Notes against the lyric essay.

HTMLGiant put out a call for guest posts for entries for its Mean Week feature.  You’re supposed to be mean.  As a regular reader, I thought this would be my chance to A. be mean and B. post something there.

So that’s what I did. I brought the mean.

I have long thought the term Lyric Essay was a bullshit term for craptastic writing, a catchall cop-out for folks who wrote a crappy poem or a crappy prose piece to call it something else.  I had been taking notes and stuff for an essay called “Against the Lyric Essay (As a Term)” but I did not draw on those notes for my splenetic screed; here, in all its 194-word glory, is my Mean Week post:

Lyric Essays. Let’s say your poems make discursive sense but lack human emotion. You’re in a graduate workshops in Iowa.  What do you do?

Get rid of those linebreaks, honey, and join the growing ranks of lyric essayists!

Or let’s say your shitbad poems with, like, math equations in them aren’t cutting the mustard. Denver Quarterly won’t touch them.  Who you a gonna call?  Lyric Essaybusters!

First Iowa’s 80s and 90s products ruined whole wings of poetry. Readers fled accordingly.  Then, just when personal essays and literary memoirs re-entered the public sphere and earns actual book buyers in the 1990s, Iowans take up another cause: to ruin nonfiction.  Their weapon of choice: The Lyric Essay.

Lifted from Camus book cover and bowdlerized by Iowans, who now have a freaking MFA for the thing, the lyric essay, which is basically an excuse to pee on a couple of fire hydrants to mark off academic territory, has produced prose that is at once unreadable and untethered to any human feeling. As George Carlin once said about farts, it’s like shit without the mess.

I say: Make it stop. Leave writing non-feeling non-person-aware wankathons to the poets.

I guess I got a rise out of some people, but what surprised me is that some people took on that now-signature arch comment box personae. Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius Press chimed in; he quotes one of my sentences by way of a question:

“Leave writing non-feeling non-person-aware wankathons to the poets.”
Just who are you trying to piss off here?

Whether people would get ‘pissed off’ by what I wrote remains to be seen.  I saw that sentence as more of a statement of fact.  There are poets who would say “non-feeling” is their calling card; same goes for “non-person-aware” and even “wanking.”  I would even say there are non-feeling, non-person-aware wankathon poetry and poems that I love.  Take Flarf, for example–more about that later.  And much of the conceptual writing poetry on Ubuweb.com would qualify.  If some are surprised at my salty language (“wankathon”), oh well. That’s sorta my bailiwick, people.

Me, I thought I made it clear who I was talking about: poets who write subpar poetry, usually sequences with a tacked-on overarching subject, and then turning around and call them lyric essays. They know who they are–all you have to do is look around you–but it seems that Robinson and others want me to name specific names.

After that, the discussion gets interesting.  Side-stepping the issue of whether the term “lyric essay” sucks or not, I guess, is a good thing.  So we comment box peops start talking about what exactly is an essay and even what qualifies as “essayistic.”  There, it feels as we are more confident in the theory/academic sphere. Critic John Madera took some time to point out the elasticity of genre definitions. Which is, of course, interesting, if you’re into talking about or being reminded what an essay does or embodies.  Also interesting: that he quotes Annie Dillard, who quite famously switched from poetry to essays so that what she writes could be better accommodated.

“The essay can everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do,” Dillard wrote famously. “[E]verything but fake it.” An essay to Dillard is both “coherent” and “meaninful” and “thinks about actual things.”

So here’s one point: I think a lot of what is published specifically as lyric essays are not meaningful, are not coherent, and do not think about meaningful things. It is a catch-all term for a wide range of hybrids, and I prefer there be another term for this.  I don’t mind “lyric,” as long as it adheres to that word’s spirit and definition and traditions, at least by 20th century standards.  Most lyric essays aren’t lyrical at all, but that cause is for someone else to take up.

My solution: Just call it an essay and see what people think. It’s enough of a elastic term to include them all.

Where I have a problem starts is when “lyric” is combined with “essay” and how and when it is combined. First: There is this idea that lyric essay is a genre. It is not. It is a form.  It is also a form defined, by and large, I would argue, by its formlessness, not so much its content. When one talks about a particular lyric essay, in my experience, one usually talks about not what is written, but how. In that sense, the lyric essay term is set up by writers for other writers. It is not set up for readers, specifically and especially readers who do not write. And hasn’t that been one of many inside-baseball reasons poetry has lost chunks of its audience in the past century?

