examples of lyric essays

Writing Without Limits: Understanding the Lyric Essay

Sean Glatch  |  February 28, 2023  |  7 Comments

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

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

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

What is a lyric essay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal essay vs. lyric essay: An example of each

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

Personal essay example

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

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

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

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

Lyric essay example

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

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

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

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

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

Lyric Essay Vs Prose Poem

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

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

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

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

The two share many similarities, too, including:

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

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

Lyric Essay Examples

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

“Lodge: A Lyric Essay” by Emilia Phillips

Retrieved here, from Blackbird .

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

“Spiral” by Nicole Callihan

Retrieved here, from Birdcoat Quarterly . 

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

“Star Stuff” by Jessica Franken

Retrieved here, from Seneca Review .

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

5 approaches to writing the lyric essay

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

1. Start with your narrative

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

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

2. Identify moments of metaphor and figurative language

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

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

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

3. Investigate and braid different threads

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

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

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

4. Revise an existing piece into a lyric essay

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

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

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

5. Write stream-of-conscious

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts on the lyric essay form

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

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

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

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

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

thanks for sharing

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

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 Fiery Writing Prompts for Aries Season

4 Poetry Collections to Read After You Listen to Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well

Good For a Laugh: How to Tap into Your Comedic Side in Your Writing

An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

Rebecca Hussey

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

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

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

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

What is the Lyric Essay?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM THE NARRATIVE OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON,

WHO WAS TAKEN CAPTIVE WHEN THE WAMPANOAG

DESTROYED LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETS, IN 1676"

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

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

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

10 of the Best Examples of the Lyric Poem

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A lyric poem is a (usually short) poem detailing the thoughts or feelings of the poem’s speaker. Originally, lyric poems, as the name suggests, were sung and accompanied by the lyre , a stringed instrument not unlike a harp. Even today, we often use the term ‘lyricism’ to denote a certain harmony or musicality in poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest short lyric poems written in English from the Middle Ages to the present day.

1. Anonymous, ‘Fowls in the Frith’.

We begin our whistle-stop tour of the lyric poem in the thirteenth century, a whole century before Geoffrey Chaucer, with this intriguing and ambiguous anonymous five-line lyric:

Foulës in the frith, The fishës in the flod, And I mon waxë wod; Much sorwe I walkë with For beste of bon and blod.

A ‘frith’ is a wood or forest; the poem, written in Middle English, features a speaker who, he tells us, ‘mon waxë wod’ (i.e. must go mad) because of the sorrow he walks with.

Because the last line is ambiguous (‘the best of bone and blood’ could refer to a woman or to Christ), the poem can be read either as a love lyric or as a religious lyric.

We have gathered together more classic medieval lyrics here .

2. Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘ Whoso List to Hunt ’.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, hélas , I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind …

One of the most popular and enduring lyric forms has been the sonnet: 14 lines (usually), in which the poet expresses their thoughts and feelings about love, death, or some other theme. In the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet the poet usually brings their ‘argument’ to a conclusion in the final rhyming couplet.

Here, however, Sir Thomas Wyatt offers an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, but he introduces the distinctive ‘English’ conclusion: that rhyming couplet. In a loose translation of a fourteenth-century sonnet by Petrarch, Wyatt (1503-42) describes leaving off his ‘hunt’ for a ‘hind’ – in a lyric poem that was possibly a coded reference to his own relationship with Anne Boleyn.

3. Robert Herrick, ‘ Upon Julia’s Clothes ’.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes …

This very short lyric poem, by one of England’s foremost Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, is deceptively simple. It seems to be simply a description of the woman’s silken clothing, and its pleasure-inducing effects on our poet.

But the poem seems to hint at far more than this, as we’ve explored in the analysis that follows the poem (in the link provided above). It might be described as one of the finest erotic lyric poems of the early modern period.

4. Emily Dickinson, ‘ The Heart Asks Pleasure First ’.

The Heart asks Pleasure – first – And then – Excuse from Pain – And then – those little Anodynes That deaden suffering …

So begins this short lyric poem from the prolific nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86).

The poem examines what one’s ‘heart’ most desires: a common theme in lyric poetry. The heart desires pleasure, but failing that, will settle for being excused from pain, and to live a life without suffering pain.

5. Charlotte Mew, ‘ A Quoi bon Dire ’.

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a popular poet in her lifetime, and was admired by fellow poets Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy. ‘A Quoi Bon Dire’ was published in Charlotte Mew’s 1916 volume The Farmer’s Bride . The French title of this poem translates as ‘what good is there to say’. And what good is there to say about this short poem? We think it’s a beautiful example of early twentieth-century lyricism:

Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead …

Follow the link above to read this tender lyric poem in full.

6. W. B. Yeats, ‘ He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ’.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light …

The gist of this poem, one of Yeats’s most popular short lyric poems, is straightforward: if I were a rich man, I’d give you the world and all its treasures. If I were a god, I could take the heavenly sky and make a blanket out of it for you.

But I’m only a poor man, and obviously the idea of making the sky into a blanket is silly and out of the question, so all I have of any worth are my dreams. And dreams are delicate and vulnerable – hence ‘Tread softly’. But Yeats, using his distinctive lyricism, puts it better than this paraphrase can convey.

