notes on teaching: I don't fuck with the term "lyric essay."
on Soul and Form, Essayism, bad terms, sketchy corners.
I don't fuck with the term "lyric essay." Its gross congealment of two messy, non-parallel terms is reason enough to stay away. That it could and perhaps should refer to works of prosimetrum (which it doesn't) or any essayistic poems like Queen Mab or Pope's Essay on Man (which it doesn't) makes it relatively useless for careful thinking about literature's long run. Yet I am a fan of much of the work on which the unfortunate appellation of "lyric essay" is bestowed. Perhaps it is for this reason that the term annoys me: it tends to blur out the long history of literature's capacity to establish and incapacity to obey generic laws. Genre weakens, explodes, collapses, restabilizes. It's supposed to. It is always assassinating itself (see Don Quixote) and out of its own blood, new versions arise (see Don Quixote). What is called the "lyric essay" is as everywhere as it is nowhere. But what the term "lyric essay" does, despite the best intentions of the many who use it, is loud-signal the neoliberal creative writing program's attempted rationalization of literary production. Rather than calling to mind the robust antimony of that which we call "essayistic" and that which we call "poetic" – their generative at-odds-ness – the term proposes a tepid marriage of the two, their barbed edges sanded down.
The "lyric essay" is in Plato and Augustine and Novalis and Pascal and Genet and Derrida, and definitely in Kierkegaard and Lukacs and Rilke and Moten, but also, it's nowhere to be found there. It's also in Nietzsche, but have you noticed that no one ever talks about him as a lyric essayist? We could call him that, but people would laugh. They would laugh because they know the open secret of the term: it is a term by which so-called "feminine" writing is gathered up together, regardless of the actual preoccupations and formal strategies of that writing, and its intellectual and critical content dismissed as 1) unserious 2) too serious 3) self-serious, etc. It's a perfect term for those who mistake list-making for criticism. They can collect names of writers and attempt to flatten them into the dismissibility of tendency, evade the responsibility of analysis of the questions raised by the work itself: for example, what social and material conditions have inspired the new use of the page in prose writing? etc. I would like to see the literature I care about liberated from the term, though I am aware that program-grammar has a power greater than mine. I am aware, too, that literature can and does overcome the banality of its terms. Besides, I have no term to offer in its place.
I am writing about this term, "lyric essay," because I am aware that this would be a convenient moment to finally surrender to it: I am a visiting writer this semester teaching a workshop on the intersection of the essayistic and the poetic. I have failed to surrender.
Instead, I, like many people, am still waiting to know what distinguishes an essay from anything else, and what qualities of a work – a poem, novel, film, memoir – could be understood to be essayistic. Brian Dillon, in Essayism, writes, "Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very names should be something like an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure." It is not just the "lyric essay" that baffles. It is the essay itself.
It is generally true that an essay poses a question, or a set of them, which it ventures to answer. It is also generally true that an essay has an object and an occasion. As Lukacs writes in Soul and Form, his book of essays about, among other things, essays, "the title of every essay is preceded in visible letters by the words 'thoughts occasioned by…'" Lukacs claims, for example, that Plato is the greatest essayist whoever lived, who gave form to his object, the life of Socrates, which is the sort of life perfect for essays. The essayist, suggests Lukacs, is always a kind of John the Baptist who preaches in the wilderness of another, greater one to come.
If the essayist is, to Lukacs, forever John the Baptist, the poet, I am afraid to say, is rather more like Jesus. That is, it is generally true to say that the lyric – in the sense of the poetical – has a subject. And it is the lyric against which the essay has often imagined itself to be defined. Again, from Lukacs: "Poetry gives us the illusion of the life of the person it represents" and "The poet always speaks about himself, no matter of what he sings." In this understanding of poetry, the lyric gives the feeling, mood, or semblance of a kind of subject creation through expression, though it does this in myriad and often subtle ways. Sometimes the lyrical subject emerges as blatantly as a cloud in trousers, sometimes more slyly in kenotic – self-emptying – processes. In fragments, understatements, omissions, elisions, and so on, the absence becomes presence. Whatever a lyric appears to be about, it is really "about" nothing, or at least no more "about" something than a tree or dog or person is about. A poem's "aboutness' is widely considered an inescapable insult to its is-ness.
The lyric, then, presents itself as a first order experience, always seeking to break from referentiality. The essay makes humbler claims as experience. The essay possesses a tender dependence on referral and citation. But these are mostly Lukacs' distinctions, not necessarily mine, and besides, Soul and Form itself in turn creates and eviscerates and founders against the boundaries between essay and poetry, form and life. Lukacs had, after all, been reading Plato and Novalis and Hegel and Kierkegaard when he wrote it and was moved to write it via his own aborted imitation of the loves of desperate, unrequiting poets.
In Soul and Form the heartbroken lyric sings, repeats, weeps, and threatens to fly off into a Jena-tinged ether — “there was something rather heinous about the whole thing.” The essayistic then attempts to use something like reason, fixation, erudition, and focus to ground the lyric impulse, to moor the modern in what it has received from romanticism: “the sea of moody, untamed individualisms.” Both the lyric and the essayistic, in Soul and Form, perform, as a troubadour might, and that the work was initially conceived of as a Decameron, written during the hard times of the flu epidemic, meant to be reflect the shape of a failed love affair, but taking the very modern form of "essay" while doing so, gives the project the swoon of poetry and the heft of essay and something else, too: the heavy wrestling of the dialectical, rather than the smooth superficiality of hybridity. This is a book that struggles, as literature should.
This is why the "lyric essay" as a term won't work. As soon as these provisionally useful distinctions (the poetic, the essayistic) are identified, it is immediately the case they are set in motion, begin to alter or dissolve. It is perhaps better to think of the lyric and the essayistic in tense, passionate, ruinous relationship, sometimes hostile, sometimes, intimate, meeting and accruing and upsetting and renewing and decaying. This is how a poem can ask a question, how an essay can sing a self. In truth, a subject and an object are always at any time either. That is the sketchy corner on which poetry and essay meet.
