lyric essays to read

Writing Without Limits: Understanding the Lyric Essay

Sean Glatch  |  February 28, 2023  |  8 Comments

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

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

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

What is a lyric essay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

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

Personal essay example

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

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

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

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

Lyric essay example

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

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

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

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

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

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

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

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

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

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

The two share many similarities, too, including:

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

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

Lyric Essay Examples

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

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

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

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

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

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

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

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

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

1. Start with your narrative

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

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

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

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

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

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

3. Investigate and braid different threads

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

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

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

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

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

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

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

5. Write stream-of-conscious

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

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

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

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

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

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

thanks for sharing

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

I’m interested in learning about essays to write my memoir, so I shall be back.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

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!

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

5 Poems for Back to School Season

8 Tried and True Ways to Get Over Writer’s Block

Forget Merit: Write Poems to Express Yourself

Two Lyric Essays

Artwork by Samuel Hickson

translated from the Chinese by Ting Wang

Read the original in Chinese, Traditional

Listen to the essays in Chinese, read by Caixin Chen and Li-ling Yeh:

Chen Li was born in Taiwan in 1954. He is regarded as one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today, and is the author of fourteen books of poetry and a prolific writer of prose. With his wife, Chang Fen-ling, he has translated over twenty volumes of poetry into Chinese, including the works of Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Octavio Paz, and Wisława Szymborska. The recipient of many awards in Taiwan (e.g. the National Award for Literature and Arts, the Taiwan Literature Award, the China Times Literary Award, and the United Daily News Literary Award), he has taught creative writing at National Dong Hwa University and is the organizer of the annual Pacific Poetry Festival in his hometown, Hualien. In 2012, he was invited to Poetry Parnassus in London as the poet representing Taiwan. In 2014, he was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Ting Wang discovered her passion for literary translation while studying American and British literature in mainland China. Her translations have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Your Impossible Voice . A native Mandarin speaker, she holds a Ph.D. from the School of Communication at Northwestern University, and lives and works in the Washington metropolitan area.

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.

Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use

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 .

You Might Also Like

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Lyric Essays

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

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.

Novlr is now writer-owned! Join us and shape the future of creative writing.

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. 

Note: All purchase links in this post are affiliate links through BookShop.org, and Novlr may earn a small commission – every purchase supports independent bookstores.

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Literature & Fiction

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays Kindle Edition

• Print length 311 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes Not Enabled
• Publisher University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date October 13, 2021
• File size 24818 KB
• Page Flip Not Enabled
• Word Wise Not Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Not Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08ZHQMQGW
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Nebraska Press (October 13, 2021)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 13, 2021
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 24818 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 311 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1496217748
• #1,944 in Essays (Kindle Store)
• #6,004 in Essays (Books)

About the authors

Susanna donato.

Susanna Donato is a third-generation Colorado native who decided at age 6 that she’d be a writer or a farm girl when she grew up, until she learned that she prefers a keyboard to a shovel. Today she lives in Denver, where she writes nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid forms, often about music, art, and the urban West. Since attending Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City and University of Colorado-Denver, she has studied at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and even pretended to be a doctor at CU’s Mini Med School. Her work has appeared in Okey-Panky, Blue Earth Review, Hippocampus, Midlife Mixtape, and Columbia Review.

Randon Billings Noble

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, was published by Nebraska in 2021. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, listed as Notable in The Best American Essays, and has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow, she has been a resident at The Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is also the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art.

Laurie Easter

Laurie Easter is the author of All the Leavings (Oregon State University Press, 2021), a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award winner and 2022 IAN Book of the Year Award finalist. Her essays have been honored with fellowships by the Vermont Studio Center and Playa, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award, and listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2015. Her work appears in Brevity, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, Under the Gum Tree, and Hippocampus Magazine, among other literary journals and anthologized in The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (forthcoming Fall, 2021), both published by University of Nebraska Press. She holds degrees from Southern Oregon University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives off-the-grid on the edge of wilderness in Southern Oregon.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 78% 8% 6% 0% 7% 78%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 78% 8% 6% 0% 7% 8%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 78% 8% 6% 0% 7% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 78% 8% 6% 0% 7% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 78% 8% 6% 0% 7% 7%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the lyric essays in the book a master class in creative nonfiction. They also appreciate the gorgeous prose and an array of beautiful, inventive approaches to the form. Readers describe the collection as an indulgent literary collection with a good mixture of styles.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the lyric essay content in the book masterful, gorgeous, and an excellent resource for aspiring writers. They mention the pieces are thoughtful, lyrical, and include many topics and ideas.

"...It shows a wide range of topics and helps readers understand the elusive "lyric" essay...." Read more

"Reading this book is a master class in lyric essay/creative nonfiction ! Recommend it." Read more

"The Kindle version won't allow font size adjustment -- the text is so small it's unreadable ." Read more

"...inventive approaches to the form, as well as a helpful guide with insightful craft essays that illuminate a writer’s process...." Read more

Customers find the style of the book beautiful, thoughtful, and inventive. They say it has a good mixture of styles of non-fiction essays.

"The collection has a good mixture of styles of non-fiction essays...." Read more

"...on the lyric essay showcasing an array of beautiful, inventive approaches to the form , as well as a helpful guide with insightful craft essays that..." Read more

"...the best collection of lyric essays I've yet to read, highlighting the innovation of the form and collecting together so many wonderful voices...." Read more

"...It's a collection you can dip into at intervals, but they were so lovely , I read the whole book all the way through...." Read more

Reviews with images

warning: text formats do not translate to Kindle

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Report an issue

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

A Journal of The Literary Arts

show us your work

to the publication

enter contest

If We’re Here Now: Movements Toward the Lyric Essay

By anna leahy.

March 9, 2021

“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,’” posits fiction writer Amy Bonnaffons in an essay about essays for The Essay Review. Suppose I want to do just that, as others have wanted to do—and have done. The word essay is from Latin for driving something out; it sets in motion, or is the evidence of motion. The lyric essay is going somewhere. 

Bonnaffons continues, “The term ‘lyric essay’ brings poetry—[t]he highest of the 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.” 

Valence is a favorite word of mine because it means different things in different contexts. I’ve spun a poem around concepts of valence; it begins with an epigraph of definitions. 

Valence: in chemistry, atomic affinity; in biology, capacity to interact, to bind, to unite; in graph theory, the number of edges incident to a node; in ancient medicine, an extract, a potion; in politics, voting according to party competence; in psychology, the emotional value of an experience; in linguistics, the bonds a verb controls. 

Valence comes from Latin meaning to be strong; vale was used as a greeting. Welcome, listen, be strong. 

When I headed to an MFA program and even still, the common assumption seems to be that one must apply in a single genre, take workshops only in that genre, and write a thesis in that same genre, as I did in poetry. Not everyone wants to write in more than one genre, but why not? 

Beth Ann Fennelly has published three poetry collections and is Poet Laureate of Mississippi, but her latest book is a collection of micro-memoirs, and it’s not her first collection of nonfiction. Paisley Rekdal is the author of five poetry books and is Poet Laureate of Utah, but her newest book is an extended essay, and it’s not her first nonfiction book. All three of us went to MFA programs where nonfiction was not an option. So, we are poets in the position to bring the poetic to the realm of nonfiction. 

Poet Carl Phillips writes in the introduction to Yanyi’s collection The Year of Blue Water , “for all of the questing for stability, the fact that the self is ever changing includes an instability that deserves its own respect.” We are a sequence, and the lyric essay depends on it. But Phillips is writing about poetry. 

I name this kind of sequencing, this necessary human changeability: trajectory. 

The word trajectory comes from Latin meaning something thrown. It indicates not only direction in space but elapse of time: past, present, and future. Trajectory is the changing of position in time; it has momentum and dimension. We can see it or hear it—we can measure movement— because of context: time and space. In discrete mathematics, trajectory is a sequence that can be mapped. In engineering it is a collection of states of being in an unending operation, an instability that deserves its own respect. Trajectory might be understood as where and when, which are tangled within this essay as I keep moving along. Trajectory is the context for the I.  

While trajectory may look like a straight line, Earth’s gravity shapes the path of what is thrown through the air; the path is a curve. Trajectory may look like direction, but direction is the looking, and trajectory depends on motion, on momentum. The word momentum comes from Latin meaning the power to move. The word moment came later, when measuring instants of time became useful. 

