: depending on who you ask, it’s not narrative; not long; not traditional; not experimental; not epic; not dramatic; not rhetorical or persuasive; not performative. And yet, somehow, “lyric” has come to stand in for poetry in general, or prose at its most “poetic,” whatever that means.

Jackson and Prins speculate, “Perhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry around the edges…to include all kinds of verse and all kinds of ideas about what poetry is or should be” (1).

When critics do define lyric against something else, it’s often something perceived as normative, some sort of “front door.” In one of the most influential discussions of lyric poetry, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833), John Stuart Mill defined it against the performative rhetorical eloquence of political oratory: “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (71). In a sentence deleted from the essay yet printed and widely circulated later, Mill used an image of spatial marginalization to compare the poet to someone crying out in a solitary prison cell, overheard by the reader on the other side of the wall. This spatial metaphor, like D’Agata’s and Tall’s, explicitly eschews the front door—in fact, eschews entrance altogether. For Mill, the wall between the poet and the reader preserves the authenticity of the poet’s utterance. Uncorrupted by attention to rhetoric, which bends it to another’s perceived expectations, the poet’s expression remains pure.

But the poet knows he’s writing for someone. Mill himself admits as much, acknowledging the inherently performative character of lyric: “It may be said that poetry which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress and on the stage….The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he acts as though he knew it, he acts ill.” In other words, the poet’s art consists of skillfully, publically, pretending to be alone.

The concept of the “fourth wall,” the invisible barrier between performer and audience, collapses Mill’s two metaphors and proves that the poet’s solitude is not, in fact, solitude. It’s a triangular relationship between reader, writer, and wall. In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson describes this triangulation as fundamentally erotic: “Where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them” (16). Lovers and readers fantasize about freedom, but require structure.

“Nonfiction” is perhaps the only genre to contain a negation in its very name. The category contains everything from journalism to memoir to biography to cookbooks. But it is quite clear about what it refuses. Why is this particular dividing line so bold?

John D’Agata, in a special anthology of Seneca Review essays called We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay, argues that Nonfiction developed in response to a perceived threat. He cites a 1903 article in which librarian William Doubleday complains of his patrons’ increasing demand for fiction, seen as unserious frippery for passive (usually female) readers. Doubleday prefers “a special form of literature read by young men” who “recognize the sternness of the battle of life” and prepare themselves for it by “serious reading.” In one of the first recorded uses of the term nonfiction, Doubleday uses the eroticized language of advertising to suggest its potential deployment against fiction’s threatening advance: “Attractive works of non-fiction may be temptingly displayed in convenient showcases” (5).

Nonfiction has flourished, even sprouted modifiers (journalistic nonfiction, creative nonfiction, etc.) and MFA programs. Yet D’Agata complains that the term’s largeness robs it of legitimacy: “Within the span of a single century, ‘non-fiction’ has overshadowed half a dozen other literary terms to become the bland de facto banner that flaps above everything from journalism to memoir, imposing the same aesthetic standards and expectations on everything that falls beneath its shadow.” Why is this a problem? Presumably, because the umbrella term has been imposed from the outside, rather than chosen by its practitioners. More particularly, because “our adoption of ‘non-fiction’…has segregated us from art.”

Unlike Doubleday, who feared the threat of a genre he regarded as feminine and Other, D’Agata is troubled by a tradition he’s writing within—on one side, by the pedantic, fact-fetishizing world of reportage, and on the other, by the fuzzy overshare of the memoir, with its Oprah’s-Book-Club whiff, its trauma narratives hawked for redemption.

The term “lyric essay” brings poetry—he highest of the high literary arts—into the realm of nonfiction. The term ingeniously takes advantage of lyric’s double valence: 1) it definitely means poetic and 2) nobody can agree on what else it might mean.

In adopting the term “lyric,” the “lyric essay” subtly smuggles in the concept of the “Lyric I”—a term that connotes, among other things, the notion that a poem’s speaker can transcend the boundaries of the poet’s actual, historical self. The “Lyric I” has been a site of generative contention, but critics generally agree on one particular paradox: the “I” belongs, at least partially, to the poet; yet it would be the worst kind of misreading to accuse the poem of falsehood if it appeared to depart from the poet’s biography. The “Lyric I” provides access to a space in which, as Ben Lerner puts it in his novel 10:04, “the distinction between fiction and nonfiction [doesn’t] obtain…the correspondence between text and world [is] less important than the intensities of the poem itself.”

Presumably, D’Agata wants to defend a similar kind of freedom for the lyric essayist, allowing her to construct a persona marked by artful indeterminacy, unhampered by the shackles of fact-checking yet assumed to bear a close relationship to “reality” in all of its “sternness” (unlike fiction, which is a made-up story about fake people). Thus, ingeniously, the term “lyric essay” simultaneously disowns the low-art subgenres on both sides of the fiction-nonfiction border. In allowing for lyric indeterminacy, it repudiates both the dry fact-obsession of the journalist and the solipsistic navel-gaze of the memoirist; yet, by hewing closely to “reality,” it avoids being mistaken for a puffy airbrushed fantasy or a yarn devised for entertainment.

There is power in naming. Institutionalizing the term “lyric essay” achieves, among other things, a guaranteed career niche for D’Agata, a place for him in literary history, firmly within the camp of High Art.

More so even than Seneca Review, for which he shares the masthead with his former mentor Deborah Tall, D’Agata’s anthology The Next American Essay stakes his claim on the genre. Next American Essay is an unusual anthology. It offers 32 essays (including the “prologue” and “epilogue”), ordered chronologically, one for each year, from 1975 to 2003. Why begin in 1975? Because that was the year D’Agata was born.

