After reading this, if I were me, I'd say, "So let's hear your lyric essay you little contrarian complainy pants." To which I reply, I'd share it with you, but not publicly at this point since it's under submission right now (having already garnered a personal rejection from SR; to which I wish I could reply to answer their question about the gist of the piece).
Anything else I could say about this paper would just be repeating what the paper itself says. And I'm just not that tautologically repetitive.
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(Draft 1.5)
CRW 315 – Lyric Essay
March 2, 2009
Sense and Antisense
It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article. It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation. It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine. It is not a soft doctrine nailed to the door of an empire and accompanied by a daring refrain that echoes through the centuries—Here stand I, I can do no other! It is not bureaucratic Endlösung meant to redact an ethnicity from the genetic collective.
It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.
But it can be any of these things.
The it, in this case, is an ephemeral collection of words called a lyric essay.
Unlike a more formal writing, a lyric essay does not necessarily state clearly its subject, with introduction and thesis statement, then outline references and arguments that compare or contrast view points or facts, it instead might not even mention what its true subject really is, talking, as it were, around that point. In other words, it is based entirely on the subjective and not the objective.
If a metaphor for all writing is a river flowing along its course, then technical writing (such as scientific papers or an instruction manual) would be a fairly direct, smoothly flowing stream, in which one could reach at any time with being swept away by rapids (which might be adventure fiction), poetry could be seen as a babbling brook of pleasant cascades that shimmered over smooth rocks and glittered in dappled sunlight (haiku being droplets of water clinging to the leaves and flowers growing along the shoreline), and the lyric essay then would be an oxbow in a meandering river plain—a place where the stream once flowed regularly, but a variance in course left this bend in the stream separated from where it once ran. Like the subject in a lyric essay, to describe the oxbow, one could tell of what the river used to be, but is no longer.
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―It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article.
In his piece, "The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto," David Antin tells a story about shopping with his wife for a new mattress because she has back troubles. On the page, his words appear much as a poem would, breaking like verses in modern, unrhymed, poetry. But, as the title suggests, this is a postmodern piece, and uses its form to call attention to itself, and, as a lyric essay, really isn't about shopping for a mattress at all:
"so i felt there was no reason to get rid of this
mattress that had been promised to us by a salesman who said
it would last the rest of our lives i figured we were going to live
long lives i didnt think we were anywhere close to dying so
neither was the mattress" (113)
Antin, then, is discussing holding onto things of the past, aging, and the vacuity of language, especially in regards to consumer sales and goods. At the end of the piece, he and his wife have purchased a new mattress and have been sleeping on it for a while. His wife still has her back troubles, but they are not as bad as they used to be. Antin concludes,
"if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way
to go go for it straight ahead because its not likely to be
any worse than anything else" (122)
On the surface of his context, what Antin probably intends here, is that having been overwhelmed by consumer choices for a mattress, one is likely to be about as good as any other, and that a mattress—or any thing—is not likely to impact your life to the point of irrevocably altering it in any significant manner. Whereas, if this excerpt was from a "formal" informational article, one could easily argue that walking lost in a forest, a given direct can most certainly be much worse than another.
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―It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation.
In Joan Didion's essay "The White Album," she weaves her own life in among those of many notable people in the late 1960s, but never quite elucidates exactly what it is she's attempting to reveal. "We tell each other stories in order to live," she says at the beginning, but then the story she relates becomes an exercise in pretzel logic in attempting to decipher it. At least part of this is touching upon the more familiar ground of memoir, as she reveals early in the piece psychiatric information which might be her way of offering the reader evidence that she is an unreliable narrator.
This, on one level, would lend an emotional gravity to the piece, but her narrative becomes convoluted to the point that it is not, indeed, memoir nor dissertation, nor even an argumentative tract about the era of the 60s, the personalities of the famous names she constantly mentions, nor even, really, herself. She offers almost random bits of information—like jig-saw pieces with which we are perhaps supposed to put together to figure out what it is she's telling us. With the promise at the beginning that we tell stories in order to live, it seems worthwhile to assemble these jig-saw pieces. With a more formal essay, such as that of a memoir, we might do so. But this is a lyric essay, and so the jig-saw pieces are randomly collected from a number of different puzzles, and a logical assembly is not possible. Didion implies that she knows this is the case, "writing has not yet helped me to see what it means," she tells us at the end of the piece. And that is, one could argue, the point: the era and its people did not make sense—neither at the time nor in hindsight when we try to understand what happened—and so her telling this story is not supposed to be pieced together and figured out with logic and reason, however Escherean the staircase we follow may be.