No, that’s not true. A moment is not an instant. A moment is a minute; it’s something that takes time. An instant is a point in time but takes no time at all. An instant is a way of talking about time as if it were space. 

Physicist Werner Heisenberg thought a lot about the uncertainty of measuring both position and speed—space and time—at once. Trajectory cannot be fully known as it’s happening. The path can be seen in hindsight. Moreover, Heisenberg argued that when we conduct an experiment—like writing an essay?—some of the knowledge obtained by previous experiments is destroyed. 

Poet Louise Glück, in Proofs & Theories, writes of the unsaid and the unseen, the ellipses and the ruins: “Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.” The parts and the whole cannot be separated, according to Heisenberg. The whole is suggested by the shadow of parts, according to Glück. 

And in the time it takes to discern where I am in this instant, I’ve moved on. An instant cannot be measured; it implies the time and space around it, or vice versa. 

In one of his poems, Yanyi describes Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, which is what Nelson’s publisher calls “a genre-bending memoir,” which seems to be a way of saying lyric nonfiction in language that sells books. In an interview with The Atlas Review, Nelson describes her book as “an experiment with anecdote and lived theory.” I take this to mean that the writing rests on the experience of thinking as well as on thinking about experience. Or in the words of Bonnaffons,

“The lyric essay, with its associative logic and openness to visuality as a tool of meaning-making, may in fact be more suitable than other form for expressing embodied truths.” Associative logic— juxtaposition—is a habit of mind that bridges self and world. It embodies. 

Nelson also points to this associative quality: “I was trying to smoosh things together that aren’t always smooshed.” Yanyi writes of The Argonauts ,“It reads like time, powered by adjacency, auras burned with other auras, each making the other another center.” 

Time and adjacency is trajectory—then, there, now, here. The next-to, the brush-up-against, the smoosh. The Latin word for throw is iacere , which is also the root for both trajectory and adjacent.

Adjacency and momentum define each other; they create a multiplicity of centers. 

In another poem, Yanyi writes, “I walked because I liked the companionship in going nowhere together, the endlessness of being with another person.” Pico Iyer writes something similar in The Art of Stillness: “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere.” Yanyi likes adjacency; he likes timelessness. So does Iyer. Adjacency— surroundings, context, connection—allows for trajectory without going anywhere at all. Like spinning, like orbiting. 

Iyer is writing essays. Yanyi is not writing essays. Yanyi’s pieces are poems; the book won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. But how exactly are these writings not lyrics essays? Does each not take or fill enough space or time? 

Claudia Rankine is a poet. In college, she studied with Glück, an adjacency in the history of poetry. Rankine’s book Citizen is subtitled An American Lyric and was a finalist for the National Book

Critics Circle Award in two categories: poetry and criticism. It won in criticism. As poetry, it won the PEN Center USA and Los Angeles Times book awards. A review in The Guardian explained this confusion over whether Citizen is poetry or essay: “The power of Citizen is such that questions of literary form tend to be set aside. It’s described as a prose poem, but it’s not quite what Rimbaud or Francis Ponge might have understood by that. Where Symbolist and Modernist prose poems often exhibit an almost-intolerable density of suggestion, Rankine works by impeccable timing within the paragraph, with an even tone enforcing an implacable verbal economy and exactitude.” The paragraph is space and time, position and momentum, but verbal economy and exactitude sound like poetry. 

The word exactitude is from Latin referring precision or accuracy, as with measurement; it’s related to the Latin word for forcing something out. Citizen forces out a lot, personally and politically, emotionally and intellectually. 

In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes, “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant.” That’s how Rankine appeared to change the lyric essay: in an instant. But this was not her first American lyric. 

Rankine’s point is about patterns of racism and patterns of privilege. Citizen is about accumulation over time—the trajectory of instances. 

In Rankine’s first book, Nothing in Nature Is Private, the length and shape of each piece—the space it takes or fills on the page and time on the breath—is what is generally considered contemporary American poetry. She’s doing something different now, something that looks like an essay, that uses space and time like an essay. She has brought poetry to nonfiction. Is she a poet or an essayist? 

In an online symposium at Copper Nickel, three poets discussed their movement toward creative nonfiction. Shamala Gallagher opens by saying, “I began to write nonfiction out of frustration with my poetry.” While I have not faced what I would call frustration with my poetry, one of the benefits of working in both forms is that the range of possibilities limits the risk of writer’s block. There always exists another sort of thing to write. 

Not every idea fits every form. The lyric essay offers additional spaces—shapes, sizes, syntaxes—for a poet’s ideas. 

In that same conversation, James Allan Hall talks of being drawn to the essay’s capaciousness in contrast to the condensation of poetry. Don Bogen agrees, saying that essays give him “more room.” The poem and the essay are different kinds of room, and size—the amount of space—is part of that difference. Perhaps, writing poetry cultivates a particular awareness of and appreciation for the space of the lyric essay: dimensions, edges, room to breathe without catching the breath with a line break. 

Yanyi says something along these lines: “Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear.” He is talking about poems in his poem that reads like a tiny essay. A space is a space is a space. 

I studied Latin—beginning Latin—over and over, from high school through doctoral work. Only classics professors have conversations in Latin. It’s a dead language. But it’s here now, in trajectory, momentum, adjacent, syntax. 

By 2010, I had moved for a new job and still felt disoriented in my sunny surroundings with avant garde colleagues on one side and genre-fiction colleagues on the other. I started reading Joan Didion, in part because I hoped she would help me understand what it meant to be a woman writer in California. Though Didion’s style isn’t much like my own, I began writing what I thought of as responses to her work because, at the time, I wasn’t sure how to start an essay on a blank page. After all, I am a poet. 

I wrote my own versions of Didion’s “In Bed,” which is about her experience of migraine; “John Wayne: A Love Song,” which is about the actor; and “Marrying Absurd,” which is about a Las Vegas wedding she observes. I didn’t hide the influence; I highlighted the juxtaposition with Didion’s work. In hindsight, what I attempted was not imitation at all—I’m no Didion. Instead, these essays grapple with adjacency—my adjacency to Didion and her work’s adjacency to New Journalism, but also a variety of internal adjacencies in subject matter. 

In Bonnaffons’s terms, Didion’s work was my side entrance: “Maybe lyric slips through the side entrance; maybe it tunnels into the basement; maybe it parachutes onto the rook and slides down the chimney. Perhaps the lyric doesn’t enter, just presses its face against the window and longingly observes.” Didion’s essays were windows I pressed my face against to observe both my own thoughts and the world all at once. 

In a review of the recent documentary about Joan Didion, Brigid Delaney argues, Didion’s “fragmentary style […] renders an event closer to a form of poetry than the blunt instrument that is the inverted pyramid of news or even more conversational-style features.” The form is paragraphs, and the voice is journalistic, but Delaney seems to suggest that Didion makes her way through an essay’s paragraphs lyrically. 

In his essay “The Opposite of Cool,” Joshua Wolf Shenk says of Didion’s writing, “She darts onto it [the stage], and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off.” Is the lyric essay a space into which I can dart, say something, and then dart out again, perhaps leaving a section break if I want to dart back in? “It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience,” Shenk writes, “but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance.” The place between enticing proximity and blunt distance is the adjacent. It’s why the whole is stunning. 

Importantly, Shenk also points out that, though Didion writes in the first person, The Year of Magical Thinking is “not a memoir of grief. It is, quite explicitly, an essay about alienation from grief.” In hindsight, I realize this un-memoir way to write a personal essay was what attracted me to Didion’s writing. “On the page, Didion is the epitome of control, mastery, and clarity,” Shenk writes. “But this order seems to proceed from a chronic sense of meaninglessness, detachment, and distress.” Surrounded by an un-ordered world, control of form and language attracted me to poetry and then to the essay to create order in the mind and on the page. 

