presentation based on several readings by Philip Lopate, Deborah Tall, Judith Kitchen et. al for SFUAD Lyric Essay Class

1. T H E O R I E S A N D D E B A T E S
THE LYRIC ESSAY

2. SENECA REVIEW
• These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give
primacy to artfulness over the conveying of
information. They forsake narrative line, discursive
logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of
idiosyncratic meditation. — Deborah Tall & John
D’Agata, Seneca Review, 1997

3. JUDITH KITCHEN
• In “Grounding the Lyric Essay,” Kitchen writes:
“…one subgenre of the personal essay—the ‘lyric
essay’—seems especially to suffer from an identity
crisis.” (Fourth Genre, Fall, 2011 v. 2)

4. “LYRIC”
• Suggests music
• Makes use of elements of poetic writing: alliteration,
assonance, syntactical repetition, assonance,
metaphor etc
• “It was less like seeing than like being for the first
time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful
glance…I had been my whole life a bell, and never
knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
(Annie Dillard)

5. ESSAYING
• This movement—using lyrical language to write about
“factual” topics normally not associated with poetics
(science, for example) becomes more of the norm,
Kitchen writes.
• “Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we
think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually
begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake
leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it
deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of
molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale
them back into the world.” ― Diane Ackerman, A
Natural History of the Senses (1991)

6. MEANING
• Kitchen suggests Tall’s initial definition describes an
experience in which the reader “completes” the
meaning of the lyrical essay; and that the writer, at least,
understands the question he or she is seeking to
discover. Kitchen’s own “definition” says: “Something
that aids and abets in the writer’s quest to discover
what’s under the surface, following an impulse wherever
it leads, its aim not meaning, but being, and in the
fullness of its being, revealing at something of meaning.”
(Seneca Review)
• This aspect of “wholeness,” she writes, “is often what is
missing in the essays that claim to be lyric, but aren’t
quite…The ‘essay’ part is missing.”

7. “GROUND”
• Kitchen goes on to say many “lyric” essays have
play but no “ground,” a term from I.A. Richards
used from his definition of “metaphor.”
• Richards defined (or reintroduced the concepts of)
tenor and vehicle as the two elements of a
metaphor

8. TENOR AND VEHICLE
• Tenor and Vehicle: the thing meant and the thing
said
• Tenor is the thing meant;
• Vehicle is the thing that’s said, the image that
embodies the tenor
• That interaction creates something that does not
exist without the interaction itself, defined as the
“ground.”

9. INTERACTION
• That interaction creates a meaning that doesn’t
exist without it, which can’t be conveyed literally or
linearly.
• On a grand scale, you could say, there’s the world
(tenor) and the way we see it (vehicle); and that
interaction creates questions and more associations
than can be explained directly.

10. SO THE GROUND
• According to Kitchen (and Richards and others)
• “An essay functions the way metaphor functions by
negotiating the terrain between contexts, often
consciously. The resulting ground is what
differentiates the personal essay from the memoir.
In memoir, tenor and vehicle are the same…”the
moment of the memoir is the past; the moment of
the personal essay is the present.”

11. EXAMPLES
• “the lyric essay is even more present (and perhaps
even more personal) because the present is
enacted as the mind at work…”
• Kate deGute: “What I Won’t Wear”
• Dinah Lenney, “Little Black Dress”

12. MORE EXAMPLES
• Excerpts that are stand-alone from larger book-
length collections of lyric essays:
• “Safekeeping” by Abigail Thomas
• “On Being Blue” by William Gass
• Lyric element
• Essay element
• Tenor and vehicle?

13. NOW LET’S BE SKEPTICAL…ISH
• In her interview with The Journal, Lia Purpura (considered
by many a very accomplished lyric essayist” responds to
the question of what she considers the lyric essay with:
• “Both the poetic line and the prose sentence are
musical units. Musical units of thought. The writing I’m
most drawn to has lyrical qualities, but I’d define that
quality broadly. I guess, to me, “lyrical” writing lifts off the
page in some playful, curiously angled way . . . some
way that’s defined by a writer’s sensibility itself, and thus
takes on a living, aural quality. Here’s the thing: I don’t
really use the term “lyrical essay.” I really prefer just
“essay” to describe what it is I’m up to. The tradition is
long and honorable and I don’t feel the need to nichify.
To call something a “lyric” essay, from the perspective of
a writer, feels . . . presumptuous somehow.”

14. LOPATE’S “SKEPTICAL TAKE”
• “I mistrust the lyrical essay; I welcome it; I don’t
know what it is.”
• (Seneca Review. Spring, 2000)
• Says the classical essay form is already shape-
shifting and language-emerging, so what does the
lyric essay bring to the table?

15. MISGIVINGS:
• (Lopate) Notes “lyric essays” tend to rely on:
• structural devices, such as lists or repeating word
phrases
• word phrases;
• stream of conscious disjunctive leaps
• suppression of mounting argument
• Trendy, but not actually new