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―It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine.
Reason and logic are definitely inapplicable to the essay by Harry Mathews, "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)." Evidenced by the word-play in the title, this essay gives the appearance of a exotic recipe from the land of renowned cuisine. But the dish described in the piece would be infeasible to prepared—bordering on the physically impossible—thus being a farce, as well as the essay being an example of a story-within-a-story, creating an entendre because the essay, as well as the fictive dish he details, is double stuffed.
Not only does Mathews use the recipe of a meal to tell a story on one level, in the middle of the cooking instruction, he unravels a story about a song that should be sung at one point in the preparation.
"It tells the story of a blacksmith's son who sets out to find his long-lost mother. She is dead, but he cannot remember her death, nor can he accept it." (187) Mathews continues with his tale about this fictitious song that is sung in the middle of preparing an impossible dish traditional to a fictitious town in France (which, some may say, hardly exists in reality at all). The connection, we are told, between this song and the farce double being made, is "an analogy between the stars and the holes in the lid of the roasting pot." (90)
On the surface—ignoring the fictitious nature of the dish, the town, and the song—this essay is about cooking a rural French dish. On another level, it concerns the loss of tradition and the willful forgetting of the past. And it is done so with the humor of irony, and a lyricism that combines traits of folklore, ballads, and cookbooks.
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―It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.
Of all the lyric essays read from D'Agata's collection, few contain the elements that are usually considered integral to clear written communication. In many, there is no thread of causality, either in plot, narrative, or theme; that is, some connection between one idea and the next which, linked together in some manner lead the reader to a conclusion. There is little that could be designated as conflict in many of these essays. And conflict in any written work, be it article, poem, or story, is commonly thought of as being essential to drawing a reader through from beginning to end.
This is not to categorically state that anything described as a lyric essay doesn't have causal relationship or conflict, as we have seen in Mathews' piece, some of them display these characteristics. But without some sense of what it is, the lyric essay rests at a dangerous point in the spectrum of the written word.
At its best, a lyric essay—like poetry (to steal a line from William Rose Benét)—suckles honeyed words from the poisoned lips of life. It can be use form and content to share information or impart emotion where a more linear, traditional form of the written word cannot. At its worse, it becomes muddled self-indulgent nonsense.
Without a more clearly defined realm for the lyric essay, the dangerous is present for an unintelligible written work to be declared a lyric essay and suddenly take on meaning where no existed before.
On the other hand, one might argue, that, like the Tao, any definition of the lyric essay confines and constrains it, and it no longer has an ambiguous quality that the lyric essay now possesses in a non-possessive way.
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―It is not a soft doctrine . . . It is not bureaucratic Endlösung . . .
In postmodern literature—which is certainly a phylum the lyric essay is taxonomically related to—a great deal of emphasis is placed on what the author of a piece intends or considers the work to be. If the author's sensibilities are such to declare a work art, then it is art.
But a reader's sensibilities are just as important to a work as is the writer's. Once it is written and sent off into the world, it no longer belongs to them. The writer is not available to every reader to explain what was meant or intended—nor should they be—and the author of a written work is probably the last person who should be given quarter to explain what their work signifies or what should be inferred by it. They wrote the thing, therefore, have had their chance to explain, define, instruct, cajole, solicit, impart, sway, compel, or share their joys and sorrows, miracles and tears. At that point, a work must stand on its own to be whatever a reader of it chooses or decides are its merits and/or flaws.
The author and poet Charles Bukowski (whom I do not much care for) wrote, "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." By this definition, I think a number of the authors of the lyric essays John D'Agata has collected are not artists, they're intellectuals.
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