This choice might seem appropriate for an anthology of lyric essays: like a lyric essay, the book is highly personal and poetically idiosyncratic. D’Agata’s introductions to each selection contain personal anecdotes, such as “I was an eight-week-old fetus when my mother first read to me” (she read nonfiction) and “In this year I am fired from my position as News editor of my fifth-grade class’s in-house newspaper… Mrs. Tuttle, who fires me, says I don’t know the difference between nonfiction and art. Mom says to take this as a compliment” (2, 167). Like a lyric essay, the anthology absorbs and transmutes the contents of its author’s life even as it discusses his ostensible subject. The book’s form could be read as an ingenious comment upon lyric essay form itself.

And yet there’s something suspiciously self-anointing about it. Though Next American Essay is widely regarded as the defining lyric essay anthology, the term doesn’t show up until page 435, introducing the final selection. The book’s structure thus stealthily posits a narrative with two intertwining threads: D’Agata’s life and the essay’s evolution. The climax of both happens simultaneously, with the naming of the lyric essay.

As he charts the essay’s forward progress into ever more lyrical territory, D’Agata also reaches backward, gesturing into the decades and centuries of literary history long before his birth, as if to show that the consummation of this boy-meets-genre romance was historically inevitable—fated, even. In his commentary, he gestures as far back as Cicero and Sei Shonagon. Plutarch and Plato, he suggests, were proto-lyric essayists.

Such transhistorical mapping of genre has its advantages, and may not be entirely self-serving. The term “lyric” itself has been used in a similar way; though many contemporary theorists reach as far back as Sappho for the origin of lyric poetry, Jackson and Prins point out that “the concept of lyric as the oldest form of poetic expression is actually a relatively recent notion; specifically, it is a post-Enlightenment idea” that became reified during the Romantic period (2). Reaching back into history for the presence of the lyric, critics run the risk of anachronistically imposing Romantic constructions of the individual self onto earlier time periods. Yet Jonathan Culler has defended this broad, transhistorical use of the term by arguing that such generic classification can provide “the scope to activate possibilities occluded by narrower conceptions” (75); it helps critics relate temporally disparate works through tropic similarities, taking us “beyond the period-by-period agenda of our ordinary studies” (75).

And yet the ambiguous nature of D’Agata’s structural move—at best a lyrical gesture in and of itself, at worst simply careerist—seems at least worth acknowledging. In a widely read essay in The Believer, Ben Marcus heaped praise on the anthology: “D’Agata’s transitions alone, which show how alive an anthology can be, and would make any editor envious… could outfit a whole new generation of writers with the skills to launch an impressive and relevant movement of writing.” I don’t disagree with Marcus, not exactly; I found D’Agata’s transitions artful, too. But, especially if D’Agata is helping to “launch” a “movement,” it seems important to examine the story of that movement, and recognize other ways of centering it than with his birth.

There is power in naming, and not just for the namer: once the “lyric essay” existed as such, writers could write into the fledgling genre, expand its territory from within. As Eula Biss writes in her essay “It is What it Is,” published in Seneca Review’s 2007 issue, “Naming something is a way of giving it permission to exist” (55).

Of course, essayists were writing lyrically long before D’Agata and Tall and the Seneca Review; the anthology’s transhistorical focus proves as much. Furthermore, D’Agata never claims to have been the first person to utter the term—just to institutionalize it. The term caught on partly because it described something people were already doing, that had only lacked a unifying generic label. The fact that they continued to do so once that name existed, perhaps more visibly, should not be viewed as an argument that anyone needed the permission of D’Agata or of Seneca Review to create such work.

And yet, when a writer sits down to write something, she must consider form. Some writers ascribe an anthropomorphic agency to their own writing, investing it with a desire to take a particular shape; they claim to postpone thoughts of form until after the writing has stewed long enough in formal indeterminacy to “know what it wants to be,” or that they’ll begin writing in one form and another form will “take over.” Perhaps it’s possible to sit down and enter some blank formless state of receptivity and accept whatever the muse provides. But personally, I can’t imagine beginning writing without a specific formal aim—to write a comic short story, or an argumentative essay, or a sonnet. Things often change as I write, but beginning the process is difficult enough without being able to envision the shape I’m approximating, the container I’m trying to fill.

Once the term “lyric essay” became institutionalized by journals like Seneca Review, a writer could sit down and intend to write a lyric essay. Maybe she’d already been doing so, with or without the term in mind, but now she could write with more clarity about her aims and audience. She might know how to “market” her essay, and to whom.

This intentionality, crudely teleological and possibility-limiting as it might seem, can be experienced as a kind of freedom. Biss has described the form as “organic to the way I think” (57). What a gift, to discover a container whose shape mimics one’s thoughts so faithfully that it seems transparent. This isn’t in any way to argue against generic indeterminacy; I’m excited by works that break form. But it’s my feeling that formal codifications can be generative: the more rules there are, the more potential sites of identification exist—also, the more rules there are to break.

To address the term “marketing”: it seems silly to use the term in this context, when no one is making much money off lyric essays. But there’s a different kind of capital at stake here, the kind associated with “high art.” Not only “cultural capital,” but actual money in the form of fellowships, grants, and lucrative university jobs. To make space in the “high art” realm for a type of writing is to confer power on those who practice it.

So who are today’s lyric essayists? If indeed the lyric essay sidesteps the “front doors” of journalism, memoir and fiction in order to open a portal into a new literary space, then who is being invited? Who is crashing the party? Who is notably absent?

3. GENRE AND GENDER

For all her gratitude at what the term “lyric essay” has permitted her to discover and articulate, Biss remains suspicious: “I suspect that genre, like gender, with which it shares a root, is mostly a collection of lies we have agreed to believe” (56). Indeed, as many have noted, “genre” and “gender” both concern form and classification.