7. T. E. Hulme, ‘ Autumn ’.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night – I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer …

This short poem by arguably the first modern poet in English was written in 1908; it’s a short imagist lyric in free verse about a brief encounter with the autumn (i.e. harvest) moon. This poem earns its place on this list of great lyric poems because of the originality of the image at its centre: that of comparing the ‘ruddy moon’ to a … well, we’ll let you discover that for yourself.

8. H. D., ‘ The Pool ’.

After Hulme’s free verse lyrics came the imagists – a group of modernist poets who placed the poetic image at the centre of their poems, often jettisoning everything else. H. D., born Hilda Doolittle in the US in 1886, was described as the ‘perfect imagist’, and ‘The Pool’ shows why.

In this example of a short free-verse lyric poem, H. D. offers what her fellow imagist F. S. Flint described as an ‘accurate mystery’: clear-cut crystalline imagery whose meaning or significance nevertheless remain shrouded in ambiguity and questions. Here, H. D. even begins and ends her poem with a question. Who, or what, is the addressee of this miniature masterpiece?

9. W. H. Auden, ‘ If I Could Tell You ’.

Lyric poems weren’t all written in free verse once we arrived in the twentieth century. Indeed, many poets of the 1930s, such as the clear leader of the pack, W. H. Auden (1907-73), wrote in more traditional forms, such as the sonnet or, indeed, the villanelle: a form where the first and third lines of the poem are repeated at the ends of the subsequent stanzas.

In this tender lyric poem, Auden explores the limits of the poet’s ability to communicate to the world – or perhaps, to a loved one?

We have analysed this poem here .

10. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘ Syntax ’.

Duffy’s work shows a thorough awareness of poetic form, even though she often plays around with established forms and rhyme schemes to create something new.

First published in 2005, ‘Syntax’ is a contemporary lyric poem about trying to find new and original ways to say ‘I love you’. Duffy’s poem seeks out new ways to express the sincerity of love, explored, fittingly enough, in a new sort of ‘sonnet’ (14 lines and ending in a sort-of couplet, though written in irregular free verse). A love poem for the texting generation?

We introduce more Carol Ann Duffy poems here .

2 thoughts on “10 of the Best Examples of the Lyric Poem”

• Pingback: Monday Post – 16th December, 2019 #Brainfluffbookblog #SundayPost | Brainfluff
• Pingback: 10 Interesting Posts You May Have Missed in December 2019 – Pages Unbound | Book Reviews & Discussions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Discover more from interesting literature.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

TriQuarterly

Search form, the beautiful, untrue things of the lyric essay.

Oscar Wilde’s most famous critical dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” begins with a well-meaning but uninformed man named Cyril inviting his male friend Vivian outside: “Don’t coop yourself up all day in the library,” he says. “Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.” [1]

Vivian, however, wants nothing to do with Nature, and complains of her “lack of design, her curious crudities, and her extraordinary monotony.” [2]

And thus Vivian and Cyril embark on a grand debate about the role of nature in art, and the problem with what Vivian calls “dull facts,” “depressing truths,” and “careless habits of accuracy.” “There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true,” says Vivian. And “if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.” [3]

Of course, this dialogue is about what Wilde saw as the insufferable realists of nineteenth-century fiction, so what does it have to do with us, a bunch of twenty-first-century essayists?

Vivian, as Wilde’s mouthpiece, gives us the answer near the end of the debate: “Those who do not love Beauty more than Truth,” he says, “never know the inmost shrine of Art.” [4] And in the context of our discussion, it is quite possible that those who do not love beauty more than truth may never know the inmost shrine of the essay.

Put differently, “The Decay of Lying” champions art for art’s sake. Read with an ear for the craft of creative nonfiction, the dialogue has all the workings of a manifesto on the lyric essay—what I might call truth for art’s sake. Consider Wilde’s four basic doctrines:

1. Art never expresses anything but itself.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature.

3. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. [5]

Here, I shall briefly discuss the first and last of Wilde’s statements.

First, art never expresses anything but itself — or, perhaps, for the purposes of our discussion, and with apologies to Wilde, the artist never expresses anything but him- or herself.

In “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian explains the doctrine this way: “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, [and] dreams.” [6] Art may use nature for its building blocks, but the final product is something entirely new, something reflective, not of the world, but of the inner workings of the artist. Consider Basil Hallward, the fictional painter who captured so beautifully the young Dorian Gray in Wilde’s only novel. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,” claims Basil. “The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” [7] Something similar could be said of the lyric essay—that it relies on the building blocks of memory, meditation, research, speculation, and even narrative, but that in the final product, the essay’s greatest revelation is the essayist. After all, Montaigne’s famous question was not “What do I see?” but “What do I know?” Likewise, Honor Moore calls the prose of the lyric essay a “vehicle of individual emotion,” [8] and D’Agata and Tall have called it a home for “idiosyncratic meditations.” [9] Ultimately what we want from a lyric essay is the interior knowledge of the writer. As Wilde says, “the vision . . . of the artist, is far more important to us than what he looks at.” [10]

Consider the arresting intimacy of Brian Doyle’s eulogistic essay, “Kaddish,” which relies on both structure and content to capture the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. [11] The essay consists of 217 one-line descriptions pulled from obituaries of the victims. [12] More than a tribute to the deceased, the essay attempts to re-create the writer’s emotional experience of that day. Each line falls down the page, evoking images of victims falling from the towers, but also giving each victim his or her own moment in time. As we read, we are simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and arrested by the reality of their individual humanity. What’s more, the title, “Kaddish,” tells us this essay is a prayer—not merely a private one, but a recitation, a ritual of sorts. Doyle hasn’t simply reiterated the public mourning of the obituaries, he has created a work of art that gathers and distills the public record and reframes it in a textual structure that reflects that day’s relentless barrage of images, as well as Doyle’s personal, prayerful reaction to the people in those images. It is a record not of what he saw or read, but of what he felt.