And here’s where I get to talk about Flarf again for a bit.  Lots of people have tried to define Flarf, and I will probably get some of this stuff wrong, but it would be fair to say that Flarf is defined a kind of conceptual poetry that draws from and then crafts found texts. I love a lot of Flarf.  I think it’s smart; it has concepts behind it; it has a writer around it and in each piece. In a lot of ways, Flarf is a reaction to non-Flarf poetry: it sets out to make some thing or experience quote-unquote “poetic” that is not.

But do you see the rigor I had to use there, even in my ham-handed definition of Flarf?  And this is my try at defining, in my opinion at least, one of the most out there, free-jazz experimental kinds of writing there is.

I doubt anyone would get their gander up or muster the same desire to define, defend, or even denounce a lyric essay.  It’s another made-up term, sure.  But it is not a form defined by its content, as you could say Flarf or a sonnet or a Roman a Clef is. Nor is it a form set up to help readers or establish some sort of process-note/conceptual explanation discussion alongside it.

If it is not a genre, not a form, then what is it, then? Is it set up as a publishing niche?  Maybe. For, like, 5 presses and 20 literary journals.  Is it a movement?  Maybe again, if you count multiple issues of Seneca Review congratulating itself on coming up with its own term and publicizing it.

What I do know is that the term was invented and its promoters set up shop as for the most unhelpful and insidious of reasons: writing workshops and academia and advancing one’s own career.

And even then it’s not that helpful pedagogically.  It does not, in my opinion and experience as a teacher, help a writer figure out what he or she is writing. There are descriptors for essays, sure–Mosaic, Collage, Episodic, List, Segmented, Vignette, Jump-cut–all used by teachers and writers, all with varying degrees of success.  Does it help readers?  Not so much.

Maybe the term “Lyric” helps other writers, sure, but perhaps only ones who are want to find a home for their writing.  One comment box writer to my HTMLGiant post did present a story of being ‘inspired’ by the idea of writing a lyric essay, at least insofar as figuring out what she had already written.  And here’s what I wrote back.

I think your story cuts to the heart of my grumpiness about the lyric essay. I mean, here you are, trying to figure out what you’re writing–which is one of the joys of writing, if you ask me–and this term helps you get excited about writing. How could I take that away from you? I wouldn’t.

For me, it was a reverse process. I started writing short prose pieces about my favorite rock band, and all the while, it was: is it a poem? prose? memoir? essay? I loved the indefinable nature of enterprise. I wrote poems for years, with a few successes here and there, but all the while feeling something wasn’t quite right, that my writing could do something else.

And then when I did, when I feel I’d finally broke out on my own as a “creative nonfiction” writer or “essayist” or whatever, along comes this term, lyrical essay, promoted by other ex-poets with far more cultural zeitgeist mojo than I, staking a claim on a whole wing of what I thought to be my new genre. What the freak? was my reply. And so it seemed that a good chunk of the preciousness, the we-are-prophets poetryland bunk that I’d grown so tired of, had implanted this new term, lyric essays.

So for me, my experience with the term comes at a different point in my writing life. Which is all I meant to say.

Still, as I think of it, for that writer and others out there who feel limited by the essay form, or the idea of an essay, the term “lyric” tacked onto it doesn’t solve anything.  Genre is a gesture, an amorphous thing; form is anything but amorphous. The idea of an essay provides plenty of leeway to allow much of the good of what passes off as lyric essays.

But why not just call it an essay and see what people think?

For myself and many others, the term lyric essay doesn’t really help us think about how the essay is written, what is written about, what an essay does, or why it was written that way in the first place.  And yet it’s invaded the publishing sphere in its small way, as well as MFA land, almost to the last person by ex-poets who want to stake out not only their own form or movement, like Flarf, but their own freaking genre. Think of hubris involved in such a move, how it falls outside the parameters of what I am talking about here.  I urge you to think about that, if you are invested in the writing world at all: setting up one’s own genre! And a school for it, too! Conferences! Empaneling speakers!

I think that when we have a genre such as the essay–one that, through its 400-plus years of history and incarnations, has proven sufficient enough to include, in the 20th Century alone, Joe Brainard, Amy Fusselman, Albert Camus, Lester Bangs, Jenny Holzer, Larry King, John Hejduk, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Jenny Boully, Joan Didion, Albert Goldbarth, and David Lee Roth, all under the same essay tent–it begs the question: why get all record store clerk-y and come up with a sub-genre, other than to exclude readers and make those in the know feel more special?  Or is it to make a conscious careerist grab for a chunk of the creative writing pie?

Just call it an essay and see what people think.