In “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion writes, “I tell you this neither in a spirit of self- revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” Perhaps through yours— yes, mine! The first John Wayne movie I saw was Sands of Iwo Jima, and I remember the buzz when he went public with his cancer diagnosis. Before reading Didion, I’d never considered writing about John Wayne, but it turned out that I had plenty to say, and Didion’s essay invited me to say it, not as self-revelation (even as I revealed myself) nor as total recall (even as I wove through researched detail) but, rather, to figure something out about the relationship between the parts and the whole of what’s happened—the where and when of the I . My essay is called “Strange Attraction: John Wayne and Me,” and it’s about John Wayne to some extent and also about the nuclear age and my father’s cancer. When I finished this essay in July 2010, I sent it in response to a call for an Americana issue at The Southern Review and nowhere else. Less than six weeks later, editor Jeanne Leiby accepted this piece. 

After that, the piece underwent fact-checking by Cara Blue Adams, which was an experience I hadn’t had as a poet and one that forced me to look at how the minutia of my essay mattered and fit together. Fact-checking seems about parts but is about the whole and its shadows. 

Accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to an existing value. The less margin for error, the more accurate. It’s hitting the mark. Accuracy comes from Latin meaning to do something carefully, so the word refers to the rightness, to the trueness, of what’s observed. 

Precision is different than accuracy. Precision refers to the reliability of the measurement. It means that if you measure the same phenomenon again, the value will be the same. It’s hitting the same mark again and again, but it might not be what you’re aiming for. If the result is not what you expected, that’s racked up to random error. Something done or said over and over isn’t necessarily right or true. But it can seem as real as anything else. 

Precision, then, might be considered internal consistency, a way to make one’s way through the essay or, for that matter, memoir. Accuracy allows the lyric essay to accept the value of facts—its connection to the world—even as it takes leaps that appear chaotic, even as it smooshes. These leaps leave room room for juxtaposition and the adjacent. 

Factual accuracy is a constraint I welcome as part and parcel to the essay form, just as I welcome constraints of syntax and grammar. Out of constraints, opportunities emerge. As soon as we write the first word, form the first paragraph, we are choosing constraints. 

In a group interview at Electric Lit, Edwidge Danticat expresses appreciation for fact- checkers: “Someone will always question your interpretation of things, but I like to get the factual things as right as possible and I feel a bit crushed—and somewhat ashamed—when I don’t.” I share Danticat’s stance, not out of moral certitude so much as out of aesthetic possibility. I lie or imagine something into being only if I am honest about it being a lie or a supposition. Writing is a process of selecting, including, and interpreting; there’s more outside the paragraphs. Honesty, then, is often more complicated than trickery. Honesty can be scarier and more fun when the reader is in on it too. 

The word honest comes from Latin meaning respected or decent, which is a way one can be perceived. The word trickery comes from Latin meaning a shuffling in order to be evasive, which is a shaping of others’ perception. 

Accuracy is a kind of protection. I have double-checked my records, for instance, to be sure of the submission and acceptance dates and numbers for the essays I’m discussing here. I didn’t remember timeframes accurately; I had told myself a different story of my trajectory by erasing lag times in my memory. When I look back, I can see that, when “Strange Attraction” was published, I stopped submitting the other two essays I’d written. 

Vulnerable comes from the Latin word for wounding, plucking, stretching. 

For a while, I told myself I had beginner’s luck. Or I happened to find the right editor or judge for a particular piece. Or I timed it right, when content matched a particular editorial hole, though I did not think, at the time, how the editors where my work appeared over the next several years were white. The word particular comes from Latin meaning something so tiny that it is even less significant than an actual part of something. 

And of course, I told myself that it must be easier to publish nonfiction than poetry—and why hadn’t anyone told me this before? 

In 2010, the year I sent out my John Wayne essay, I also sent “Half-Skull Days” (about my experience of migraine) and “Marrying Absurd: An Update” (about my own Las Vegas wedding). A big fell swoop, and then I stopped submitting them. 

All six outlets passed on “Half-Skull Days,” but I didn’t send it right back out after each rejection. More than a year later, I saw that an editor at The Pinch was looking for an essay to fill out an issue, so I sent it there and only there, where it was published and then listed as a Notable in The Best American Essays 2013. My point isn’t about success. 

Why did I let this essay lie fallow right after another essay had been published? Did I not trust the lyric essay as a thing to do—that I could do? And then, why did I bother sending it out again? What if I hadn’t seen that side entrance call for essays? And who is most likely to find the way in through the side door? 

From my initial round of submissions in 2010, my take on Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” was a finalist in a contest, which is the most encouraging form of rejection a writer can receive. And then I didn’t submit that piece again for five years, when I submitted it once at a time to seven outlets over eight months. And then “Marrying Absurd” won the creative nonfiction award from Ninth Letter, which feels like bragging to say. Confidence—or at least resilience and a good game face —was something I didn’t think I lacked until I looked back at my records. 

Confidence, from the Latin for trust. I had a sense of my path, but I’d misremembered the pace. Am I a poet or an essayist now? What determines the shape and speed of our writerly dreams? 

“I moved into nonfiction because that’s how things shook out,” Mary Mann tells E.B. Bartels in a multi-author interview at Electric Lit . Mann admits, “Maybe it was just the examples I had.” When I finally turned to nonfiction, I became absorbed intellectually by more types of essays, as had been the case with poetry years earlier. Bartels writes of Mann and others, “Almost every writer I interviewed told me that she first thought she was going to be a novelist. […] Instead, as you grow as a writer, nonfiction seems to choose you.” Bartels’s point is that those of us who write nonfiction don’t perceive it as a choice so much as necessary movement. 

This statement also reveals assumptions between what G. Thomas Couser, in Memoir: An Introduction, calls “the two sibling genres” of fiction and life-writing that “share a good deal in the way of technique.” Poetry seems left out of these shifts and comparisons. Yet Couser asserts, too, that “all literature is sometimes divided among these modes: lyric (expressive), narrative (storytelling), and dramatic (presentation through enactment).” When I headed to my MFA, I chose poetry (expressive) over fiction (narrative) because I was more fascinated by form than plot, not because I valued expression (or self-revelation) over storytelling. Form offers ways to shape space and time. That’s what drew me to poetry and then to the lyric essay. 

“Nonfiction feels like the only genre,” Elizabeth Greenwood tells Bartels. “I wish it were more of a decision!” Had I forced myself or been forced to pursue poetry? Was I really a nonfiction writer all along? Or was this path from poetry to an adjacent nonfiction the inevitable surprise? 

Greenwood surmises that nonfiction is an especially good fit for her because “I lived equally in my head as in the world.” Both poetry and nonfiction are equally in my head and in the world. To echo Greenwood’s words further, both poems and lyric essays offer “the luxury of following my curiosities.” Several years ago, an editor said of a short piece I’d written, “Any essay that can juggle both [the scientist Enrico] Fermi and [the childhood game] Mystery Date wins me over right away.” I enjoy seeing how many disparate somethings I can smoosh into a single essay—that is my way through. Adjacency enacted, in response to and as fuel for curiosity. 

[lyric essay = mind world]

Curiosity comes from two related Latin words, one meaning inquisitiveness and the other meaning careful, or diligent. 

Couser sees another distinctive quality of memoir that, to my mind, points to a similarity between poems and lyric essays: “memoir may also be structured entirely without reference to the passage of time.” Sven Birkerts, in The Art of Time in Memoir, puts it another way: “Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency.” Memoir—and I would argue the personal lyric essay too, as memoir-adjacent—can depend on the relationship between the mind and the world, on the interplay between what’s considered subjective and objective. 

While the craft of the personal lyric essay and memoir overlap, and while the range of creative nonfiction and the essay is wider and more varied than I’m discussing here, there’s something un-memoir about the lyric essay, too, something that undercuts or overshadows its I about-ness. something other than or in addition to self-revelation—an about-ness that is multiple. The lyric essay does not necessarily make the self the primary subject even when the self’s presence moves through the paragraphs. 

“The route is often associative,” the second paragraph of Citizen begins. 

In her book that is poetry and memoir and cultural criticism , Rankine uses the second person: you. 

Shawn Wen’s A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause: An Essay is a lyric biography of mime Marcel Marceau. Wen is not the subject; there exists no authorial I. Wen writes, “Time passes. It sputters and stretches. What matters is not the speed of light, but the speed of thought.” She describes Marcaeu’s power as a mime as a manipulation of time that’s akin to that of the lyric essayist: “The mime refashions time, sculpting it with a precision instrument. He can suspend or hasten it at will. He marches in place for three minutes and a lifetime has passed.” 

