description of lyric essay

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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

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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.

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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 .

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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!

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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.

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

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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/.

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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 .

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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.

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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.

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Exploring the art of prose

A Jump to the Left, and Then a Step to the Right: Lateral Lyric Moves

By Heidi Czerwiec •

I come late to creative nonfiction, after decades of writing and training and teaching and researching as a poet. While I feel I’m still playing catch-up with the standards of nonfiction craft, what I bring to the discourse is a deep familiarity with the craft techniques of poetry. The lyric essay is achieving a critical mass in publication, even as the critical work explaining its workings lags. Because so many writers of the lyric essay form come to it from poetry, it makes sense to import discussions of poetic craft to help explain various aspects of how the lyric essay functions on the page. I don’t pretend that these discussions are new, but they are new to creative nonfiction.

In my essay “Success in Circuit: The Lyric Essay as Labyrinth,” forthcoming in Randon Billings Noble’s anthology A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays , I both describe and enact ways in which the lyric essay may turn itself without actually advancing, sidestepping as it circles its subject, much like the circuitous path of a labyrinth. While that piece is presented as a lyric demonstration, I wanted to offer as a preface a more straightforward explanation, with examples of these lateral moves that create parallels or reversals, and spatial placements that may be either of the two.

Some terms: When I’m talking about mode—lyric, narrative, assay/meditative, didactic—I’m referencing both classical applications ( cf Aristotle on lyric vs. narrative, dramatic, didactic) as well as the more current taxonomy offered for discussion by Karen Babine at LitHub . She subdivides literary nonfiction into genre, subgenre, form, mode, and shape in order to start a conversation not on rigid classifications, but to describe what a piece is doing .

While the lateral moves I’ll be describing occur in other essay modes—for pacing and to create suspense in narrative mode; to incorporate history or research in assay/meditative mode—they appear in greater density in lyric mode. So many of the moves are based in language and, on the page (especially since the early twentieth century), with language’s relationship to space (arrangement, breaks, white space). Language is the primary interest of pure lyricism. Here, I have great respect for Katharine Coles, who puts it best in her critical essay “ If a Body ”: “I use ‘lyric’ as a noun differently than I do ‘lyric’ as an adjective, where for me it indicates a reliance on dense musicality and imagery.” She goes on to clarify the difference, for her, between narrative and lyric:

[N]arrative works operate structurally through narrative gesture, the ‘if/then’ movement of cause and effect, about which lyric cares not. The pure lyric may gesture or hint at narrative possibility, which it nonetheless sequesters outside itself, operating instead through the this-and simultaneity we recognize in metaphor and metonymy, which purports to move us along while still keeping us from getting anywhere.

While I think Coles’s piece does some brilliant work demonstrating how the lyric can bridge poetry and prose, I disagree slightly with her description of pure lyric as lack of movement. Rather, I argue there is lateral movement, a resistance or delay to forward movement, which nonetheless moves us through the lyric essay.

But I also think it’s important here to distinguish the ways in which the movement and handling of time in the lyric (and therefore in lyric essays) is more fluid than in other modes, which is what makes these lateral moves so prominent. Carl Dennis, in “ The Temporal Lyric ,” describes the two “plots” of lyric poetry as the temporal—“a psychological development in which the speaker reaches a position by the end of the poem different from the one he or she occupies in the beginning”—and the nontemporal, which involves “the amplification and intensification of a single state of mind.” In both cases, the lyric may resist forward movement, so long as the piece brings the reader to a new position or richer understanding.

Heather McHugh, in “ Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination ,” argues, “A poem means to move you, but in unexpected directions…. In poems, the convention of continuance is always being queried by poetic structure…. It is a structure of internal resistances.” McHugh refers to the ways in which the poem’s forward movement is constantly in tension with the arrangement of its language on the page, across lines, breaks, and space. But because the lyric essay employs many of the same disjunctions, an examination of how these poetic structures function or are adapted in prose is important. To create lyric tension, the lyric essay may also resist forward movement, instead moving laterally.