Phillip Lopate has registered skepticism about the lyric essay for its “refusal to let thought accrue to some purpose.” [13] But what if that is precisely the point—to capture thought and emotion before it has accrued to some external determination? Oscar Wilde wrote that the “basis of life . . . is simply the desire for expression.” [14] Regardless of any larger social, political, or spiritual implication, the form of the lyric essay is primarily a vehicle for expressing the interiority of the artist. As Wilde scholar Lawrence Danson puts it: “Realists claim that they refer to a world out there; Wilde claims that the only significant out-there begins in here.” [15]

And that brings us to the second of Wilde’s doctrines that I will discuss here, his fourth and final, and for writers of the lyric essay, perhaps most controversial: the doctrine that says, “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

And before you wonder if I’m going “there” with this presentation, before you divide yourself off in either the D’Agata/Shields/Dornick camp on the left or the Gutkind/Lopate/Levy camp on the right, before we start fighting about truth in nonfiction and the relative fallibility of memory, and that oversimplified claim that all writing is a lie, let me just say that if Oscar Wilde were here to witness such a debate, I like to think he’d rub his hands with delight, and say we were all missing the point.

Ezra Pound said that literature is language charged with meaning. [16] If that is true, then perhaps the essay is truth charged with meaning. But how, you might ask, do we infuse truth with meaning? That is where Oscar Wilde comes in. His warning about “our monstrous worship of facts” is a call for resistance to realism that “finds life crude, and leaves it raw,” and is born of a desire for art that dictates terms to nature, and not the other way around. [17] “Nature is no great mother who has borne us,” writes Wilde. “She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.” [18] The meaningfulness that we draw from narrative, that we draw from juxtapositions and associations, that is born of research and speculation, these are the beautiful untrue things that are the proper aim of art—not the mere mimesis of reality, but the generation of new truths out of its building blocks.

As an example of this type of lying at work in the essay, let us reconsider one of the sacred tenets of the genre—that the essay imitates the mind at work. The idea is as old as Montaigne, who wrote, “I chiefly paint my thoughts.” [19] Scott Russell Sanders claims that the essay is “the closest thing we have on paper to a record of the individual mind at work and play.” [20] And as I read the lyric essays of writers such as Eula Biss, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and others, and experience the meandering, fragmented, associative playfulness of their work, I see what Montaigne and Sanders mean. And yet, there’s something about this idea that also bespeaks a Wildean Lie.

The venerable Carl Klaus writes, “It’s an alluring idea . . . to affirm . . . that the essay reveals the mind of the essayist.” But Klaus “wonders how one could possibly make such an inference without being privy” to that mind. As he sees it, “the mind’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.” [21]

If Klaus is right, then the notion that the essay re-creates the mind at work is precisely the kind of beautiful , untrue thing that lends both beauty and truth to a lyric essay. Consider for a moment Wilde’s own evidence for this concept—the French impressionists. “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,” asks Wilde. [22]  According to Wilde’s logic, fog didn’t exist until artists gave us a way of seeing it. In other words, the romantic image of a London fog is a lie that art has told us about nature. However, such a lie does not mean that these images are untrue, but merely that such images are a truth about the artist, and not necessarily a truth about the world itself.

Likewise, where—if not from Montaigne, White, Didion, Biss, and others who play in zigzagging, fragmented forms—do we get our wonderful ideas about the associative, reflexive, even lyric way that our minds process information? The essay might show the mind at work, but only because the essay has given us an idea of how to think about our minds in the first place. My true mind is scattershot, it goes off in dead ends, gets stuck on song lyrics, it daydreams, falls asleep, turns on the television and tunes out. My cultivated mind on the page of an essay, in contrast, wants always to be alert to the connectivity of things. As Klaus writes, “Even if one could get inside the head of another human being, I have a hunch that its workings would turn out to be far messier than anything in a personal essay.” [23]

Now, in the first half of this paper, I’ve argued that expressing interiority is the primary role of the lyric essay. But here in the second half I’m arguing against the notion that interiority can be expressed at all, maintaining that such expression is little more than one of Wilde’s beautiful untrue things. But far from negating the first half of my argument, this apparent contradiction proves that the artful life is a necessary part of expressing interiority.

Consider other artful lies of the lyric essay, such as the selective cutting away of reality and superfluous details, or the amplified significance of certain experiences, certain memories, certain people. Or the way a lyric essay might adopt a particular form—a final exam, a series of found postcards, a Google map—and the way such forms generate new ways of seeing that go beyond the seemingly inexorable facts of nature. “Art itself is really a form of exaggeration,” writes Wilde. “And selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” [24]

Of course, we must not take Wilde’s advice entirely to heart. I’m not sure I would say, as he did in regard to writers of realist fiction: “we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.” But I might venture that in all the discussion and occasional vitriol about the ethics of information in nonfiction, we may have overlooked the ethics of art and its integral role in helping us render the interior emotional experiences of our lives—those experiences that must be translated to one another if we are to, as Lopate so aptly put it, help each other feel “a little less lonely and freakish.” [25]

So how do we balance our desire to represent real experiences with art’s insistence on the lie? How do we take what nature has given us and move beyond it, not with an arrogant disregard for what actually happened, but with a humble willingness to let the essay uncover what actually matters? After all, if Wilde is right about nature being our creation, then any responsibility we have to nature is first a responsibility to ourselves.