[lyric paragraph = space time] 

           ∴

[lyric essay = paragraph || paragraph || paragraph] 

The lyric essay prioritizes connection among this and this and this—then, there, now, here. Then, there, now, here—these are existing values for the lyric essay. Time and space serve as context for the self. 

In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses some external measures of her essays: “Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible.” She asserts, “I am an academic,” which comes with certain assumptions about what she is supposed to write and where she is supposed to publish. She points to “a fundamental misunderstanding of what I do.” The result is that her “ethnographies have too much structure and [her] sociology is a bit too loose with voice. A bit slutty it all is, really, jumping between forms and disciplines and audiences.” One value is ethnography, another is sociology, and she’s off the mark for each. She’s hitting a mark of her own making, the one she’s aiming for as “a black woman who thinks for a living.” 

Cottom goes on to say, “The essays in this volume dance along the line of the dreaded ‘first- person essay’.” But she isn’t trying to figure out how everything in the world is about her. Oh, the dreaded lyric essay, then. Her work is un-memoired and un-academic, and all the better for that double un-about-ness. 

All these constraints about who is supposed to write what—and how we label a piece of writing based on who’s written it—add up: “We [black women] have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movement theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us.” Not everyone takes the same path, and the same path doesn’t treat everyone the same way. Of the mind and of the world, Cottom describes herself as “few people’s idea of an intellectual, public or otherwise, and showing up anyway” to write essays. 

Maggie Nelson of The Argonauts talks of a similar issue in The Atlas Review, but her position is quite different than Cottom’s: “I’ve always written what I need and want to write, without thinking all that much about whether it’s personal or scholarly or esoteric or provocative or prose or poetry or whatever.” Such freedom of thought, of language! “I write about things that are typically coded as personal—the experience of having a body; of having sex, of having feelings, including ugly ones; anecdotes from my daily life; details about people I know and often love; and so on.” But she also says, “I don’t valorize the personal over the impersonal or the theoretical.” The self is not her only or primary subject matter. 

The personal and the theoretical, the subjective and the objective, memoir and research, biography and philosophy, emotion and intellect—it’s all possible in the lyric essay. Perhaps, it’s all necessary too. 

Birkerts suggests intuition of meaning emerged, for him, when “events and feelings […] arranged themselves into a perspective,” but he finds the word perspective, which is from Latin meaning to see through, too “fixed, even static.” Movement is necessary for lyric. 

The lyric essay occurs when the writer, in words borrowed from Birkerts, has “discerned the possibility of hidden patterns.” Likewise, in The Book of Delights, Ross Gay writes, “Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up.” Shortly thereafter, he writes of the route he walks home: “What compels us into such grooves, such patterns?” Wen (and Marceau) uses—sees, creates—patterns; scene descriptions recur, as do lists of items in various collections. Cottom’s ideas and conclusions emerge from patterns. 

Race is part of Cottom’s perspective, and the way events and feelings arrange themselves for her as a black woman. She always starts “by interrogating why me and not my grandmother?” Race is part of Gay’s perspective too: “Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind.

Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.” Like Nelson and Cottom, he writes of things typically coded as personal and plenty that’s of the world too. But each of us comes to the essay differently and are coded differently; position and speed vary. 

Race is part of Birkerts’s, Nelson’s, and Didion’s perspectives too—and mine as well. But as white writers, we are not often expected to acknowledge this. We should acknowledge it anyway. 

Patterns are iterations in and through space and time. They are instances; there exist things adjacent and implicit. The word pattern comes from the word patron, from Latin meaning defender, advocate, or model. Because the lyric essay discerns the possibility of hidden patterns, it is a model, a map of movement, a mockup of a trajectory of thought. It can be a way to defend, to advocate.

Why me? is not enough. Why me and not someone else? is a beginning. 

Braid: to draw a sword, to throw to the ground, to knit.

Prism: something sawed into pieces, something that throws light at angles. 

Mosaic: the work of the muses.

Web: something woven, like fabric.

Collage: something glued together. Both the parts and whole discernible. 

Hermit crab: a crustacean that uses an empty seashell for protection. 

Thank goodness I didn’t stop with Didion. I’d have gone only so far and not far enough. 

In “The School of Roots,” Hélène Cixous traces origins of and connections among words:

clean in English, immonde in French, immondus in Latin. She is considering about what is edible and what is abominable. A few pages later, she writes, “If I gather these beings to talk about them in the same way, if I am worried by the fate of birds and women, it is because I have learned that not many people—unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—can really love, tolerate, or understand a certain kind of writing; I am using women and birds as synonyms.” She is talking about hidden patterns and how she is not writing as others expect her to write—or to think. 

Her writing is a model of her thinking; it is of the mind. She is a philosopher, not a poet. 

No, that’s not quite right. In an interview with Kathleen O’Grady, Cixous calls her own work “philosophico-poetical,” adding, “my theoretical texts are carried off by poetical rhythm.” The word lyric is Latin referring to words sung to the music of a lyre, but I haven’t talked much about sound because others have written much about sound and lyric, especially in the context of poetry. I am talking about trajectory and patterns. 

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a book that opens with the story of her mother leaving her all her personal journals. The journals turn out to be blank. The title of this book is When Women Were Birds, so Cixous is not the only one to connect—somewhat arbitrarily, it turns out for both Cixous and Williams—the two creatures, women and birds. Ross Gay refers to Williams’s book in The Book of Delights, and I’ve referred to him in this essay. Cixous, Williams, and Gay are connected in my mind and now on the page. Is this enough adjacency? 

Those journals were white space. Of white space in essays, Bonnaffons says, “The white space might be read as the necessary separations between nodes of a network, or as intervals between distinct voices that together form a chord.” In an essay, meaning made of white spaces depends on the adjacent—the paragraphs—not on the blankness itself. 

In a different section of her essay, Bonnaffons points out, “Rankine’s book reminds us that whiteness is more like willful ignorance, disavowed knowledge. […] Citizen’ s spare blocks of prose on blinding-white paper serve to underline this notion: to force the reader to confront whiteness as a part of the text.” She also points to the “absence of writers of color” in a recent anthology of essays. The adjacent matters to the essay, and absence does not suffice in its place. 

On the next page of “The School of Roots,” Cixous is on to Ghandi. I’m not sure where she is or is going, but I know she’s somewhere and going somewhere. And soon she announces, “That is my theme for today: to be ‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy,” by which she means, “You no longer belong to the world.” You’re in the head. The un-ordered falls into place because she’s come back to those words for clean. She’s created an echo, a pattern. 

Writing, Cixous says, “is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. […] This does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently than our thinking and speech.” The lyric essay resists what Cixous calls “a huge concatenation of clichés,” yet works by a different concatenation, which is a word drawn from Latin meaning chained together. As Jane Hirshfield says in Nine Gates, though she is talking about a poem not an essay, it “begins in language awake to its own connections […]. It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.” In the physical and in the mental, in the world and in the head, in space and time. 

Hirshfield looks at origins and meanings, somewhat as Cixious does and as I have:

“Concentration’s essence is kinetic, and the dictionary shows the verb as moving in three directions,” namely toward a center, inward toward one’s own attention, and toward strength. Again, everything is moving, even if we’re not sure where it will end up or how long it will last. 

And yet concentration feels like stillness. 

“Sitting still,” Iyer suggests in The Art of Stillness, “as a way of falling in love with the world and everything it.” He posits, “Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.” The lyric essay depends on the world and the mind, on movement and paragraphs. 

Iyer also says, “So much of our lives takes place in our heads—in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation—that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.” Putting the world into words changes the thing I write about. And the thing itself changes the writing that embodies it. 

We’re going somewhere from here, from now, I’m sure of it. The trajectory of the lyric essay is the logic of movement and adjacency. We have a sense of where we are, but we can’t be sure until we’re somewhere else—and we don’t know exactly when we’ll get there.

More Craft Articles

Risking the Hug: An Examination of Sentimentality and Sincerity in Lars and the Real Girl by Daniel Abiva Hunt

Daniel Abiva Hunt holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, The Masters Review, CRAFT, Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches and studies fiction.