The first group of lateral moves are those that create parallels, placing similar elements in apposition. These may be images, scenes, or situations that resonate with each other, placed in proximity to heighten/call attention to those resonances. Nicole Walker’s “ Fish ” is a triptych in three different writing styles, scenes, and points of view—lyric nature documentary/fish ladder/close third-person; memoir/deep sea fishing/first-person; and food writing/kitchen/second-person—and each section presents only a brief, image-based moment addressing some aspect of fish. While each section has its distinct voice, images and words echo across the essay: the straining of the salmon upstream becomes the straining of the young girl and barracuda against each other, and returns as directions for making a sauce: “Strain through a chinois. Strain through cheese cloth. Strain one more time for good measure.” Words like “circling,” “hold,” and “flesh” recur, accruing meaning—Dennis’s nontemporal “amplification and intensification of a single state of mind.”

The parallel move also may be achieved via language, especially in lyric essays. This may be accomplished by exploring the etymology of a word to discover or create links between two ideas. Sun Yung Shin’s “ The Hospitality of Strangers ” traces the sources and cognates of the Old English gest , which means both guest and stranger and is related to the words host, hostile, and hospitality, in order to interrogate borders and immigration. The author might employ wordplay, invoking a similar-sounding word to suggest a linkage or slide the meaning from one word to a seemingly unrelated one. I’ve done this myself in a lyric essay “ Cuir ,” where I recount the entwined history of leather and perfume: “[F]rom cuir to queer , the veneer of sweat-stained chaps and battered motorcycle jackets, leather’s skin-on-skin action.” In “ Dee Aster ,” Lee Ann Roripaugh moves from “disaster” to her mispronunciation “Dee Aster,” which gets her to the traumas of “Lee Aster.” In using this technique, the author doesn’t exactly create connections so much as reveal them, the trace of the author made visible.

The author might also signal more clearly that she is creating a parallel through such phrase tags as “at the same time” or “at that time” to parallel two simultaneously occurring events, or by saying “that reminds me of” or “which makes me think of” to suggest a connection which may exist only because of the author’s process of mind or stream of consciousness. At the beginning of Terese Mailhot’s Heart Berries , her lyric account of trauma, mental illness, and reconciliation, she says, “I knew I was not well. I thought of the first healer, who was just a boy. My friend Denise told me the story. She called him Heart Berry Boy, or O’dimin…. The people in his village were sick and dying because the Indian world was shifting.” She then relates the tale of the first medicine, wild strawberries, and first medicine man of the people. This “field of concurrent times” links Mailhot both to original trauma and to potential healing.

This requires a bit more explanation of lyric time and how it differs from narrative time. Time in poetry includes the tension between its progress and its structures of internal resistance, but there’s more to it than that. Radiant Lyre , an anthology of craft essays on lyric poetry, includes some marvelous critical work on lyric time. In “To Think of Time,” David Baker says:

Poetry is about the varieties of measuring, telling, and thinking about time…. The interesting question is not whether a poem has a story in it, but rather what kind of time-telling the poem undertakes. Time may be suppressed, elongated, distorted, or abbreviated. It may be spotty, circular, or linear. It may, as in a palimpsest or a bad photograph, be multiply exposed. Time may be a field of concurrent times.

This would seem to be a revision of Dennis’s nontemporal amplification—here we have multitemporal amplification, what Stanley Plumly in “Lyric Time” describes as “those concerns in present time amplified, compared, and analogized in past time—the moment juxtaposed with mythic memory.” In these lateral moves created by paralleling events or moments, lyric time is shown to its greatest effect.