Like most taxonomic classifications, both genre and gender are somewhat arbitrary; they have hidden agendas. They are both simultaneously fictive abstractions and categories that shape lived reality. The name “essay,” famously, comes from a verb that means “to weigh” or “to try,” highlighting the genre’s emphasis on process, its willingness to embrace indeterminacy. Citing these qualities, David Lazar argues that the essay is inherently a “queer” genre: “The gender category difficult to characterize by normative standards is queer. The genre category difficult or impossible to characterize, the essay, is also queer…. The desire of the essay is to transgress genre” (19-20). Lazar personifies the essay as a desiring subject in order to plead against carving it up into sub-genres; the term “lyric essay,” he argues, restricts the essay’s freedom by making it “genre normative” (20). When writing about genre, there’s a tendency—almost a cliché—to disparage its limits, to gesture longingly towards an over-the-rainbow world beyond it. Ben Marcus writes, “Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and for its formal originality.” But don’t we long for labels, too? What would a world without them look like? Could “formal originality” exist without definitions of form?

In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson shares an anecdote from her friend Christina Crosby, a professor of feminist theory, whose class “threw a kind of coup”: “they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write ‘how they identified’ on it, then pin it to their lapel. Christina was mortified…she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it” (59).

This anecdote comically illustrates how both our lust for classification and our rejection of it might spring from a similar source—an urge to accurately limn reality. As Nelson puts the dilemma: “On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live” (53). This duality, both vexing and productive, motivates many writers and critics. Maybe this is why we’re tempted to personify our own writing as desirous, to imagine it capable of willing transgression. Transgression is sexy. Think of overhearing, of eavesdropping; of scaling walls to reach the unseen beloved; of back-door entrances to speakeasies with complex passwords. But every transgression requires a boundary. Christina Crosby’s story captures the confusion that can result when a category like “feminism” is transgressed from within: such transgressions, paradoxically, require the proliferation of walls. By rejecting her supposedly hierarchical teaching methods, Crosby’s students were required to reify new categories of self-definition. Presumably, Lazar’s distaste for the institutionalization of the “lyric essay” shares something with Crosby’s distaste at being handed that Sharpie. If, as noted above, ever-more-subtle classifications might become generative sites of identification and/or resistance, Lazar and Crosby remind us that they can constrict and chafe as well. So what new wall might be reified by the “lyric essay” in order to name the transgression it seeks to perform? Who might be liberated, and who “mortified,” by this taxonomic move? One concept that’s being transgressed is that of the “fact.” In a review of D’Agata’s book The Lifespan of a Fact, Lee Gutkind describes hearing one of his colleagues use “D’Agata” as a verb. “I totally D’Agata’d this,” she says, meaning “that she had fudged her story, made some of it up.” Gutkind is the protective father, if not actual originator, of the term “creative nonfiction,” which of course rivals “lyric essay.” Many writers and critics use the two terms interchangeably, or see lyric essay as the sub-genre, but the terms of the turf war between these two generic godfathers themselves are starkly clear: Creative Nonfiction, the journal Gutkind edits, fact-checks assiduously, while Gutkind imagines that D’Agata, on hearing his name used as a synonym for fictionalizing, “would be pleased.” The Lifespan of a Fact consists of the record of correspondence between D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his fact-checker at The Believer on a story about a teenager’s suicide that had been rejected by Harper’s due to factual inaccuracies. D’Agata is unapologetic about his strategy of altering facts for the sake of “art”: “When Fingal proves that there are 31 strip clubs in Las Vegas and not 34 as D’Agata claimed, D’Agata says: “The rhythm of ‘34’ was better in the sentence than the rhythm of ‘31,’ so I changed it.”

What is the difference between importing the artfully indeterminate “Lyric I” into the realm of nonfiction, as a way of granting power to subjectivity, and simply making shit up? Does such a distinction matter? D’Agata claims not to care, but I side with Gutkind in suspecting that there’s a difference between “queering genre” and borrowing the authority of one genre, on bad credit, to bolster the profile of another.

Furthermore: does such a maverick stance towards “fact” betray a certain kind of presumption? One wonders how a writer might reliably distinguish between irrelevant facts—facts that can be smudged for the sake of art—and facts on which others’ lives and legal futures might hinge. I’m not saying that the facts D’Agata changed fell into the latter category—but I’m not sure I would trust myself, or anyone else outside of the story, to know the difference. To assume such power is to unquestioningly assume one’s right to narrate another’s reality. Gutkind goes farther: “The market for lyric essays is limited at best. Perhaps this new book’s lame idea, that art supersedes fact, is D’Agata’s foray into self-promotion and image-building in the creative writing academy. That—and not the general public—seems to be his target audience.”

So here is the High Art thing again. Not all “lyric essays” play fast and loose with the facts, and most of them don’t pretend to be journalism anyway. But still: does the “back door” of lyric lead, perhaps, not to a shadowy speakeasy but to a rarefied academic cocktail party, one whose attendees can afford to scoff at the banality of “fact?”

Perhaps D’Agata can be forgiven for conflating the creative writing academy with some kind of marginal space: it hardly holds the cachet of other, longer-standing, more traditionally prestigious academic departments. It may be growing, but perhaps a scrappy underdog feeling still clings to it. Many public debates have been held, for example, about whether MFA programs are inherently anti-intellectual. Even so, if the traditional academy is what the lyric essay seeks to transgress—well, I’m not sure this is a transgression that interests me.

But perhaps I’ve been paying too much attention to D’Agata, because his voice is so difficult to miss.

When I was an undergraduate, I sang in the Yale Women’s Slavic Chorus, which was formed in 1969, the first year women were admitted to the university. Its origin story: when a group of women petitioned to join the long-established Russian Chorus, they were denied, but one of its members volunteered to teach them Bulgarian women’s vocal music. Today, the Yale Women’s Slavic Chorus is still going; their gatherings and concerts are still the weirdest, loudest, most joyous, most unapologetically female events I’ve ever attended. Sometimes the original male founder comes to these gatherings and hangs around. He tells anyone who asks that he founded the chorus, that he is responsible for its existence; if you smile appreciatively and appear willing to listen, he’ll quip that he did so “to meet girls.” But it’s obvious, once the music starts—once the “girls” open their throats and start hollering—that none of it’s really about him.