Poetic Endings: Nailing Down the Threshold by Dia Calhoun and Deborah Bacharach

Deborah Bacharach (left photo) is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review and a mentor with PEN America. She lives in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Dia Calhoun (right photo) is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Nashville Review, The Writer’s Chronicle; EcoTheo Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize and taught creative writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com.

The Manananggal as Mythmaking by Melanie Manuel

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She obtained her BA from UC Davis in English and Asian American Studies and is currently attending SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She is a recipient of the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She is the Production Editor for PI Online and teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies department. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine and North American Review , and she has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, and Zone 3 .

Delightfully Weird by Tommy Dean

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

• Mission and History
• The University of Tennessee Creative Writing Program
• Back Issues
• Grist Merchandise
• Fiction Reviews
• CNF Reviews
• Poetry Reviews

Submissions

• ProForma Contest

A Fan of Grist?

• Purchase Back Issues of Our Print Publication
• Buy Merchandise
• Submit to Print or Online Publication​

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.

On the Lyric Essay

by Ben Marcus

First published in The Believer, July, 2003.

The Genre Artist

If a story takes place, as we are told stories do, then who or what does it take that place from, and why is an acquisition verb—take—necessary to describe the activity of stories? Maybe it’s an unfair, literalizing question. Not all figures of speech need to be prodded for accuracy (although shouldn’t a phrase relating to stories, which are made of language, have some passing precision?). Stories would keep taking place whether or not we worried about what it meant for them to do so, or worried about what stories actually did instead. But if we poked at this strange phrase, which suggests a theft of setting in order for narrative to occur, we might also deduce that if a place is taken for something to happen in it, then this taking must happen at a specific time (that’s what the word “happen” asks us to believe, anyway). The verb “take” presumes duration, implies a moment (unless we  take a break from time or  take the opportunity to no longer experience time , options that are difficult, at best, to secure, unless we die). It is this specific time that is meant to concern us when we encounter what is likely the most well known (i.e., terrifying) story opener of all: once upon a time.

Imbedded in this innocent phrase, which I would like to prod for the rest of this paragraph until it leaks an interesting jelly, is a severally redundant claim of occurrence, perhaps the first thing a reader, or listener, must be promised (reader: consumer of artificial time). For the sake of contrast, to look at a more rigorously dull example, the opener “I have an idea” does not offer the same hope, or seduction, or promise (particularly if I am the “I”). Even the verb is static and suggests nothing approximating a moment. Time is being excluded, and look at all the people already falling asleep. “Once upon a time” is far more promising (something happened, something happened!). We might need to believe that the clock is ticking before we begin to invest our sympathies, our attentions, our energy.

Fiction has, of course, since dropped this ingratiating, hospitable opener in favor of subtler seductions, gentler heraldings of story. But it is rare not to feel the clock before the first page is done, a verb moving the people and furniture around (whereas “having an idea” does not allow us to picture anything, other than, possibly, a man on a toilet). The physical verbs are waiting to assert themselves, to provide moments that we are meant to believe in, and verbs, traditionally, are what characters use to stir up the trouble we call fiction. Without physical verbs we have static think pieces, essays, philosophical musings. There is no stirring, because generally there is nobody there holding a spoon. This will be an interesting distinction to remember.

Maybe this is as it should be, since Proust said the duty of the literary artist was to tell the truth about time. Aside from blanching at the notion of duty, which is one of the required notions to blanch at, it seems clear to me that Proust’s edict, interpreted variously, has served as a bellwether for most thriving traditions of fiction (which held true, of course, before Proust articulated it). If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a methodology, a criteria, a standard, a purpose (is there anything else left for fiction to have?), it would be time itself. Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to  become time . Without time, fiction is nonfiction. Yes, that’s arguable—we have Borges, Roussel, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Robbe-Grillet, after all, among others, to tell us otherwise, and it is in part their legacy, their followers (witting or not), whose pages will be shaken here until we have something that counts for a portrait of this anti-story tradition.

One basic meaning of narrative, then: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depictions of time.

It sounds facile to say that stories occur, but it is part of the larger, relentless persuasion that time both is and envelops the practice we call story. We cannot easily separate the two. Yet if time is the most taken-for-granted aspect of fiction writing, it would seem precisely like the good hard wall a young, ambitious writer would want to bang his head against, in order to walk and talk newly in the world of fiction (that’s still the desire, right?). To the writer searching for the  obstacle to surpass , time would look plenty worthy a hurdle. If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired  at this point (there’s time again, aging what was  once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without, and therefore, to grow or change, must.

Time must die.

John Haskell is among an intriguing new group of writers chiseling away at the forms of fiction writing without appearing exhaustingly experimental (read: unreadable). Haskell is working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well, literally timeless (which is not yet to say that his debut book is  for the ages ). Yes, I said “inert,” because things do not have to move to be interesting. Think mountain. Think dead person. Think thought. I say “think,” because Haskell is a thinker, and although he writes often about film, you could not film what he writes.

I Am Not Jackson Pollock contains some storylike moments, but it is primarily a new kind of fiction, one that, curiously, hardly seems interested in fiction at all (which is not to suggest that it reads autobiographically—the opposite is true, which makes a great case for secret-keeping). Haskell might be indebted to Borges, but not in the way most so-called imaginative writers are. There’s no obsession with infinity and worlds within worlds, no conceptual masterminding at work to showcase a stoner’s tripped-out, house-of-Escher mentality, not much that would qualify as being made up. Haskell is more interested in using modest, unassuming forms of nonfiction, as did Borges or Sterne (albeit Haskell does not perpetrate extravagant untruths): the essay, the report, the biographical sketch, the character analysis (this last is Haskell’s favorite, from  real people like Glenn Gould and Jackson Pollock, to film characters like Anthony Perkins’s innkeeper in  Psycho , to Topsy, the first elephant executed by electricity). Haskell does not write characters so much as he writes about them, and it is this willful instinct toward exposition that is so curiously distinctive and unusual in the story-driven world of most new fiction.

A fair question here might be this: where is the fiction in this, if these “stories” of Haskell’s refuse story and then faithfully essay to supply information, respectable information, analysis, and reflection, just as nonfiction might? And one fair answer might be: John Haskell’s primary fiction, overriding his entire project, the place where his fiction is located, is precisely in his puzzling gesture of calling these pieces fiction in the first place. He is fictionalizing his genre. Or, in other words, his fiction is genre itself. Haskell is not an artist in a particular genre, he is an artist  of genre.

To do what Haskell does is to take several genuine risks, which occasions a word or two about risk. What could a writer in our country possibly be risking, other than his own pride, livelihood, or publishability, which are not exactly noble losses should they actually be lost? (Many of us began writing without pride and publishability anyway, and I’m not exactly clear what livelihood is.) Yet risk is the most urgent exhortation of what we are supposed to take when we write fiction (which is somehow different from the kind of taking a story does when it takes place). Fiction is praised when it is called “risky,” but this sort of risk usually involves shattering, shameful disclosures. (I could fill the rest of this essay with examples of shattering, shameful disclosures, but maybe just one will do: while wrestling with my dog, experimenting on a new hold called “the Sumatra,” we ended up horizontal on the lawn, head to toe, and thereupon commenced a directed nuzzling, a purposeful mouth-to-balls activity, that in some quarters of academe is referred to as the sixty-nine, which then became a standard “variation” on the “Sumatra,” well into adulthood (especially into adulthood)). With secret-telling having become its own lucrative industry, it’s hard to fathom what a risk of subject-matter might be (though I’m certain better, scarier secrets are approaching in next season’s books, however ill-equipped my imagination is to conceive them).

Risks of form, on the other hand, might seem more provocative, more inherently interesting to those attuned to the established modes and means of fiction writing (Hey, you guys!), but the risk more often cited in these cases is the financial sort that a publisher takes in publishing such work. They risk not selling enough books. And they are sorry but they cannot take that risk (it is interesting that the writer is supposed to be risky while the publisher is not). Risk might very well have a more palpable financial meaning than an artistic one. So while it is no longer clear what literary risk is—perhaps the term has been molested to death, like those other harassed words: edgy, innovative, startling, stunning—it could be more appropriate to say that within the larger, hapless chance-taking of writing at all (when indifference is about the scariest, and likeliest, response most of us might face), writing fiction without story seems especially curious, willfully self-marginalizing, and therefore very much worth considering. (No, not all obscure literary gestures are “interesting,” but something akin to playing golf without one’s body, as John Haskell might be doing, is.)