The second group of lateral moves involves opposition rather than apposition—reversals, or at least restarts that don’t actually or immediately move the piece forward, but move in an opposite or new direction. This might be done using anaphora, a technique where an initial word or phrase is repeated at the start of each line or paragraph, acting as a reset button or a listing mechanism, as in John Scalzi’s “ Being Poor ,” which is a list of details from shifting perspectives (old, young, parent, woman), all of which create a composite portrait of poverty by beginning, “Being poor is.” This could also be signaled with phrase tags such as “or, rather,” “not x , but y ,” or some negation that refutes what came before in favor of what is now being offered, or at least offers alternatives. I do this in “ Consider the Lobster Mushroom: being a brief theory of the craft of creative nonfiction ,” when I compare writing nonfiction to the lobster mushroom, which is actually a mushroom infected with a parasitic fungus: “You become infected by an idea, a topic…that absorbs you, imparting its own qualities, until the you’re transformed, not the same person as before. // Or, you may play the part of parasite—cloak your work, make it take the appearance of another form…. // Or, you may think you’re writing one essay, but another essay takes it over, makes it its own.”

This kind of oppositional move could also be presented via revision, such as redoing a scene in a different way by changing point of view or “perhapsing” an imagined alternate scene, as Anika Fajardo does in “ What Didn’t Happen ” when she imagines an alternate unlived life, or at the level of language by saying something again but using a different tone, register, or rhythm. Dinah Lenney does this in “ Object Parade: Little Black Dress ,” where each paragraph starts with a new shift in the speaker’s register, from lofty to blunt to wistful: “O, you should be able to say when you bought this dress and what for…” “So. Is it actually, finally time to retire the little black dress?” “You remember a dinner party in Laurel Canyon.” In presenting these alternatives—logical, thematic, emotional, tonal—the lyric essay explodes with multiple possibilities, creating a density of meanings within a compressed space.

The final group of lateral moves is more ambiguous and spatial, and involves juxtaposing and/or braiding items/fragments. The author lays down one thread in order to pick up another, signaling this with white space. Although white space has long existed in poetry in the right margin’s turns of verse and in its stanza breaks and caesuras, and the fragment does appear in Romantic prose, its expansion as a technique largely comes from two concurrent developments in literature at the end of the nineteenth/start of the twentieth century: the production of cheap typewriters so writers could treat the blank page as a visual field to be manipulated, and the influence of the French Symbolists with their experiments in prose poetry. The combination of these two led to innovative work that often is included as early examples of flash nonfiction, and from there, the practice spread. As a result, white space is one poetry technique which has received some nonfiction craft attention. Dinty W. Moore acknowledges this debt to poetics in his excellent “Positively Negative” in Bending Genre : “[Poets have] been thinking of white space, negative space, the distance between thoughts and words, since the time they first took up the pen.” He laments that “prose writers…seldom if ever articulate how white space works…. We use it, certainly, but I very seldom find it discussed in craft books or writing classrooms.”

For white space as a lateral move, it’s left more to the reader to determine whether the fragments are being placed in apposition, opposition, or something else—and whether that move is a leap or resisting motion altogether. Eula Biss’s fragmentary essay “ Time and Distance Overcome ” juxtaposes scenes of telephone poles linked to violence to complicate the ideas of connection and division at the birth of telephony, the resistance to forward movement mimicking resistance to (and, in the case of racism, even lack of) progress. These fragments function almost like telephone poles, stringing their connections across the dividing white space—what is communicated?

There may be no clear sense of accrual, however, and the effect may even be jarring. Here, I think especially of Kathy Fish’s flash piece “ Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild ,” with its startling catalogue of proposed names for groups that culminates in a gutpunch of a shift at the end. In fact, in this example, it’s the white space that creates the gutpunch, with its pacing, pause, and then succinct, deadly delivery.

I do want to assert that I don’t believe an essay, even a lyric or fragmented essay, can succeed solely through lateral moves or leaps. At some point or points, the piece needs to advance in order to develop or arrive at a revelation, however small. New writers experimenting with the form sometimes attempt to move only by juxtaposition, fragments laid down, a series of “and this” without a sense of accrual or summation, resulting in an essay feeling static and flat. Here, I find it especially useful to apply what poet Robyn Schiff calls “bound association.” During Q&A at a recent reading , Biss cited Schiff, who distinguishes between “free association” and “bound association.” In the latter, you bind yourself only to the trajectory of certain terms, to keep yourself from pursuing infinite rabbit holes. When Biss uses this process, she goes back and tries to figure out how she got from one leap to the next, to fill in any gaps, while also trying to preserve wonder.