I’m not saying D’Agata is that guy. (For one thing, he’s not standing on the sidelines; he’s singing too.) But I suggest the analogy to frame the different kinds of ownership that might be at stake here.

In Next American Essay, D’Agata writes, “In Italy stanza means ‘a room.’ In Spain stanza means ‘a shelter.’ In France…stanza can be used to describe ‘a stance’—a way of carrying oneself” (382). I like the little volta of this third definition. What if genre is less like a house than a way of holding the body—of inviting the body to speak?

Maggie Nelson in Bluets: “One image of the intellectual: a man who loses his eyesight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton). I try to avoid generalities when it comes to the business of gender, but in all honesty I must admit that I simply cannot conceive of a version of female intelligence that would advocate such a thing. An ‘abortion of the mind, this purity’ (W.C. Williams)” (55).

Gender is a slippery, often-misleading signifier, but it’s also a lived reality. Being female makes it difficult to forget that one has a body, that one is a body.

Susan Griffin echoes Nelson’s critique of this brain-in-a-jar model in her essay “Red Shoes.” “Without the body,” she writes, “it is impossible to conceive of thought existing. Yet the central trope of our intellectual heritage is of a transcendent, disembodied mind” (306). Such a notion, she argues, is a fantasy of liberation that itself becomes a kind of cage: “The idea of an entirely autonomous mind has a subtext, and that is the desire for unlimited freedom from natural limitations…. And yet limitations are a necessary predisposition for any existence, including the existence of something we suppose to be abstract and cerebral, like the essay. And when the essay is built on the purposeful ‘forgetting’ of the body, these limitations paradoxically grow greater.” (306)

Jenny Boully’s essay “The Body,” also included in The Next American Essay, consists exclusively of footnotes. Some of its pages are almost entirely blank. The essay’s title refers not only to its own absent “body of text,” but to the physical body of its lyric speaker. Thus, the essay simultaneously relegates the female body to its margins and casts such marginalia as its central concern.

The last thing I want to do is suggest some kind of easy relationship between gender and literary form, to argue that women are predisposed to write in a certain way. And yet, for many, writing about gendered experience presents a paradox: how to represent the robustness of one’s own lived experience while also representing the experience of obscurity, of erasure? How to explore the messy, fluid realities of the body without sacrificing so much linearity that one’s work is labeled incoherent or unreadable? How to transcend the “diminutive,” the traditionally “feminine,” without devaluing it?

Susan Griffin again: “Is it possible to write in a form that is both immersed and distant, farseeing and swallowed? I am thinking now that this is what women have been attempting in the last decades. Not simply to enter the world of masculine discourse but to transform it with another kind of knowledge” (315).

The lyric essay, with its associative logic and its openness to visuality as a tool of meaning-making, may in fact be more suitable than other forms for expressing embodied truths—especially those previously neglected, those experienced in the gaps between sanctioned “facts.” It may offer unique tools for expressing the presence of absences. Perhaps this is why many notable female writers, especially those interested in writing about and through their female bodies, seem to excel at the lyric essay, to find the genre a congenial home: Maggie Nelson, Jenny Boully, Susan Griffin, Anne Carson, Eula Biss, Mary Ruefle, Brenda Miller—among many others.

Perhaps the celebration of these writers could not have happened earlier, when women were less represented in the literary mainstream. That same mainstream is also, conveniently, more receptive now to regarding embodied and fragmentary writing as art, as a valued form of intellection rather than an avoidance of it. Griffin’s and Boully’s presence in The Next American Essay indicates the acceptance of their writing by the creative writing establishment. Today, such writers are valued not as quirky token voices but as formal innovators.

The essays mentioned above do not necessarily represent the dizzyingly diverse genre as a whole, in either their form or their concerns; even if I could, I’m not really interested in proving that they are, or that the lyric essay is somehow a “female” genre—to do so would be to essentialize, and to run the risk of ghettoizing. (Besides: even the term “female” feels, these days, like an outmoded category in need of renovation.) But these examples serve to highlight the folly of separating “identity politics” from studies of “form,” as many critics still insist on doing. Essays like Boully’s show how formal innovation can arise, at least partially, out of the urgent need to explore the lived reality of a particular identity. It seems to me that any genre proving hospitable to such efforts should be welcomed.

Despite Lazar’s objections, “queerness” might not be hampered by generic reification: the lyric essay potentially gives high-art sanction to all sorts of experiments. And not just those by women, or queer writers. If the lyric essay’s associative structure, its deployment of visual tropes and of blank space, are tools particularly suited to exploring the bright mess of embodied experience, then the genre opens new possibilities for anyone with a body.

Paradoxically, it also seems well-suited for exploration of the disembodied, the fragmentary, the flashbulb immediacy and ephemerality of the Internet age. Sarah Menkedick skeptically writes in “Narrative of Fragments” that the lyric essay’s form, which seems to both represent and invite interruption of the reader’s attention, “is as easy to consume as a Flickr slideshow, as successive sound bites on CNN, although in its language and content as a whole it intends to be difficult and tries for Barthesian jouissance.” Maybe—but to me, this paradox seems less like hypocrisy than evidence of a messy, invigorating attempt to reckon with disruption. In this post-postmodern age, even writers who might have previously benefited from the illusion of a unified, separable self are forced to confront the reality of fragmentation, and find new ways to express it.

David Shields writes in “Reality Hunger” that he prefers lyric essay to fiction because it is, well, more “real”: “We want work to be equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought, not flattening it out” (83). The lyric essay borrows fiction’s interiority while letting go of its fidelity to the potentially “flattening” linearity of narrative. In doing so, it invites the reader into a crystalline structure of thought that—like a rhizome or network—might resemble chaos and formlessness at first, but upon closer look, might accurately represent the bright mess of a particular mind, inside a particular body, inside the vivid confusions of our shared world.

