This summer, I’ve given myself a project:  study the lyric essay.  Over the last year of grad school I’d heard it mentioned in passing, but never really thought about it—too busy trying to figure out what a regular essay involved, really.  But now that I have some time, I’m interested to discover what the lyric essay is.

 So when I heard that the lyric essay is, loosely paraphrased, a sort of cross-over between CNF and poetry, I felt like I had to try it.  In fact, I actually think a couple of the pieces I wrote this year could be formed into lyric essays, and that’s one of the things I’m working on this summer.  Less tied to narrative and logic, the lyric essay has so much freedom.  This is what the folks at the Seneca Review had to say about what, exactly, a lyric essay is:

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language.  It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.  The lyric essay does not expound.  It may merely mention.  As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, “It depends on gaps…it is suggestive rather than exhaustive.”  It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or side-winding poetic logic…Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically—its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.

So.  I wrote an essay, fragmented, sort of a montage which I wanted to create a feeling.  At workshop most people felt it didn’t add up to one thing yet, and also that creating a feeling isn’t a good base for an essay.  Sigh, and they were right.  I love the idea that an essay can be so free and quirky and still be an essay.  On the other hand, though, maybe that’s just too much freedom for a novice like me.  Maybe I need to master the essay form first before I apply for a specialty.