Judith Kitchen put it this way: “The job of the lyric essayist is to find the prosody of fact, finger the emotional instrument, play the intuitive and the intrinsic, but all in service to the music of the real. Even if it’’s an imagined actuality. The aim is to make of not up. The lyre, not the liar.” [26]

Consider what Kitchen is saying here: the heart of the lyric essay is not reality, not nature, but the music of reality, the music of nature as conceived in the mind of the essayist—the music of beautiful untrue things, which, as Wilde says, is the proper aim of art.

[1] Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Intentions (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1904), p. 3.

[3] Ibid., p. 9.

[4] Ibid., p. 47.

[5] Ibid., p. 49.

[6] Ibid., p. 20.

[7] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

[8] Honor Moore, “Origin of the Species,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 102.

[9] John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, “New Terrain: The Lyric Essay,” Seneca Review 27, no. 2 (1997): 3.

[10] Quoted in Paul L. Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 30.

[11] Brian Doyle, Leaping (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2003), pp. 132–40.

[12] Brian Doyle, in email conversation, 14 February 2014.

[13] Phillip Lopate, “A Skeptical Take,” Seneca Review , 37, no. 2 (2007): 31.

[14] Wilde, Intentions , p. 36.

[15] Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 55.

[16] Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 2010), p. 36.

[17] Wilde, Intentions, p. 11.

[18] Ibid., p. 37.

[19] Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

[20] Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” in Essays on the Essay, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 32.

[21] Carl Klaus, The Made-up Self (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), p. 20.

[22] Wilde, Intentions, p. 37.

[23] Klaus , Made-up Self , p. 20.

[24] Wilde, Intentions, p. 21.

[25] Phillip Lopate, Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor, 1996), p. xxxii.

[26] Judith Kitchen, “Mending Wall,” Seneca Review 37, no. 2 (2007): 47.

Share TriQuarterly

About the author, joey franklin.

Joey Franklin's essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle , The Norton Reader , Gettysburg Review , and elsewhere.  He was the 2011 winner of the Sport Literate essay contest, and his first collection of essays is due out through University of Nebraska Press in 2015. He teaches creative writing and literature at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The Latest Word

• Craft Essays
• Teaching Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

I came to define a lyric essay as:

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

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

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

Flash Essays

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

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

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

Segmented Essays

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

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

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

Segmented essays are also known as

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

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

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

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

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

Braided Essays

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

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

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

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

Hermit Crab Essays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s real,” I murmured.

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

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

“This is the corner of Division and I!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I smiled, “I am.”

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

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

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

“How do you mean?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I smile. “ Exactly .”

_____________________________________

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

Julie Marie Wade

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

Lyric Essays: Structure and Content Essay (Article)

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

What makes the lyric essay unique?

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

Are lyric essays similar to other pieces of writing?

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

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

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

• Poetry v. Prose: Their Differences and Overlaps
• Growth Through Ingenuity and Enterprise
• Rhetorical Figure in "Fond Memories of Home" Poem
• The Peculiarities of Discussing the Theme of Death in Poetry and Prose
• Is Rap Poetry? Essay
• Stylistics of Poetry and Prose: A case of Contrast
• Modern Sins: "Gluttony" by Francine Prose
• “The Red Wheelbarrow” Poem by Williams
• Vaccines and Autism: Separating Facts From Fiction
• Characteristics of the Love Poetry of the Renaissance
• An Essay Template Planning and Writing
• Writing on Preservation and Distribution of Food
• Writing a Process Analysis Essay in Six Steps
• Writing on a Descriptive Essay Topic
• An Evaluation Essay Is Not Cause-Effect Essay

Carol Ann Davis Matt Donovan Tomás Q. Morín Lynda Fleet Perry Emilia Phillips Lawrence Sutin David Wojahn Caitlin Doyle Chelsea Gillenwater Matthew Phipps Susan S. Williams

Lodge: A Lyric Essay

When the Sleepwalkers at dawn finally stumble into their rooms, or slump over the steering wheels of their hubcapless Impalas, the seagulls land and become a landscape over a landscape, as snow does: a contour line, a living topography of the Budget Inn on the corner of N. Lombardy and Brook in Richmond. When the flock lifts, it lifts at once, proportional to its placement across the steep roof, the cars, and open lot, so it seems something essential, even soul-like, rises—the way in movies a ghost flickers over a body at death: superimposed blue, see-through and shining: confused, maybe even smiling, until it looks around and sees itself, or who it was, there, on the ground.

I dreamed I wandered lost in a city in only a lace nightgown, a blanket over my shoulders. I’d escaped a high-rise hotel after an elevator crashed into the basement, a column of fire rising and lashing through the steel doors on the top floor, the stairs blocked by avalanche. I don’t remember how I got out, and therefore wasn’t sure I had. (Was I a ghost? a projection?) I came to on a sidewalk in a deserted part of town (the buildings boarded up, the garbage in heaps on the curb uncollected) without knowing where I was or where I was going. But then I found my car double-parked, running, the key in the ignition.