I suspect that most practitioners of the lyric essay, whatever they think of the term itself and its relation to identity politics, would resonate with Susan Griffin’s rhetorical questions in “Red Shoes”: “Bringing the public world of the essay and the inner world of fiction together, is something sacrificed? The high ground? Perspective? Distance? Or is it instead a posture of detachment that is renounced, a position of superiority? The position of one who is not immersed, who is unaffected, untouched? (This is, of course, the ultimate ‘fiction.’)” (314) At its best, the lyric essay accurately locates the writer in the “great soup of being” —the confusions of lived time, the jagged shape of thought, the betrayals and silences of the body.

4. THE WHITE SPACES (RECONSIDERED)

I’ve typed the phrase “white spaces” so many times now that I can’t help but focus on the word “white.” Blank pages are usually white. But that doesn’t mean they are innocent.

Claudia Rankine’s recent book Citizen has been called a lyric essay. Though most reviews labeled it as poetry, its formal indeterminacy and plurality have invited a variety of classifications. Either way, the subtitle, “An American Lyric,” seems to invite the reader to treat the book’s speaker with the generative indeterminacy, the choral plurality, of a “Lyric I”; Rankine has said that this speaker, who explores the lived experience of Black subjectivity in America, conveys experiences that are her own as well as those of people she knows. The book mostly eschews the “I” itself in favor of a second-person “you”; this “you” could represent the speaker’s plurality, or her dissociation from herself. Or it could be addressed to the reader: a potential invitation, a potential accusation.

Many associate whiteness with blankness, innocence. But Rankine’s book reminds us that whiteness is more like willful ignorance, disavowed knowledge. It’s a highly complex set of codes and privileges, disguised as normative neutrality. To equate whiteness with blankness is a refusal of knowledge—or of acknowledgment. Citizen’s spare blocks of prose on blinding-white paper serve to underline this notion: to force the reader to confront whiteness as part of the text, to confront whatever she projects onto it in response to its difficult (and notably black) “propositions.”

One notable absence in The Next American Essay: writers of color. D’Agata cops to the anthology’s demographics in his introduction: “There are 19 men in here, 13 women. Twenty-nine are Americans; 1 is a Mexican; 1 is Canadian. There’s a Native American, a Korean American, an African American, a Thai American. I’ll bet you there are probably some gay people, too” (1). I guess he figures he’ll get points for honesty.

But, as Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “The notion of privilege as something to which one could ‘easily cop,’ as in ‘cop once and be done with,’ is ridiculous. Privilege saturates; privilege structures” (97).

For an anthology of 32 writers to contain only one African-American, and only five writers of color in total, is striking—particularly striking when the words “Next” and “American” are in its title. In the “Next America,” the one on the verge of being, Americans of color will outnumber their white compatriots. (We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay isn’t much better: just 3 writers of color out of 15 total—demographics presumably representative of Seneca Review as a whole.) So are writers of color particularly under-represented in this fledgling genre? Or in John D’Agata’s mind? Or do these numbers reflect the larger inequities of the publishing world, of society?

If I had to guess, I’d blame the exclusion not only on D’Agata’s personal blind spots but on a persistent yet misguided notion in the Academy that “high art” and “identity politics” are inherently contradictory. Either way, there are many wonderful writers of color who might be called “lyric essayists.” Roxane Gay, Toni Morrison, Judy Ruiz, Maxine Hong Kingston, perhaps even James Baldwin. And more—certainly, many that remain unknown to me. It would be unfair to disown my own complicity in this; writers of color have rightly taken white writers like me to task for not looking harder, past the gatekeepers’ darlings. But if such writers remain outside of the anthologies and publications considered to be genre-normative—to define the standards by which the lyric essay is recognized and marketed—that says something. For one thing, it says that we need some new anthologies. If the lyric essay does in fact open up new and exciting possibilities for embodied writing within the realm of High Art, it should not, in its excitement at finally being invited, neglect to look around and see who is still absent.

Still, I would like to insist on seeing the lyric essay’s blank spaces as sites of possibility for everyone—if only because, in insisting, we might make it so.

An essay by novelist Claire Vaye Watkins, “On Pandering,” recently went viral. Watkins decries the way in which her own internalized misogyny shaped her first book, while calling herself out on her frequent blindness to her own white privilege: “Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men.” Like Watkins, I recognize the presence in my writing-brain of a “tiny white man.” And yet as a female writer I’ve been invigorated by identifying patriarchal structures so as to depart from them—to conceive of myself as writing into some other place yet to be mapped. I might, at times, bemoan the inescapability of the patriarchy (Nelson in The Argonauts: “There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about ‘female sexuality’ until there is a control group. And there never will be.” (66)) But maybe there’s value in having a structure against which to rebel. We might fantasize some pure organic form—some control-group form—but new forms have always ruptured older ones in order to bring themselves into existence.

It would be impossible, especially for me, to compare gender and race; among other offenses, doing so would deny the existence of intersectionality. But perhaps racist and sexist structures can resemble each other both in the erasures they inflict and the ways in which their charged, dubiously defended borders might invite a kind of generative violation. Destruction can be a powerful kind of creation. Watkins ends her essay with a battle cry: “Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories. Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.”

Yes, let’s—even if the old structures won’t disappear entirely; we’ll always be reacting against them, to some degree. Still, we can salvage that obsolete front door and make a window out of it. Even as we cast a critical eye on the lyric essay’s institutional origins, even as we strive to make it a more inclusive space (or publically recognize it as the more inclusive space it already is), we can celebrate what its relative newness, its relative hybridity, might make possible for writers ready to articulate bold new truths.