The shopworn adage “show-don’t-tell” reinforces the ethos that fiction must have a story, and warns a writer away from discursive, essayistic moments and exposition, which apparently amount to a kind of quicksand for the writer (a statement that presupposes motion as a valuable aspect of fiction writing). Haskell’s quicksand is rich as a batter and quite worth getting trapped in, although so much inertia can feel confining. If we are to be cast in mud, and then smothered, we want our demise to be fascinating. Telling is supposedly insufficient, it cannot produce a quality demise, since it does not dramatize a moment, or in fact does not even supply a moment at all. Telling is stingy with time. Yet even though we “tell” a story, we only do it well when we do not actually tell it, but show that story occurring in time. Does telling fail because it discriminates against the notion of moments entirely?

Take this paragraph in Haskell’s story, “The Faces of Joan of Arc.”

Hedy Lamarr, through most of the movie, takes the side of those in authority, which is not the same as having authority. Obedience is a way of reconciling oneself to a lack of authority or a lack of choice. But it’s not the only way.

This is a funny (read: not-so-funny) way to start a section in a story, but this is Haskell in his psychological mode, and it’s a tone he turns to frequently, which can make parts of this book sound eerily similar to the  DSM-IV-TR Case Studies: A Clinical Guide to Differential Diagnosis . His exposition is dutiful and persistent, but he oddly does not seem to be using it to generate sympathy, which is what a narrative writer might hope for after disclosing details of character. Minimalism in fiction, which at its best extracted psychology purely from surfaces, would be anathema to Haskell. One of his favorite things to do, his pet point throughout the book, is to probe the interior conflicts  within a character, but the effect is rather more coldly intellectual than warmly empathic:

She creates a space between what she does and who she feels she is, so at least she can live with a little peace.He wanted to let whatever it was inside of him come out, and then change it, and by changing that he was hoping everything else would change. Inside that bubble he could relax and let who he was come out. She waited until what the camera wanted was fairly close to what she wanted, and although this wasn’t a perfect arrangement, she could pretend to stand it. … the man wanted to bring out whatever it was inside the boy.

Haskell is expert at clarifying the moments when his characters feel estranged from themselves. The defiance of Haskell’s title is a form of self-denial echoed throughout most of these stories. He is so shrewd at depicting this sort of moment, that for him it is apparently sufficient to carry whole stories. Once he has achieved the revelation, he seems ready to end his story. If he has a deficiency, it’s his inability to convert his fascinations into whole pieces of writing that prove the artistic adequacy of his idea. If Haskell is desperate to show us how people hide from themselves and conspire against their own better interests, working as multiple identities in agonizing contexts—which is, after all, a familiar enough idea routinely explored, or dramatized, by many writers—then it’s upon him to make our experience of this idea immediate, visceral, and potently refreshed. Maybe it’s not  upon him , but when the idea is centralized, as it is in Haskell’s work, and narrative is deliberately excluded, there is a risk when that idea does not seem novel.

To be fair, Haskell has no real comforting tradition to fall back on, to guide him in his efforts, so he must invent for himself what an ending, in this sort of writing, might look like. It’s an original path he has chosen, and it will be rewarding to watch this exceptional writer as he navigates this new territory for fiction.

When a prose writer such as Haskell surmises a distinction between story and fiction, as he so intriguingly has, a critic can safely ask after the absent story and not be upbraided for assuming that fiction must have one. A writer thus interested anyway in dividing the two projects risks an error of category, or at the least risks being read incorrectly (not that reading correctly sounds like a very compelling thing to be doing). But when, for example, David Markson, an expository novelist who fired the starting gun for fictions of information and proved that pure exposition can be alarmingly moving, who purposefully  tells instead of shows, is dismissed in  The New York Times for failing to provide a story in his novel  Reader’s Block , no discussion follows about why, exactly, fiction must have one (at 150 words in the book review, how could any discussion follow?). Nor do we learn what a story might have looked like in such an exquisitely felt book that, to summarize, catalogs the various ways historical figures have hated whole races of people and/or died by their own hands. (Yes, you should read this book.)

Markson should have presumably, under the  fiction-must-have-a-story criteria , zeroed in on one of his hundreds of characters and gone deep, doing that good old-time psychological work, the person-making stuff, dramatizing how such an interesting fellow had gone on to hate Jews and/or kill himself. Markson should have used more words like “then.” He should have sequenced. He seems to have forgotten that literature is supposedly a  time-based art.

Markson’s amnesia is one of the happy accidents of the last decade of fiction writing. By eschewing a fetishistic, conventional interest in character, or a dutiful allegiance to moment creation, to occurrence itself, Markson accomplishes what a story, slogging through time and obedient to momentum, arguably could not: a commanding, obsessive portrait of single behaviors throughout history, a catalog of atrocity that overwhelms through relentless example. In truth, it’s a novel that can be read as an essay, but unlike most essays, it’s lyrically shrewd, poetry in the form of history, and it’s brave enough to provide creepy, gaping holes where we normally might encounter context (the burden of the conventional essayist).

This might explain a new category of writing, the lyric essay, swelling special issues of literary magazines (such as  The Seneca Review ) and, in particular, a new, provocative anthology:  The Next American Essay , edited (orchestrated, masterminded, realized) by John D’Agata, the form’s single-handed, shrewd champion. The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all of the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that  none of this ever really happened that a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. The lyric essay is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it is apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret here is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers take note. Some of the best fiction is these days being written as nonfiction.

The Next American Essay proceeds chronologically from 1975 to 2003, from John McPhee (a re-animated Monopoly game) to Jenny Boully (all footnotes, no text), with D’Agata practicing his own artful transitions before each piece, waxing witty, smart, personal, mute, cleverly obtuse, passionate, lucid, myopic. D’Agata’s transitions alone, which show how alive an anthology can be, and would make any editor envious, provide a toolbox of categorically adulterous leapfrogs that could outfit a whole new generation of writers with the skills to launch an impressive and relevant movement of writing. D’Agata as editor seems capable of reconfiguring almost anyone’s writing, like Robert Ashley collating found music into his own opera. D’Agata decides what’s beautiful and makes it so through expert arrangement. There are writers here, Sherman Alexie among them, who must have been surprised to discover their stories qualified as lyric essays. D’Agata justifies the choice of Alexie by claiming that fiction is a protective term, providing shelter for difficult material, which is really essayistic in nature. All fiction writers should be so lucky.

The flagship practitioner of the lyric essay, who seems early on to have inspired D’Agata’s editorial imagination, is the Canadian poet Anne Carson. Under the banner of poetry, Carson has produced some of the most rigorously intelligent and beautiful writing of the last ten years: essays, stories, arguments, poems, most provocatively in her early collection,  Plainwater . Her piece, “Short Talks,” which she describes as one-minute lectures, and which moves through the history of philosophy like a flip-book of civilization, offering stern commandments and graceful fall-aways, simultaneously qualifies as fiction, poetry, and essay, and is championed protectively by ambassadors from each genre.

The loose criteria for the lyric essay seems to invoke a kind of nonfiction not burdened by research or fact, yet responsible (if necessary) to sense and poetry, shrewdly allegiant to no expectations of genre other than the demands of its own subject. If that sounds strangely like fiction, several of the writers included here, Harry Mathews, Carole Maso, and Lydia Davis among them, first published their pieces in that genre, and will no doubt continue to. Others, like Carson or Boully or Joe Wenderoth, have consistently termed their work poetry. Thalia Field has published her singular writing under the label of fiction, although it seems better read as poetry. Here, of course, it is an essay, as are works of autobiography. David Antin shows up with more of his astonishingly boring diaries, continuing his decades-long ruse of consequence. Thankfully he cannot single-handedly ruin an anthology. David Shields provides a Lishian catalog of clichés that accrue curious meanings and expose how revealing banal language can actually be. And stalwarts like Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and Susan Sontag throw in with fierce, ambitious contributions that actually always were essays, although this lack of genre-hopping is in the minority.