Frank Zappa wanted to buy up billboards along the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System and plaster them with two words: DOUBT EVERYTHING

Today, two suns: one in the rearview, one in the side mirror. The meter money rattles in the door to the bass drum on Feist’s “The Bad in Each Other.” As I turn a corner, my shadow laps me.

I drive from Richmond to Raleigh, Raleigh to Fredericksburg to Gettysburg, on two-lane highways for two days. I keep my notebook open on my lap to write down the names of motels I pass, partly because they’ve devolved from Technicolor postcard destinations with mod geometric signs, to roadside slumps of peeling paint and mediocre marquee promises, housing stereotypes and imagined meth-dens—and I admit, I love ruin, and therefore, seeing them, a quarter plunks into the vending machine of my heart and down drops that generic American Nostalgia—

ROYAL INN * Waterbeds *

CRESCENT MOTEL Clean Room  *  HBO

CARDINAL MOTOR COURT Travelers Welcome Micro Fridge

JOHNSON’S LODGE Vacancy / Single Double / Color TV

—and partly because they seem like my late anxieties become totem: unrest, excess, (anonymity).

Driving from Gettysburg to the Baltimore Amtrak, I listened to a Hopkins radio segment on the link between sleep cycles and depression. A neurologist advised listeners emotional health could be improved by turning off the television and computer at least two hours before bed, as electronic screens emit a blue light whose rapid frequency fools the body’s circadian into thinking it’s a time for wakefulness, a bright re-beginning.

One summer, at age ten or eleven, I couldn’t sleep and so watched the full run of Nick-at-Nite, Lucy at nine to Mr. Wizard at five, sucking on Mayfield banana popsicles and chipping away at Rita’s Italian ices with a tongue depressor, crawling beneath the uncurtained back windows from the den to the kitchen so no one, no intruder surely there, could see me. My mother, severely depressed, slept all night with a hair dryer on to drown out noise; she held it like a drowsy cowboy on watch with his gun. I was terrified, and rightly so, of fire, and so I stayed awake, for when I closed my eyes I saw her shadow moving down the hall, eyes aflame, smoke sibyling from her mouth.

The insomniac speaker of Larkin’s “Aubade” is terrorized by this thought:

The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,    Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

For three years I’ve had bouts of nighttime terror: about my ten-year-old half brother’s death and my diagnosis of stage IV melanoma a year later. With cancer, it helps knowing where the cells are; when one doesn’t know, Not to be here , one feels one can’t control it, contain it.

With my brother’s death, my great transgression—which I grieve but cannot help—has been to imagine his body underneath the soil, in his last Halloween costume, a Superman uniform, the premortem atrophy turned postmortem decomposition. I wish he were ash. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere , so that he could be free again to dwell in thought.

When dark times loom, we cliché. Night is coming. Whenever we have hope, we cliché. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Both used as metaphors for the approach of death.

Once a black bag was wheeled out of the Budget Inn. Police tape cracked like a whip in the wind. Another time, another day at the red light, I look through an open door, second from the end; inside, a shirtless man with Manson-esque beard and hair, danced in front of the television rabbit-eared to the news.

GET YOUR DAILY EXERCISE RUN AWAY FROM SATAN GRAVEYARDS ARE FULL OF GOOD INTENTIONS EXAMPLE IS A LANGUAGE ANYONE CAN READ

(some recent favorite church marquees)

My mother tells this story:

The father of my first best friend, the preacher at the Grace Reformed Baptist Church, asked me, age four, if I’d died that day, where would I go, heaven or hell?

I answer again and again in the retelling: My mom doesn’t let me go places like that by myself.

Miscellaneous roadside signs, line breaks original.

MAGIC TOUCH All Girl Staff FLYING CIRCUS AIRPORT AMERICAN EX-PRISONERS OF WAR HIGHWAY

On an unsalted stretch, bested by ice, I submit to $51/night and color television at the Boston Inn in Westminster, Maryland, the only place open. The incandescent light reviving a moth’s orbit that had stilled in the darkness preceeding my artless entrance on the chain gang of shadows, anxious and shaking. My pack slumped on the chair. The odor fecal, of cigarettes. My mind wanders: Whose knees were burned on the geometric carpet? A hole melted into the bedspread’s vanitas of flowers. The dead bolt latches but the doorframe’s busted, gold chain thin as a necklace. My tire tread caked in snow.

On the lobby RCA, a football game in whiteout conditions in the snowy reception of antennas where we lose the players in a huddle.

Entering this room, I enter a room inside myself with four corners and a human form, crouched in a shadow the bathroom light falling on me and falling on me again in the mirror. I want to hear the form speak to me, my own voice echoing off the tile before I leave with a refund, but as I recall absence can only be heard by dogs.

Weeks apart, I drive past two abandoned churches. First, a one-room wooden with peeling white and copper-green paint, broken glass windows, on Mt. Olive Lane in Southern Virginia. Alongside the No Trespassing signs, a little one:

FUTURE HOME OF The Wedding Chapel

The other’s outside Biglerville, Pennsylvania. I barely got a look at it, except its yellowed marquee:

NEW HOPE CHURCH

Bachelard: “It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

Which is why it is better to live in language rather than out of language.