I really like this for a summation. The lyric essay may move laterally, sidling through the various associative techniques I’ve outlined. Doing so allows the author to contain multitudes within a compressed space. But there are limits and bounds—walls to the labyrinth—and there needs to be a trajectory, a path that, rather than losing us in a maze, leads us to amazement.

Essayist and poet  HEIDI CZERWIEC  is the author of the lyric essay collection  Fluid States , selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’s 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection  Conjoining , and is the editor of  North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets . She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an editor for  Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies . Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

Image by Lanterne_Foto courtesy of Pixabay

By Guest Author | Craft , Classroom | June 29, 2021

Tagged: Fragments , Lyric Essay , Juxtaposition , Parallelism

On Crafting the Memoir in Pieces

Interview: Nicole McCarthy

Even Though He Fell by Maxwell Suzuki

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Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying (FULL)

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What is a lyric essay? Is it a form, a genre, a quality of writing? These questions have confounded poets and essayists alike since the late 1990s, when the term “lyric essay” first made its debut in the pages of Seneca Review . Since then, writers have continued to blur the line between poetry and prose, writing powerful lyric essays that resist traditional ideas about what the essay can do and be.

In this 6-week workshop, Zoë Bossiere, coeditor of the new anthology, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) will guide writers through approaches to crafting lyric essays that play with content, style, design, and form. These interactive sessions include analysis of contemporary lyric essays, generative prompts with dedicated in-class writing time, and an opportunity to share written work with other writers. ‍ --- Details: Minding the Gaps, Mapping the Story: The Art of Lyric Essaying meets Tuesdays March 5, March 12, March 19, March 26, April 2, and April 9 from 6:30-8:30pm remotely online via Zoom. Prerequisites : None Genre : Nonfiction Level : All levels Format : Generative workshop with writing in class and outside of class and group sharing. Location : This class takes place in person remotely online via Zoom. Size : Limited to 12 participants (including scholarships). Suggested Sequence : Follow this class with another generative nonfiction writing workshop or a feedback course. Scholarships : Two scholarship spots are available for this class for writers in Northeast Ohio. Apply by December 11. Cancellations & Refunds : Cancel at least 48 hours in advance of the first class meeting to receive a full refund. Email [email protected] .

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Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins . Bossiere's debut book, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir , is forthcoming in May 2024 from Abrams Books. Learn more at zoebossiere.com

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Scene and Being Seen in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction (FULL)

Keep Moving: 5 Essays in 6 Weeks (FULL)

Image & Memory: An Introduction to Creative Writing (FULL)

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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.

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The lyric essay as resistance : truth from the margins

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Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Introduction / Zoë Bossiere, Erica Trabold
• Apocalypse logic / Elissa Washuta
• Meditation on grief : things we carry, things we remember / Crystal Wilkinson
• Story you never tell / Chelsea Biondolillo
• Words first seen in print in 1987, according to Merriam-Webster / Krys Malcolm Belc
• Becoming / Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
• Dreaming of Ramadi in Detriot / Aisha Sabatini Sloan
• Architectural survey form : 902 Sunset strip / Camellia-Berry Grass
• Egg face / Hea-Ream Lee
• Fragments, never sent / Molly McCully Brwon
• World maps / Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
• Little girl, her drunk bastard parents, and the hummingbird / Jessica Lind Peterson
• As if to say / Michael Torres
• Signatures / Lyzette Wanzer
• Toward a poetics of phantom limb, or all the shadows that carry us / Jennifer S. Cheng
• Whens / Chloe Garcia Roberts
• Transgender day of rememberance : a found essay / Torry Peters
• Annotating the first page of the first Navajo-English dictionary / Danielle Geller
• War baby / Jenny Boully
• Dry season : spring 2016 / Melissa Febos
• Watecourse / Wendy S. Walters

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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

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How to write a poem: 11 prompts to get you into Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department'

Will Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album “The Tortured Poets Department” usher in a new era of poetry appreciation ?