No, there will never be a control group. But what there can be: a breakage, a re-shuffling. The result of breakage: a proliferation of edge, of space.

A new arrangement of truths, a different kind of meaning.

Notes Biss, Eula. “It is What it Is.” Seneca Review , Fall 2007: pages 55-60.

Boully, Jenny. “The Body.” In The Next American Essay , ed. John D’Agata. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003. Pages 435-466.

Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre . Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet . Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.

Culler, Jonathan. “Lyric, History and Genre.” In The Lyric Theory Reader . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pages 63-76.

D’Agata, John, ed. The Next American Essay . Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003.

D’Agata, John. “What’s In A Name?” In We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay , ed. John D’Agata. Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2014. Pages 5-10.

D’Agata, John, and Deborah Tall. “The Lyric Essay.” Seneca Review , Fall 2007. Web. 10 December 2015.

Garner, Dwight. “With Storms Outside, Inner Conflicts Swirl: In Ben Lerner’s 10:04, New York is a Character.” The New York Times . 2 Sept, 2014. Web. 8 December, 2015.

Griffin, Susan. “Red Shoes.” In The Next American Essay , ed. John D’Agata. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003. Pages 301-215.

Gutkind, Lee. “Doing a D’Agata.” Los Angeles Review of Books , 19 March 2002. Web. 8 December 2015.

Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. “General Introduction.” In The Lyric Theory Reader . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pages 1-10.

Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Assignments.” Seneca Review , Fall 2007: pages 15-18.

Lazar, David. “Queering the Essay.” Essay Review , Volume I Issue I, Spring 2013: pages 19-23.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network . Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Marcus, Ben. “On the Lyric Essay.” The Believer , July 2013. Web. 10 December 2015.

Menkedick, Sarah. “Narrative of Fragments.” The New Inquiry , July 3, 2014. Web. 10 January 2016.

Mill, John Stuart. “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” In Dissertations and Discussions . London: Savill and Edwards, 1859.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts . Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015.

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets . Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2009.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric . Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014.

Shields, David. “Reality Hunger.” Seneca Review , Fall 2007: pages 79-91.

Watkins, Claire Vaye. “On Pandering.” In Tin House , 23 November 2015. Web. 10 December 2015.

Amy Bonnaffons’s writing has appeared in The New York Times , Kenyon Review , The Sun , The Literary Review , and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of 7×7, a journal that publishes collaborations between writers and visual artists. Amy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and is currently working on a PhD in English at the University of Georgia. A New York native, she currently resides in Athens, GA.

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23 How to Quote Song Lyrics in an Essay in APA Style

When writing essays in fields like music education, psychology, sociology, or other disciplines that may analyze song lyrics, you’ll often need to incorporate direct quotations or paraphrases to support your arguments and deepen your analysis. Understanding how to properly attribute these sources is essential to both academic integrity and effectively guiding your reader back to the original work. The American Psychological Association (APA) style provides the framework for formatting these citations while ensuring you give credit where credit is due.

Additionally, if you find yourself overwhelmed with the task of incorporating citations or formatting your paper according to APA guidelines, consider seeking assistance and ask professionals to do my paper on DoMyEssay to ensure accuracy and adherence to academic standards.

While there’s no single section in the APA manual devoted entirely to musical sources, you can intelligently adapt the principles for citing various source formats to fit this particular purpose. This involves a careful understanding of both APA’s conventions and the unique nature of musical works, where elements like composer, lyricist, performer, and the date of a particular release all contribute to the full picture.

In-Text Citations

Short Quotations : Integrate shorter lyrical excerpts directly into your text using quotation marks, providing a seamless flow within your writing and allowing the lyrics to speak directly to the reader. Separate line breaks with a single forward slash ( / ) and stanza breaks with two ( // ).

Joni Mitchell explores themes of freedom and constraint in her song “Big Yellow Taxi,” where she poignantly sings, “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot” (Mitchell, 1970, track 4). 

This technique lets the song’s imagery resonate clearly, strengthening your argument by using the artist’s own words as direct evidence. Furthermore, short quotations can be particularly impactful when they capture a powerful metaphor or a striking turn of phrase unique to the songwriter. 

The bitter irony of “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” (Mitchell, 1970, track 4) underscores the song’s larger message about the fleeting nature of what we take for granted.

Block Quotations : For lengthier lyrical segments (typically four lines or more), set them apart as block quotations to emphasize their significance, help with visual clarity, and signify a deeper level of analysis. Indent the entire block from your main text. Consider this example:

They took all the trees

Put ’em in a tree museum

And they charged the people

A dollar and a half just to see ’em

(Mitchell, 1970, track 4)

By using a block quotation, you invite the reader to pause and carefully consider the extended lyrical passage, potentially uncovering deeper meanings, nuances, or its connection to the larger themes of your work. Block quotations can also highlight shifts in tone within a song or reveal the development of an idea across several verses. In Mitchell’s case, the block quote emphasizes the absurdity and commercialization of a world where nature is commodified, adding a layer of social commentary to the environmental focus of “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Citation Components : An in-text citation for song lyrics generally includes the songwriter(s) last name, copyright year, and either track number (for recordings) or page/line number (for printed scores). For example, a direct quotation from “Big Yellow Taxi” would be cited as (Mitchell, 1970, track 4). Paraphrases follow the regular APA pattern of (Author, Year), allowing you to rephrase the song’s message in your own words while still giving credit to the original idea. Remember that consistency in your citations adds a layer of professionalism and clarity to your essay writing , demonstrating your respect for intellectual property and guiding your reader effectively.

Reference List Entries

Your reference list, found at the end of your essay, provides a comprehensive and detailed guide to all the sources you’ve used. For song lyrics, this is where you meticulously list full publication information, allowing a reader to easily locate the exact music you analyzed. Here’s the basic structure, with examples and additional considerations:

Recorded Music : Start with the songwriter(s), copyright year, song title, and recording artist. Then, specify the album title, medium of the recording (vinyl, CD, digital, etc.), location of the record label, and the label itself.