Sadly absent from what is otherwise one of the most significant anthologies published in years are a few true voices of the essay who would have fit right in with these other inspired eccentrics, among them: Daniel Harris, Lawrence Weschler, Joy Williams, and Dallas Wiebe.

One instantly wonders how the chosen genre appellation liberates or constricts the writer, and whether or not John Haskell, absent from D’Agata’s all-star selection, would have fared better (whatever that might mean) under a different label, with someone like D’Agata warming-up for him. Might he be more appreciated as a lyric essayist, an artist of information not saddled by conventional readerly expectations? I ask because Haskell seems to suffer slightly when evaluated as a fiction writer, when one brings hopes of story to his book, which are hard not to bring. There’s the implied tedium of fiction not driven by story, particularly if a reader is expecting one (of course tedium, as Robbe-Grillet showed, can have its thrills). With storyless fiction, one suspects an intellectual lesson is at hand, instead of entertainment (this must either be fun or it must be good for me), with a reader’s pleasure not high on the author’s agenda. Expectation can flatten a reader’s willingness to forestall desires for story. It is similar to feeling forever trapped in a flashback, waiting for the current scene. A reader saves attention and energy if he senses that what he’s reading is not primary, the thing itself, and that  the real story is ahead, and attention is the commodity the writer is striving to create, at all costs. Haskell’s book could very nearly be shelved uncontested in the film studies section of the bookstore, and here it might perform its rogue fictionalizations with more astonishment, reversing his style of ambush, so to speak, since it is much more a collection of film studies with bursts of unreality, than it is a burst of unreality with moments of film studies.

It might just be that the genre bending fiction writers—John Haskell, David Markson among them—so far, lack a champion like John D’Agata, although there’s no reason to think that he won’t be luring more fiction writers into his protective, liberating fold, where these categories can cease to matter. 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.

Tags: Ben Marcus , Essay

• Notes from the Fog
• New American Stories
• Leaving the Sea
• The Flame Alphabet
• Nicolas Jaar—Let’s Live for Today
• NOTES FROM THE FOG reviewed in The Scotsman

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Historical Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Browse content in Art
• History of Art
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• History by Period
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Intellectual History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• Political History
• Regional and National History
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Language Teaching and Learning
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Christianity
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Browse content in Law
• Company and Commercial Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Criminal Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Legal System and Practice
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Browse content in Economics
• Economic History
• Browse content in Education
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Browse content in Politics
• Asian Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• European Union
• Human Rights and Politics
• International Relations
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Theory
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Public Policy
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Sociology of Religion
• Reviews and Awards
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

23 The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation

• Published: October 2022
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

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.

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• The Lit Hub Podcast
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Beyond the True-False Binary: How the Internet Helped Transform the Lyric Essay

Hugh ryan on truth and post-truth in creative nonfiction.

Twenty five years ago, the vast majority of my reading was both bounded and continuous—bounded, because most of my reading material came in discrete packets (a book; a magazine; the salacious graffiti of a seedy bathroom stall), and continuous, because although I might put a book down and come back to it, or have several books going at the same time, I was not generally bouncing back and forth between unrelated reading experiences simultaneously.

Today, I’ve already checked Twitter seven times while writing the sentence above, and now my brain is a whizzing fizz of climate change, K-pop, and “hot” takes in three languages and a hundred voices.

Over the course of the last generation, the Internet has changed our common reading experience; now, as a teacher of creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, I’m seeing first-hand how this new world of reading has transformed the instinctual writing voices of my students. An epochal shift is occurring, and from our great humming mass of distributed machines my students are summoning an unexpected ghost: lyricism.

The lyric essay is having a moment—despite the fact that many of these students could not offer a definition of the lyric essay, describe its techniques, or explain why they used them. But this is to be expected, as this change is not the precious reaching of a precocious undergrad, but an upstream change in the base reagents my students are combining in the alchemical process that is writing. To understand why this is happening, and how to take advantage of it, we need to first step back and define the lyric’s place in the ecosystem of essays. And to really do that , we first have to define what essays themselves are made of.

The Three Components of Essays

All essays have three fundamental components: self, content, and form. The self is the point-of-view of the piece, the storyteller; the selective intelligence of the author, which both chooses the moments that make up the piece and imbues each moment with the unique perspective that best serves the piece’s totality. The content is the thing we are writing about; what Vivian Gornick so masterfully defines as “the situation” (the plot or external object under consideration) and “the story” (the meaning, or internal realizations of the narrator). Finally, form is the shape of the words on the page, how they connect, spiral, or explode.

Think about it this way: all essays are journeys to new knowledge or states of being. The self is the shoulder we the reader are perched on for the journey. The content is the landscape we are traveling through and the path we are on (in Gornick’s terms, the moment-to-moment stuff we see is “the situation,” and our later reflective understanding of the path we took is “the story”). The form is our mode of locomotion, whether we are walking slowly and methodically from start to finish, or leaping wildly from beginning to end and back again.

The Three Kinds of Essays

Building off of this: there are also three main kinds of essay: personal , research , and lyric . All three have self , content , and form , but each kind has a corresponding component that is of dominant importance.

Personal essays are distinguished by their focus on self. The unique point of view of the storyteller is the fundamental reason to read the essay. The content is mostly there to provide a space for the author to think or have experiences, and the reader isn’t meant to learn that content.

Research essays are distinguished by their focus on content. Like journalism, they prize explaining something to the reader; but unlike journalism, the author is directly implicated—they are a part of the group, idea, or experience being explained, and through that explanation, the reader comes to understand the author better, as well as the content.

Finally, lyric essays are distinguished by their focus on form. In these essays, fundamental aspects of meaning are contained in or created by their shape on the page. For example, in lyric essays white space, fragments, repetition, juxtaposition, caesura, braids, changes in tense, and non-linear-organizing structures are frequently used to suggest or change the relationship between the written words and their meaning.

A Rabbit Hole Into the Concept of Truth

The divisions above aren’t arbitrary; they are indicative of a deeper reality about essays. The concept behind creative nonfiction is easy—tell the truth—but the truth, it turns out, is subjective. The three kinds of essay (personal, research, and lyric) are defined as much by their relationship to the truth as they are by how they are written; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the way they are written is a sotto voce attempt to communicate the author’s understanding of “the truth” as a concept.

How does this work? Well, we can divide all statements into three truth values: true, false, or outside the true-false binary (neither true nor false, both true and false, shifting between true and false, not categorizable as true or false, etc.). In writing, we call these relationships to the truth nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The different kinds of essays draw both their narrative power and their literary techniques from these pre-existing genres.

Personal essays fall closest to fiction; they are primarily about illustrating the unique point of view of the author. They smooth out the randomness of life to turn it into narrative. The truth exists in the meaning, not the details.

Because the goal of the personal essay is to get the reader to see a certain perspective, they often play fast and loose with the truth (on a small scale). For instance, almost every great personal essayist says that the details are necessary, but they don’t matter. So long as the overall intention is not to deceive the reader, invented detail—in this way of writing—is seen as helping the reader to get at the truth of it all. For example, here’s essayist Jo Ann Beard discussing truth in her book Boys of My Youth :

I remembered the bare bones, and then the rest of it is just constructed from what I know of the people involved. Fuzzy memory doesn’t usually work in an essay; you have to be detailed…the dialogue and various other things were constructed for the pleasure of the reader. And, I must add, the writer… I don’t think anybody could read [BOYS OF MY YOUTH] and think they were reading a factual account of someone’s childhood.

Research essays , on the other hand, double down on nonfiction; they are primarily about explaining some external reality or experience the author has had. The truth in these essays exists in the facts.

Research essays are thus detail oriented. They use a lot of proper names and dates and quotes, and the author can’t make things up without losing my trust as a reader. Atul Gawande, a surgeon turned essayist, is a strong advocate for this kind of truth in nonfiction. In The Guardian in 2014 , an interviewer noted that Gawande felt the “idea of precision” is something writers could learn from doctors. “As a doctor,” he said, “you have to notice the particular shade of blue the patient turns. You need to be very factual.”