Delaney Atkins, a part-time instructor at Austin Peay State University who teaches a class exploring Swift’s music's connection to Romanticism , hopes this album will help people realize the power of poetry as “one of the purest forms of human expression.”

“Poetry is not a scary thing,” she says. “If it’s something that (Swift) reads and leans into, I’m hopeful that other people will take it as an opportunity to do the same and not be afraid of feeling like they aren’t smart enough or it’s not accessible enough.”

How to write a poem

Ever heard the saying “the best writers are readers”? The first step to writing a poem is figuring out what you like about poetry.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

Is it imagery? Format? Rhyme? Start by sampling a few poets. Maya Angelou, William Wordsworth, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath and Amanda Gorman are among the greats. Look to your favorite songwriters and ask yourself, "What do I admire about their craft?" Atkins also recommends looking for a poem about a subject you're passionate about.

“I promise you, there’s a poem for everyone,” she says.

Next, decide what you want to write about. Simple as it sounds, this can often be the hardest step for writers. What do you want to say?

Finally, decide how you’re going to write it.

Atkins recommends starting with metaphors and similes , which Swift often employs. Some metaphors are more obvious, like in “Red,” when she sings “Losing him was blue, like I’d never known/Missing him was dark gray, all alone.” She uses a simile when she says “Loving him was like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.”

If you’re writing about a relationship, ask yourself what it felt like. “This relationship feels like … a burning bridge,” is Atkins's example. You can stick to a single line or make it an extended metaphor with an entire poem about that bridge.

Use imagery, or visually descriptive language, to help tell the story. Look around the room and describe the setting using lofty prose or personify the objects around you. Or create a character and tell their story – think of Swift’s love triangle in the “Betty,” “Cardigan” and “August” trilogy or “No Body, No Crime,” in which she slips into the skin of a vengeance-seeking best friend.

Do poems have to rhyme?

While many of Swift's songs rhyme, it’s not required in poetry.

“There are no rules and that’s a good thing, it’s a freeing thing,” Atkins says. “Take that and run with it – be as creative as possible.”

Review: Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is hauntingly brilliant

Taylor Swift has always been a member of 'The Tortured Poets Department'

In Atkins’ class, Swift's 10 previous albums are on the syllabus. Some connections to poetry are more overt, like Swift’s reference to English poet William Wordsworth in “The Lakes.”

But Atkins also teaches the motifs and literary devices that Swift uses throughout her discography, like the repetition of rain . In “Fearless” Swift alludes to naively running and dancing in the rain. Later in “Clean” from “1989,” rain is a baptismal metaphor for washing away the addiction of a past relationship. On “Peace,” off of “Folklore,” Swift sings about rain as a manifestation of her anxieties. 

She uses the extended metaphor of death and dying in several songs. Atkins points to “dying in secret” in 2009’s “Cold As You” as representative of shame (“And I know you wouldn’t have told nobody if I died, died for you”). In 2020’s “peace” death is a symbol of unconditional love (“All these people think love’s for show/But I would die for you in secret”). She also repeatedly references her death throughout “My Tears Ricochet” – “And if I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?”

Poem ideas inspired by Taylor Swift

Want to become a “Tortured Poet” yourself? Here are some prompts to kickstart your poetry era.