Mitchell, J. (1970). Big Yellow Taxi [Recorded by Joni Mitchell]. On Ladies of the Canyon [LP record]. Burbank, CA: Reprise Records.

If the songwriter and recording artist are the same, you can omit the bracketed “[Recorded by…]” portion. Sometimes, you might need to differentiate between various editions or re-releases of an album, especially if bonus tracks or alternate versions are involved. Since different versions could contain lyrical changes, it’s important to be detailed to ensure a reader can locate the precise source you used. Also, be aware that original publication dates and recent re-releases can differ, so make sure to list the date relevant to the version you’re citing.

Printed Scores : For printed sheet music, whether it’s a full score or a simplified arrangement, focus on the publication details. List the songwriter(s), year of publication, song title, the type of score (vocal, instrumental, choral, etc. – if relevant), the city and state where the publisher is located, and the publisher’s name.

Dylan, B. (1963). Blowin’ in the Wind [Vocal score]. New York, NY: Warner Bros. Publications.

Printed scores can vary widely, from simple piano-and-vocal arrangements to comprehensive orchestral scores. Specifying the score type clarifies the exact version you used for analysis and can be particularly helpful if your arguments focus on instrumentation, harmonies, or other musical elements beyond just the lyrics themselves. Additionally, some scores include notes on historical context or performance practice relevant to specific genres or time periods, giving you additional insights for your analysis.

With a bit of careful attention and by understanding the core principles of APA, you can successfully integrate song lyrics into your academic writing, giving proper credit, strengthening your analysis, and enhancing the overall scholarly impact of your work!

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23 The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation

• Published: October 2022
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This chapter asks what it means to label an essay ‘lyric’, and it makes a case for why the lyric essay is both distinct and essential in the nonfiction canon. Though the term ‘lyric essay’ has been in wide circulation for over twenty years, not unlike the larger genre of the essay itself, the subgenre has had a complicated and sometimes contentious history. The chapter begins with the history of the term ‘lyric essay’, locating it in both lyric poetry and the traditional essay traditions. It ascribes a series of formal qualities and conventions to lyric essays: a move towards poetic rather than fictional techniques; juxtaposition and association in lieu of direct denotation; and the use of form to mirror and inform content. Finally, offering a range of textual examples, the chapter argues for the lyric essay as particularly generative of truth-telling when there are complex and fragmented situations; when there are gaps in knowledge, memory or experience; and when the reader’s perceptions, rather than the writer’s, must be centered.

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How do I format a quotation of song lyrics?

Format a quotation of song lyrics the same way you would format a quotation of poetry. If the quotation consists of fewer than four lines, run it into the text, placing quotation marks around the lines and separating the lines from each other with a forward slash with a space on either side of it. 

Bob Dylan famously sang that “[t]he answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Work Cited Dylan, Bob. “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Bob Dylan , 2018, www.bobdylan.com/songs/blowin-wind/.

If the quotation consists of four or more lines, set the quoted lines apart from the text as an extract.

In “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan asks: How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand?

Dylan, Bob. “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Bob Dylan , 2018, www.bobdylan.com/songs/blowin-wind/.

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How to Incorporate Lyrics Into an Essay

Lyrics can be effective tools in an essay. You may want to cite lyrics, because a song writer says something in an eloquent way, or the excerpt solidifies a point you’re trying to make. You are allowed to quote a portion of a song under the fair use doctrine of the United States copyright law, but the law doesn’t specify exactly how many words or what percentage of a song you can use. You can use a limited portion of a song for your research paper, but it must be acknowledged though in-text citations and a listing in your works cited or reference page.

Quotations and In-Text Citations

When incorporating lyrics into an essay, put the lyrics inside quotation marks. Short quotations can be integrated into a sentence, such as, “In the song ‘Hey Jude,’ the Beatles sing…” followed by the lyrics in quotation marks.

Long quotations, or those that are four lines or longer, need to be set off in a block quote, where you indent the entire quote from the paragraph above it. To cite the lyrics in Modern Language Association format, write the artists’ name in parentheses, such as (The Beatles), followed by the ending punctuation.

To cite in American Psychological Association format, include the artist, copyright date and track number in parentheses, such as (The Beatles, 1968, track 1). Note the comma between the artist and year and between the year and track number.

Reference List

Include the details of the recording in your works cited or references page. In MLA format, include the artist’s name, song title, album name, name of the recording manufacturer, publication date and the sound recording medium, for example:

The Beatles. “Hey Jude.” Hey Jude: The U. S. Album (italicized). Capitol, 2014. CD.

Citing this recording in APA style is slightly different, so follow the example:

The Beatles. (2014). Hey Jude. On Hey Jude: The U. S. Album (italicize the album name) [CD]. Los Angeles: Capitol (Recorded 1968).

• Purdue Online Writing Lab: In-Text Citations: The Basics
• Williams College Libraries: Media
• U. S. Copyright Office: Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?
• U. S. Copyright Office: Fair Use
• Purdue Online Writing Lab: MLA Works Cited: Other Common Sources
• Purdue Online Writing Lab: Reference List: Other Non-Print Sources

Cara Batema is a musician, teacher and writer who specializes in early childhood, special needs and psychology. Since 2010, Batema has been an active writer in the fields of education, parenting, science and health. She holds a bachelor's degree in music therapy and creative writing.

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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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• Craft Essays
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Structure: Lifeblood of the Lyric Essay

Writing mostly poetry for the last two years, I had pretty much given up on prose. Until I met the lyric essay. It was as if I found myself a new lover. I was on a cloud-nine high: I didn’t have to write a tightly knitted argument required of a critical essay. I could loosely stitch fragments—even seemingly unrelated ones. I could leave gaps. Lean on poetic devices such as lyricism and metaphor. Let juxtaposition do the talking. I did not need to know the answer, nor did I need to offer one. It was up to the reader to intuit meaning. Whew!