But a word might change us, our landscapes, our movements, how we see our country, literally and figuratively. As if by traveling on the interstate, we might actually move between states of being.

On our way to see our first place in Richmond, we got lost on a street that was the same name as the street we were supposed to be on but didn’t connect to it. As we were driving, slowly to see the numbers, I caught sight of a woman on the concrete porch of one of the craftsmen. She had on several layers of skirts in autumn colors, a peasant shirt, her hair wrapped in shimmery purple. She looked like one of the vintage coin-op fortune tellers, a gypsy , although I have never seen a real gypsy, and worry now even calling her that I’m buying into America’s greatest product: cliché.

She beckoned to us, waving come in, come in, come in.

I fantasize about inventing a downloadable voice setting for GPS: VIRGIL™ who might provide us with more insightful directions. Ex . You will leave everywhere I guide you, we hope.

A partial concrete list of my abstract fears:

Vibrating bed. Shag carpet. Blacklight forensics. Synthetic waffle batter hissing on a press at the continental breakfast. Candy bars in the minifridge with the little bitty bottles of Jack. Bedbugs. Plastic mattress covers. Oily telephone receivers. Bedside table Bibles. Peed-in pools. Sticky and/or stained sheets. Fist-sized holes in the wall. Bullet-sized. Busted-in door frames. Snapped door chains. Snuff films. A friend’s coke cut on my bedside table. Thin walls. Thin doors. Peepholes. Hair in the drain. Unidentified fluids. Unknowns, ineffables. Unspeakables .

The preacher, I remember, had a waterbed.

Was it to be more like Noah?

I’ve always sympathized more with the unnamed thousands, millions who died in the flood, who didn’t believe Noah or in the coming apocalypse. I like to think they weren’t jaded with God but rather hopeful that they would keep what they had, that they wouldn’t get washed away. Their bodies are never mentioned, not during the flood. Not after the arc lands. I like to think that those people lived, a kind of Calvino-esque city, a world under the surface world—permanent against the changeable winds, the temporary currents.

So many of the old tourist motels outside of Gettysburg National Park are now low-income apartments. Often, driving home in the early evening, I’d spot residents in the parking lot igniting charcoal in a scrap-metal grill with lighter fluid.

A baby draped over a shoulder like a rifle.

A car hood up.

Or no one at all.

One still has a vending machine, the only light for a mile.

Before my mother married him, my stepfather—addicted to pain pills, recovering with pain pills after a car wreck caused by falling asleep at the wheel after a handful of pain pills—lived in the Extended Stay America. We would bring over beef tips and baked potatoes from Steak-Out and eat them out of to-go Styrofoam, Law and Order on the television.

Before that, we lived with my father near a cemetery, the thought of which, lingering just beyond the dark shape of the woods, would keep me up at night, as if ghosts could travel underground and rise into my room like radon. I had recurring nightmares of tombstones erupting through the floorboards.

A cemetery seemed then as much a transient space as a motel, or a mobile home like where my husband grew up.

These places seemed not to create life, but carry it.

I pass an empty field bordered by trees, a tattered billboard in its center:

Future Home of the FOUNTAIN OF LIFE    

   Contributor’s notes

return to top

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access Options
• Why Submit?
• About English
• About the English Association
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Terms and Conditions
• Publishers' Books for Review
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

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

• < Previous

Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

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

• Permissions Icon Permissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Biography

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

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

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

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

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

Emerson, ‘Experience’, p. 30.

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

Levine, p. 47.

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

Ibid., p. 33.

Ibid., p. 25.

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

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

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

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

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

Bluets , p. 6.

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

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

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

Bluets , p. 1.

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

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

D’Agata and Tall, p. 7.

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

Ibid., p. 5.

Bluets , pp. 30–31.

Ibid., p. 31.

Parsons, p. 384.

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

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

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

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

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

Bluets , p. 30.

Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Ibid., p. 34.

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

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

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

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

Bluets , p. 71.

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

Ibid., pp. 32, 39.

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

Bluets , p. 46.

Bluets , p. 77.

Ibid., p. 74.

Parsons, p. 385.

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

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Contact the English Association
• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1756-1124
• Print ISSN 0013-8215
• Copyright © 2024 The English Association
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• 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.

“Nature Is Literally Our Larger Context”

The cedar waxwing is the glutton of songbirds, known for stuffing itself—even to the point of incapacity—with fruit. In “The Cherry Birds,” Kateri Kosek traces the path of a 1908 act “relating to the protection of fruit from the cedar waxwing” through the Vermont state legislature and, more broadly, considers the value humans assign to the species with which we share our space.

Writing about birds is not new to Kosek; her essay “Killing Starlings”—about a seasonal job that required her to kill invasive species—appeared in Creative Nonfiction #40 in 2011. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in Orion , Terrain.org , and Catamaran , and she teaches college English and mentors students in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. “The Cherry Birds” is the winner of the $1,000 Best Essay prize for Creative Nonfiction #69: “Intoxication.”

CNF: The research for your prize-winning essay “The Cherry Birds” began when you saw a cedar waxwing killed by your housemate’s cat. You write, “But before the waxwing fluttered away and flopped to the ground, before I turned away and went inside so as not to see the cat finish it off, we stood there in the driveway guiltily admiring the finer points of its plumage.” What about that moment inspired you? Did you know right away that you would write about these birds?