• Use a five-dollar word: Who else could fit “clandestine” and “mercurial” in a song? Use an unexpected word from Swift's work, like “elegies,” “unmoored,” “calamitous,” “ingenue” or “gauche” as a jumping-off point.
• Write a poem based on one of the “eras” : Tell a girl-next-door love story based on “Taylor Swift,” a bitter heartbreak for “Red” or the tale of your slandered character for “Reputation.”
• Write about your “invisible strings”: The “invisible string theory” hypothesizes that there’s some larger force at work laying the groundwork to lead us to our destinies. In “invisible string,” Swift writes about the path that led her to a romantic partner. Write about your own.
• Paint the image of a season: It's tempting to break out your flannels and drive to go leaf-peeping after listening to "All Too Well." In literature, fall often represents change. Pick a season and describe it using imagery – how does that season represent what your poem is about?
• Use rain as a metaphor: Take inspiration from Swift's many uses of rain, which sometimes symbolizes losing yourself in a passionate moment but other times indicates a cleansing or sadness.
• Take a spin on a classic: Swift invokes classic literature in “Love Story” when she sings “You were Romeo I was a scarlet letter.” How can you put a modern take on classic tropes ?
• Retell history: This is precisely what Swift does in “The Last Great American Dynasty” when she tells the story of Rebekah Harkness , a socialite who lived in the Rhode Island house Swift bought in 2013. Who can you use as a muse?
• Play with color: A whole essay could be written about Swift's use of the color “blue.” Try out a common color symbol (like blue for sadness, red for passion, green for envy) or flip it on its head entirely and have it represent a new emotion.
• Use the year you were born: Swift's “1989” symbolizes her artistic rebirth . Title your poem the year you were born. How can you emerge as a poet reborn? 
• Random lyric generator: Still stumped? Use this random lyric generator and use that phrase as the theme or first line of your poem. Just make sure to credit Swift if you post it anywhere online.
• Write about “The Tortured Poets Department”: What would it look like if it was a real place? Assume the role of Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department and craft your world of punished poets. 

Tortured poets: Is Taylor Swift related to Emily Dickinson?

Just Curious for more? We've got you covered.

USA TODAY is exploring the questions you and others ask every day. From "How to get on BookTok" to "What does 'era' mean?" to "Where to buy cheap books?" – we're striving to find answers to the most common questions you ask every day. Head to our Just Curious section to see what else we can answer for you. 

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Chinese book club language day.

18 April 2024

The event will consist of three segments: a short Chinese music performance, a talk and a roundtable. Chinese star Mr. Shēn Zhōu will sing "Ode to Peace", a new song specially composed for this year's UN Chinese Language Day.

Mr. Chén Ji (DGACM), who translated the lyrics of "Ode to Peace" into English, will delve into the minutiae of the translation process and illustrate the vital importance of wielding human prowess and savor-faire to build cultural bridges through language.

During the roundtable, the young Chinese creators of "Ode to Peace" will share their insights with the audience.

Target’s version of 'The Tortured Poets Department' contains two special poems: Read and shop them here

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‘The Alchemy’ lyrics meaning: Is the Taylor Swift song about Travis Kelce?

We have a play call from Taylor Swift: “Call the amateurs and cut them from the team!”

The second-to-last song on “ The Tortured Poets Department ,” “The Alchemy,” is one of the only pure love songs on an album that skews melancholy.

This is a story of a love that “happens once every few lifetimes,” Swift’s narrator sings. Alchemy refers to the quest in ancient and Medieval times to find a philosopher’s stone, which would make it possible to turn any substance, like lead, into gold.

Revisit our live coverage of the release of “The Tortured Poets Department.”

More ‘Tortured Poets’ lyrics analysis

• Taylor Swift’s ‘thanK you aIMee’ and ‘Cassandra’ lyrics: Are the songs about Kim Kardashian?
• ‘Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus’ lyrics: What does this Taylor Swift song mean — and who are these people?
• ‘So Long, London’ lyrics meaning: Taylor Swift's song, decoded
• ‘So High School’ lyrics: What does the Taylor Swift song mean?
• Fans connect Taylor Swift’s song ‘imgonnagetyouback’ to Olivia Rodrigo’s single ‘Get Him Back!’
• Who is Clara Bow and why did Taylor Swift name a song after her on 'Tortured Poets Department'?
• Which ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ songs could be about Matty Healy?
• 'Fortnight' lyrics meaning: What is the Taylor Swift song about?
• Taylor Swift’s ‘Robin’ lyrics: What does the song mean?
• Read the two special poems in Target’s edition of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

In the context of relationships, like this song, alchemy could suggest the meeting of two people to form something wholly new, though something inexplicable (like, cough, love ).

Beyond medieval magic, what’s especially notable is that “The Alchemy” is replete with football imagery.

Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kel ce — to whom she has been linked since her first Chiefs game appearance in September 2023 — was not expected to be the focus of the album.