Okay, so it’s not as easy as that. I can’t just stick bits together. Not if I want to write a decent —fabulous! —lyric essay. Structure is work. A work of craft, like shaping a poem, requiring space and patience. In her essay “The Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction,” Eileen Pollack writes “…finding the perfect form for the material a writer is trying to shape is the most important factor in whether or not that material will ever advance from a one- or two-page beginning to a coherent first draft to a polished essay [my emphasis].”

But why such weight on structure?

The lyric essay, say Deborah Tall and John D’Agata , is useful for “circling the core” of ineffable subjects. And in her Fourth Genre essay , Judith Kitchen states that its moment is the present, as it “goes about discovering what its about is [Kitchen’s emphasis].” As such, traditional structures—e.g. narrative logic and fully fleshed arguments that help the writer organize what he or she already knows—don’t befit the lyric essay (as per Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in Tell It Slant ).

This makes sense. Because when I tried to write prose I would flail in too many words, unable to say what I felt. Hence, the poetry. But now I had discovered a prose genre where the writer leans on form— consciously constructing it or borrowing a “shell” like the hermit crab [1] —to eloquently hold the inexpressible aboutness , to let meaning dance in the spaces between its juxtaposed parts.

For fun—and to appreciate the significance of structure—I juxtaposed two essays from Ellena Savage’s debut collection Blueberries : the titular essay “Blueberries” and “The Museum of Rape,” essays with very different forms; in fact, the whole book is a goodie bag of experimental forms.

I saw that while “Blueberries’” structural unit looked like the paragraph, its appearance is deceptive: the usual paragraph-by-paragraph logic is non-existent; instead, each paragraph acts as an individual poetic musing, making it more like a stanza, which literally means “room” in Italian. Some rooms are big—a single block of unindented text that can be longer than a page—and each room is separated by a single line break. As such, “Blueberries” could have easily become an amorphous piece of writing that leaves the reader thinking What’s the point of this? or scares them off with the lack of white space, but Savage uses metaphor and the lyricism of repetition to build a sturdy, stylish house.

The phrase “I was in America at a very expensive writer’s workshop”—or variations of it—appears in almost every room. Other words and phrases such as blueberries, black silk robe, gender-neutral toilets, reedy and tepid and well-read [male] faculty member, also often fleck the essay. This syntactical play and repetition, delivered in long, conversational sentences as if talking passionately to a friend about something weighty (which she is), are used as metaphors—tangible stand-ins—allowing Savage to have a broader conversation about complex abstract themes, in this case the intersection of privilege, gender, and making a living as a woman and a writer. Crucially, the repetition also makes associative links between the rooms, giving the reader agency to intuit meaning. As such, these structural devices create layered connotations (like a poem), making structure integral to the completeness—and coherence—of “Blueberries.”

In “The Museum of Rape,” Savage sections the content by numbered indexes – e.g. 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, like museum labels for pieces of artwork; hence, performing the essay’s title on one level. Savage uses these indexes to direct the reader to different parts of the essay, associating (in some instances ostensibly unrelated) fragments together, whereas in “Blueberries” Savage uses repetition as the associative device. This structure invites the reader to navigate the essay in multiple interwoven ways, intentionally making meaning a slippery thing that can “fall into an abyss”—a phrase that Savage often directs the reader to. In this way, the structure—labyrinthine and tangential—mimics the content, which is much more allusive— elusive even —than “Blueberries,” given its themes of trauma, memory’s unreliability, and, as beautifully summarized by a review , “the lacunae of loss (of loved ones, faith, and even the mind itself).” Savage captures this essence in index 8.0:             What I’m saying is that I understand the total collapse of structured memory.

I asked myself, what it means to anticipate the loss of one’s rational function (7.0, 7.1, 7.2)…I comprehend tripping into the lacuna with my hands tied behind my back.

The museum-label structure also offers plenty of lacunae: There is almost a double line break in between each of the indexed fragments, because the index number is left-adjusted and given an entire line. Also, the fragments are, on average, shorter than the rooms in “Blueberries,” with many paragraphs indicated by an indent or a line break rather than a block of unindented text. There’s a poem in there, too, peppered with cesurae. These structural devices further signify the content, whereas “Blueberries” is purposefully dense to indicate a pressing sense of importance. Which is to say, the form used for “Blueberries” could not convey the aboutness of “The Museum of Rape” and vice versa—proof that form is the lifeblood of the lyric essay.

Now all there’s left to do is construct one. So, let’s play.

Choose a nonfiction piece you’ve already written or are working on, preferably one with a subject matter that’s tricky to articulate. Now reconstruct it by building or borrowing a form that’ll illuminate (even perform) the aboutness of your piece. Here are some ideas:

• A series of letters, emails, tweets or diary entries (epistolatory)
• An instructional piece—e.g. “How to…,” a recipe, or a to-do list—using “you” as the point of view
• Stanzas/paragraphs (like “Blueberries”) that can stand alone, but when put together offer a bigger/layered meaning through repetition
• Versify, playing with lineation and cesura; you can also intermix a series of poems and prose fragments
• A “mock” scientific paper with title, author(s), aim, methods, results, conclusion, discussion, and a reference list, as a way to section the content

Above all, have fun experimenting. ____

Lesh Karan is a former pharmacist who writes. Read her in  Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Not Very Quiet  and  Rabbit , among others. Her writing has previously been shortlisted for the New Philosopher Writers’ Award. Lesh is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne.

[1] The “Hermit Crab Essay” is a term coined by Miller and Paola to describe an essay that “appropriates existing forms as an outer covering” for its “tender” content. A classic example is Primo Levi’s memoir The Periodic Table , structured using the chemical elements in the periodic table.

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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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