Kosek: Well, it’s always exciting to see a bird that up close, and a waxwing isn’t a bird that comes to feeders, that you spend a lot of time looking at. It was beautiful, which becomes a key premise in the essay, but mostly I was struck by the tenuousness of the moment, how fragile yet tenacious the bird was, fighting for its life. I did write about it immediately, though not with any sense of the essay you see before you, or of how waxwings specifically would figure into it. At first, the poor waxwing worked metaphorically for how I was feeling at the time. Two essays I had read also colored the incident. One was “Les Oiseaux,” Angela Pelster’s very short lyric essay that opens her book Limber, in which a huge flock of waxwings descends on her yard in the winter and devours the berries off the trees, both magically and destructively (my epigraph). And Leslie Jamison’s essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e)” grappled with notions of sweetness and indulgence and included a passage about birds that were, I think, drunk on berries and banging into windows. So I was kind of stuck on the idea of gorging on sweetness even though it may do us in. I forget why, exactly, but at some point perhaps a few months later I did a search on waxwings. I kept coming across that story of the Vermont senators in 1908, which set the course for the essay. But I am first indebted to my housemate and her cat.

CNF: This essay takes a historical and personal approach to the story of the cedar waxwing. How did you organize your research? Did you find that there was some research that had to be left out?

Kosek: This is by far the most “researchy” piece I’ve written. I definitely tried to represent everything that I found (there were lots of examples to choose from), but it’s possible I could have kept looking. Most everything I used was available online. Perhaps somewhere out there, obtainable through more old-fashioned research, is an old newspaper article that would illuminate what happened when the bill to exterminate waxwings came before those senators. Not having found that, I just worked that gap into the essay.

So, similar to leaving things out was deciding when to stop combing through the research and just write the essay already. As a poet I tend to prefer a limited amount of material, when I can see everything on a page and just tinker with it. This amount of research was a little overwhelming. The sources were kind of slippery and finding them was haphazard. Luckily the legislative journals from Vermont in 1908 were digitized on a Vermont government website. Where I found those, all sorts of supplemental government-issued writings popped up, such as old agricultural bulletins. Several of those happened to contain extensive guides to different bird species, based on the research into their diets to prove that they were (mostly) helpful to farmers. But there was a lot of overlap with variation, and sometimes it was hard to tell what something was and when it was written. Submitting for this theme —intoxication—was actually very helpful. I had thought about the essay thematically for a long time, but the deadline forced me to stop staring at potentially endless amounts of material and select enough to make a narrative.

CNF: Did anything in your research surprise you?

Kosek: Some attitudes toward ecology and environmental protection were more progressive than I might have expected for the early twentieth century. I was surprised to find the origins of the “keep cats indoors” campaigns; apparently, some states even wanted to license cats. A State Fish and Game Commissioner report, after establishing how helpful birds were for agriculture, crunched some numbers about how many might get killed by cats and ended, “Those who are really bird lovers and want to have birds nesting close to the house should try the experiment of dispensing with the family cat for one summer and note the increase in bird life about the garden.” Another article was about how we shouldn’t dismiss the “lower animals,” for they can do us much good—insects keeping other insects in check, for instance. It contained the delightful sentence, “Even such a humble animal as the common garden toad deserves our sympathy and encouragement.” And I was surprised at how popular bird-watching was, to the point of newspapers running lists of the new bird species seen migrating through the locale. That was one branch of this essay I didn’t initially plan on, but searching for the phrase “cedar waxwing” in old newspapers turned up a lot of lists like that, as well as some funny items, like an Audubon-sponsored ball to which guests wore outfits that mimicked the plumage of a certain bird, and then everyone had to guess the birds … maybe something someone should bring back?

CNF: Both of the essays that you’ve published in Creative Nonfiction are about birds. What attracts you to writing about nature?

Kosek: Well, I’ve been a birder since I was a little girl. I certainly didn’t share such a questionable hobby with my peers growing up, but the more I wrote, the more I decided to claim and tap into that rather unique area of knowledge. Nature in general has always anchored me, so it seems to follow that it also anchors most of my writing. It also embodies mystery, which is important for my writing. I’ve always written more personal things too, but often in the slightly veiled form of poetry, where nature may exist symbolically. In prose, recapturing extended dialogue and scenes intimidates me. I’m more comfortable describing exterior elements—birds and landscapes and my movements in them—and they also provide that bigger picture that’s necessary for creative nonfiction to avoid falling in on itself. Nature is literally our larger context. The backdrop of the natural world can prevent writing from being too purely confessional. Where I live, in a river valley in western Massachusetts, surrounded by mountains, hiking on the Appalachian Trail regularly, it’s hard for me not to notice nature on a daily basis.

CNF: How does your background in science overlap or feed into your writing?

Kosek: Actually, somewhere in cellular biology lab my freshman year of college, I abandoned wanting to be a scientist, and went in the direction of literature and writing. I wouldn’t have made a very good scientist, because I can’t read science without being struck by the poetic implications of it. So, you could say I “use” science to render it lyrically. But I’m also very interested in what it has to say. The poetry I’ve written in the last few years has a strong environmental consciousness to it, though it’s also very personal. I weave in various effects of climate change, the disruption of weather patterns, my longing for snow in the winter. We can’t afford to ignore science these days. But art and imagination are important vehicles for it.