But “The Alchemy” seemingly equates love to football and “winning streaks.” (Kelce’s Chiefs are certainly on one of those, having won the Super Bowl two years in a row.)

“There was no chance / Trying to be the greatest in the league,” Swift sings.

The chorus’ conceit is about being champions and comebacks: “When I touchdown call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown baby / I’m the one to beat.”

The bridge is a lyrical description of victory, ending with, “Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me / Touchdown!”

One can’t help but remember Swift and Kelce embracing after his Super Bowl and playoffs wins.

She also mentions crowns in “The Alchemy,” as she’s done frequently in the past. In “Long Live,” she sings, “You traded your baseball cap for a crown.” Here, she’s trading a helmet.

Football has also appeared in the imagery of her music videos, often in the context of high school football players.

In “Fifteen” (2008) she sings: “But in your life, you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.” The lyrics suggest dreaming bigger than nabbing the popular guy.

Then, her on-screen crush in the “You Belong With Me” (2008) music video is a football player. Meanwhile, she’s on the other side of the social spectrum and “on the bleachers” in a marching band uniform.

In “Mean” (2010) she imagines watching football as a passé activity, fit for her nemesis: “I can see you years from now in a bar / talking over a football game / With that same big mouth opinion / but nobody is listening.”

By the time “Stay Stay Stay” came out in 2012, Swift was dating the football player: “That’s when you came in wearing a football helmet / And said, “OK, let’s talk.”

Read on for the lyrics for “The Alchemy.”

Read the lyrics to ‘The Alchemy’

This happens once every few lifetimes

These chemicals hit me like a white wine

What if I told you I’m back?

The hospital was a drag, worst sleep that I ever had

I circled you on a map

I haven’t come around in so long

But I’m coming back so strong

So when I touch down call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team

Ditch the clowns, get the crown baby

I’m the one to beat

‘Cause the sign on your heart said it’s still reserved for me

Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?

Hey you, what if I told you we’re cool?

That child’s play back in school is forgiven under my rule

But I’m making a comeback to where I belong

Cause the sign on your heart said it’s still reserved for me

These blokes warm the benches

We’ve been on a winning streak

He jokes that “It’s heroin, but this time with an ‘E’”

Shirts off and your friends lift you up over their heads

Beer sticking to the floor, cheers chanted cause they said

There was no chance

Trying to be the greatest in the league

Where’s the trophy?

He just comes running over to me

Call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team

He jokes that “It’s heroin, but this time with an ‘E’”

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

The never-ending Young Thug trial that could reshape hip-hop

The atlanta rap star is at the center of one of the most complex, chaotic cases in georgia’s history, accused of running a murderous gang under the guise of a record label.

ATLANTA — Two years in the Fulton County court system have turned Young Thug into an iPad kid. With each passing day, he looks less and less like the musical prodigy who came out of the Atlanta projects and redefined the sound and style of trap. Who spent his 20s touring the world and blowing minds, just as likely to pose for cameras in a leather jacket as a billowing couture dress. Now, he wears a blank face in the chilly courtroom where guards deposit him most mornings.

The man born Jeffery Lamar Williams, now 32, pecks at a tablet. He swipes, he taps, he barely rises when the judge walks in. Thug paws at the screen as lawyers who will help decide whether he spends the next 20 years in prison crack their morning sodas and their morning jokes. “Is that Schlitz?” the judge asks. “Gotta stay warm in here somehow,” an attorney says. Ha ha ha. Tap tap tap.

It is a February morning, the 654th day since Williams was jailed without bond and accused of running a murderous gang posing as a red-hot record label. Jury selection lasted a full year; the trial is likely to run past the next presidential election. When a forensic biologist takes the stand to explain the finer points of a “molecular Xerox machine” in relation to an alleged assault from 2013, Thug crosses his arms across his 6-foot-3-inch frame, closes his eyes and sinks toward the defense table. On the gallery’s hard wooden benches, where a scrap of foam is impressed with the butt cheeks of some long-gone observer, a deputy will nod off before the hearing ends.