Here we have the difference between research and personal essays: Gawande says we have to be very factual, Beard says no one would ever assume her work was factual. (For my money, the best craft essay on this topic is T Kira Madden’s “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy.”)

Finally, Lyric essays work the techniques of poetry, the area of writing where we rarely ask if something is true or not. Thus, they forefront the idea that truth is in some fundamental way uncertain, unknowable, or uncommunicable, and that life is not at all like a story: it is confusing, conflicting, discontinuous, random, and with multiple or unclear meanings.

Lyric essays tend to be quite subtle, occluded, and difficult, because they often abandon the conventions of normal prose writing. Lyric essays have to teach readers how to understand the rules by which they function, and that can be hard.

In an interview with the journal Sierra Nevada in 2017 , lyric essayist Matthew Komatsu discussed his approach to using lyric juxtapositions to move outside the true-false binary. “[You have] two different ways of viewing it, and I think when you put those two next to each other, if you do it right, there can be a very poetic aspect…where you can essentially represent the different viewpoints, neither being more valid than the other.”

We can see this technique play out in Komatsu’s tender meditation “When We Played.” Originally published in the journal Brevity , it compares his experiences as a kid playing soldier, with his experiences as an adult in the military in Afghanistan. But Komatsu makes this comparison via form, not the written word, and by leaving it thus unspoken, he makes it impossible to analyze in terms of its “truth.”

“When We Played” is composed of short numbered sections. Odd sections are italicized, even ones aren’t. This suggests to the reader some kind of harmony, or braid, that unites all the odd sections and all the even ones. Here is a short excerpt from the beginning:

1. When we played war as boys, we never died. Dead was a reset button, a do-over, a quarrel over who killed who. Maybe we played fair…

2. All those close calls. That time in Afghanistan the SUV drove past the white rocks and into the red ones—white all right, red is dead—a local in the backseat jabbering jib. What did he say? Translator: “He say, WE ARE DRIVING INTO MINEFIELD.”

3. When we played war as men, the wounded on their backs—they called our names, their mothers’ names, the names of all gods past and present…

Komatsu’s form leads us to expect that section three will be a segment about him as a child. When instead we have another adult section, paralleling the sentence structure of section 1, the unexpected juxtaposition suggests an equivalency between the boys and the men—an ineffable comparison built via placement and font. And this brings us back around to the Internet.

The Poetry of Tabs

In many ways, writing on the Internet (not for publication, just regular daily communication) has quietly routinized us to lyric techniques. Lyric essays are often identifiable at a glance, in the same way poetry can be distinguished from prose. Like Komatsu’s essay above, these pieces often move in small segments and employ white space, placement, and font to express ideas. They might repeat a word or phrase to explore multiple meanings from it; or place images, ideas, or phrases next to each other to suggest meaning without putting it into words; or break traditional grammar and sentence structure; or change POV suddenly; or abandon chronological time in favor of some other organizing principle (often alphabetical); or dive back and forth between seemingly unconnected threads; or speak in many voices simultaneously.

Where else do all of these things happen? On Twitter. In the comment section. In discord chats and news aggregators and blogs and the million other online spaces that now make up the vast majority of the quotidian, functional nonfiction we read every day.

But these techniques aren’t just more common because of the Internet, they’re also more useful, because the Internet has pushed us firmly into a post truth world. Deep-fake videos, endless stories of online grifters, and the anonymity of the Internet have tricked or will trick all of us at some point. Moreover: just the constant and routine exposure to other points of view, different stories, and critique from unexpected angles have led us to be suspicious of the Truth (capital T) and our ability to reach it or tell it overall. How does nonfiction function in the hands of writers who aren’t sure the truth exists? Lyrically.

When employed in creative nonfiction (like essay writing), lyric techniques literally complicate the ability of the reader to find truth in the written word: they leave things unsaid and therefore undefinable; they draw multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings from one word or phrase; they break down sentence structure, embracing verb and tense confusion; they take the story out of linear time, which destroys an easy understanding of causality and motivation, etc.

Thus, the Internet has spent decades teaching my students to read lyric forms, and simultaneously, doubt the truth. It has created (or made visible) a problem—the unknowability of truth—and at the same time, sculpted a language to talk about it. This is not a process that will stop or reverse tomorrow, and I suspect that I will continue to see more lyric techniques in the essays of my students, peers, and friends in years to come. As a writing teacher, I don’t see it as my job to push my students towards one form of truth over another, but it is essential that I understand how the techniques they are using communicate the truth, and why they are reaching for these techniques, right now, instead of more traditional ones.

Previous Article

Next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

• Craft Essays
• Teaching Resources

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.

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Click here to cancel reply.

© 2024 Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. All Rights Reserved!

Designed by WPSHOWER

How This Joni Mitchell Lyric Inspired Hillary Clinton’s Latest Memoir

• By Tim Chan

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

Hillary Clinton is back in the spotlight this month but not for the reasons you think.

While the 2024 presidential campaign is into its final few weeks, Clinton has largely stayed out of the spotlight, save for a Democratic National Convention appearance to formally endorse Kamala Harris . But the former presidential candidate and Secretary of State is in the public eye once again, on the heels of a personal new book that offers what publishers are calling Clinton’s most “candid views on life and love, politics, liberty, democracy, the threats we face, and the future within our reach.”

Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty

$20.98 $29.99 30% off

$20.99 $29.99 30% off

Titled “ Something Lost, Something Gained, ” the new book was released September 17 and quickly shot to the top of Amazon’s bestsellers chart (just behind a new Dolly Parton cookbook ).

Considered to be an epilogue to her 2016 presidential campaign, the new book chronicles Clinton’s time on the front lines fighting the “firestorms of national politics” that have played out in recent years, with the Secretary of State writing about the dangers of extremism and the campaign against women’s rights. But the book also finds Clinton reminiscing about her personal life, from her upcoming 50th wedding anniversary, to her new role as grandmother. As the publisher notes state, “She takes us along as she returns to the classroom as a college professor, enjoys the bonds inside the exclusive club of former First Ladies, moves past her dream of being president, and dives into new activism for women and democracy.”

Of course, there have been some public setbacks in her personal life and career, and the former First Lady writes in the intro about drawing inspiration from Joni Mitchell, and the music legend’s 2024 Grammy Awards performance . “She held court like a queen,” Clinton writes, of Mitchell’s poignant rendition of “Both Sides Now,” adding that she was watching from home “in rapt attention.”

The song had long held meaning for Clinton, who writes that she’s been a fan of Mitchell’s since the Sixties (the Clintons even named daughter Chelsea after the lyrics of Mitchell’s song, “Chelsea Morning”). “Some days it felt as if looking ‘at life from both sides now’ gave me enormous clarity — about right and wrong, and what it would take to make progress,” Clinton writes. “Other days, it just felt confusing.”

“Personally and professionally I’ve come through so many highs and lows,” Clinton goes on to confess. “Times where I’ve felt on top of the world and others when I was in a deep, dark hole. After all these years,” she reveals, “I really have looked at life and love ‘from both sides now.'”

From publishers Simon & Schuster, the 336-page hardcover is Clinton’s second official memoir, after 2003’s “ Living History, ” which chronicled her time in the White House with husband Bill Clinton. You can also listen to the audiobook for free with a free trial to Audible here .

$20.20 $23.09 13% off

The audiobook is narrated by Clinton herself and has a run time of 13 hours and 25 minutes. The new memoir is also available for download on Kindle.

The former Secretary of State has authored or co-authored a number of other books in recent years including “ What Happened, ” which detailed her unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign, and the bestseller, “ It Takes a Village ,” which was first published in 1996.

Where to Stream Every 'Transformers' Movie Before the New One Hits Theaters This Friday

• Autobots, tune in
• By Jonathan Zavaleta

These Are the Best Places To Buy Air Jordans Online

• shopping guide
• By Oscar Hartzog and Kyle Lamar Rice

Jaime Camil Won't Gatekeep His Favorite Hotels In Mexico City (and Beyond) With New Expedia Travel Shop

• Bienvenidos to your next trip
• By Sage Anderson

Where to Watch 'Agatha All Along' Online

• witch watch
• By Oscar Hartzog

Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles Kick Off 'Gold Across America' Tour: Here's Where to Find Tickets Online

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.