That first essay that appeared in CNF, “Killing Starlings” (Issue #40/Winter 2011), I wrote after a seasonal job teaching environmental education, and the scientific principle that says invasive species = bad was at the heart of that piece, but of course it’s more complicated than that. After that essay, I noticed that I was fascinated with the larger concept of how we ascribe value to other species, particularly birds—which ones we as a culture cherish or ignore, which we deem okay to hunt, or despise, and how those biases change if one is a birdwatcher. So science certainly plays a role in that discussion.

CNF: The passage that describes the cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries made me laugh out loud. Did you start writing knowing that humor would be an important element, or is that something that developed as you wrote?

Kosek: No, I definitely started in a more poignant mindset, but the more I read, the more I found the writings about birds in the early twentieth century to be inherently humorous, and I suppose I wanted to convey some of that. The very notion of passing moral judgment on birds based on their habits or diets, all of which we now view objectively through the lens of science, is endlessly amusing. (Though I’m not against anthropomorphizing the natural world to a certain degree. If we don’t see ourselves in nature, we risk distancing ourselves from it.)

I’m also pretty aware that writing focused on the natural world carries a stereotype of reverence and awe—and, often, boredom for the reader—so I suppose humor is one element that works against that. Most writers who write about nature these days find something that erodes that stereotype. It’s also worth mentioning that although I had a draft and many notes, I rewrote this essay with the theme of “intoxication” in mind, so perhaps I was drawn to the many facets of the word, one being the humorous connotation. But from the start I was captivated by the fervor with which these birds can gorge themselves, so “intoxication” seemed fitting—also the way their beauty can intoxicate us, or the way we need to let ourselves be intoxicated by the natural world if we hope to protect it.

CNF: Your essay ends with a lovely but tragic description of “Albatross chicks on Pacific islands, crammed to the throat not with insects, but with bright bits of plastic” and “stunned, jeweled bodies of warblers piled below a skyscraper.” What would you like the reader to take away from these final paragraphs? Do you believe that writers also have an obligation to be advocates?

Kosek: Ideally, yes, but being an advocate could take so many different forms, I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody what to do, writers or readers. Of course—using that example—don’t throw your plastic in the street, but I’m not sure a reader in America can greatly impact the problem of plastic in the ocean, which stems mostly from six or so nations on the other side of the world. It is easier, though, to put decals on our big glass doors so birds don’t fly into them. So sure, there are measures we can all take, but mainly I just hope readers are at the very least more aware and attuned to something the essay touches on after reading it—maybe the birds themselves, or maybe the current administration’s regular attempts to roll back laws that protect endangered species and environmental regulations. 

I certainly find it easier to write than to be an advocate. It’s hard and overwhelming to keep track of every issue and make sure I’m doing something about it, but as a writer, I can follow an obsession with one particular place or bird or story and present that to readers. Of course, the hope is that art can make a difference because people need images and stories in addition to science and facts. A student of mine recently quoted a line from Words that Sing: Composing Lyrical Prose by Mary Ylvisaker: “language has the power to transform people … by adding to or altering the images in the subconscious—the place where 90% of our opinions are formed and decisions made.” I liked that scientific explanation to the sense that writing can translate to societal change.

CNF: What are you working on now?

Kosek: I plan to put together a book of essays exploring what I mentioned above regarding our various attitudes towards other species, particularly birds. One I worked on recently focuses on the Bicknell’s Thrush, a bird considered rare and prized because of its very limited mountain range. Lately, I’m drawn to braided lyric essays, because they allow me to be more of a poet while still writing essays. So that one also has some threads about me and my proclivities. I have another lyric essay about swimming that needs finishing. And a few months ago, I traveled for the second time to Poland, where my father is from, so I have a lot of material from that floating around.

We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. By continuing we’ll assume you’re on board with our cookie policy

What is a Lyric Essay

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

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

Lyric Essay Topics

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

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

Guidelines on Writing Lyric Essays

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

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

How to Start a Lyric Essay

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

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

Essay Body Paragraphs

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

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

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

Lyric Essay Conclusion

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

Lyric Essay Outline

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

Lyric Essay Examples

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

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

Related Topics

We can write a custom essay

According to Your Specific Requirements

Sorry, but copying text is forbidden on this website. If you need this or any other sample, we can send it to you via email.

Copying is only available for logged-in users

If you need this sample for free, we can send it to you via email

By clicking "SEND", you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We'll occasionally send you account related and promo emails.

We have received your request for getting a sample. Please choose the access option you need:

With a 24-hour delay (you will have to wait for 24 hours) due to heavy workload and high demand - for free

Choose an optimal rate and be sure to get the unlimited number of samples immediately without having to wait in the waiting list

3 Hours Waiting For Unregistered user

Using our plagiarism checker for free you will receive the requested result within 3 hours directly to your email

Jump the queue with a membership plan, get unlimited samples and plagiarism results – immediately!

We have received your request for getting a sample

Only the users having paid subscription get the unlimited number of samples immediately.

How about getting this access immediately?

Or if you need this sample for free, we can send it to you via email.

Your membership has been canceled.

Your Answer Is Very Helpful For Us Thank You A Lot!

Emma Taylor

Hi there! Would you like to get such a paper? How about getting a customized one?

Get access to our huge, continuously updated knowledge base