This is the same case that has obsessed the rap world and drawn scrutiny from legal scholars for its high drama and high stakes. It’s the trial that has made tabloid headlines for its mishaps: pornographic Zoom-bombing and jurors’ faces accidentally live-streamed. One of Williams’s co-defendants has been accused of a hand-to-hand drug swap in full view of the judge. A deputy was arrested for allegedly smuggling contraband into jail and having an “inappropriate relationship” with another co-defendant who has since been severed from the case.

“It’s been a wild ride,” said Jack Lerner, co-author of “Rap on Trial: A Legal Guide for Attorneys,” who is following the trial along with innumerable rap fans, concerned about its potential chilling effect on the industry. “They brought this massive [racketeering] case into a regular Georgia courtroom, Fulton County courtroom, that really wasn’t set up for a case this massive.”

But most days are morbid monotony. Thug stares forlornly into the news cameras. Living on chips and chocolate in jail, his lawyers say , he sleeps little. They say the government is trying to silence a generational Black artist using a case so thin that the indictment document cites Thug’s own lyrics as “overt act[s] in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

“Gave the lawyer close to two mil. He handles all the killings,” Thug sang on 2019’s album “So Much Fun,” now transcribed in the official court records. “We don’t speak ’bout s--- on wax. It’s all mob business. We know to kill the biggest cats of all kittens.”

T he Fulton County Superior Courthouse sits less than five miles from Cleveland Avenue, nicknamed Bleveland Avenue for the Bloods-affiliated gangs that dominate the neighborhood, where Williams was raised as one of 11 children.

His childhood apartment was demolished when he was about 18 years old. A few years later, Thug released his debut mixtape “I Came From Nothing.”

He sounded like no one else in the macho world of Southern rap, layering sophomoric and nonsensical lyrics over hard-nosed trap beats. The Washington Post’s music critic Chris Richards would later describe his work as the sound of a “world being dismantled.”

Thug was quickly scooped up by legendary Atlanta artist Gucci Mane, with whom he shares an ice cream cone face tattoo, and his career only accelerated. He left Bleveland for Buckhead — a tony part of Atlanta near a shopping mall with storefronts of Cartier and Gucci. By 2019, Thug had won a Grammy, collaborated with Elton John and established himself as one of the hottest upcoming stars in the fast-evolving world of rap.

Fame and money amplified Thug’s unique style. His manager told a Fader reporter in 2014 that he “eats no real food.” GQ wrote two years later he was injected with vitamins each month. He once ordered everyone who entered his home to wear white, according to a Complex reporter. He wore an Alessandro Trincone dress for the cover of his 2016 album “Jeffery.” The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston later displayed the dress in its “ Gender Bending Fashion ” exhibition.

He is unapologetically a rapper of the South, which has largely displaced acts from the East and West coasts on the charts. When a Complex reporter drove with Thug by a 20-story housing project in Manhattan in 2021, Thug envied the balcony views not seen in Atlanta projects.

“That is why you can’t compare to us, because you can still go to the top floor of your building and see the world, and see how you want to be,” he said . “We gotta literally go to prison and get put on an airplane to get this high.”

T hug’s rise in the 2010s loosely coincided with increasing public concern about violent crime in Atlanta, with calls for authorities to take major action. Prosecutors under District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) set their sights on Young Thug and about two dozen others believed to be associated with him. Investigators searched social media posts for gang signs and came to believe that some of Thug’s lyrics about crimes and shootings were based in reality.

Thug was one of 28 people arrested in raids across the city on May 9, 2022. An 88-page indictment lays out the government’s case that they operated as a gang called Young Slime Life — which prosecutors noted bore the same initials as Thug’s music label, Young Stoner Life.

“The members and associates of YSL moved like a pack, with defendant Jeffery Williams as its head,” lead prosecutor Adriane Love would say during opening statements at the trial.

Specifically, Thug was accused of renting a car used in the fatal 2015 drive-by that led to a gang war between two Bloods sets. But he was accused of involvement in a long list of homicides, armed robberies, aggravated assaults, theft, drug dealing, carjacking and witness intimidation that his co-defendants are charged with.

Thug’s attorney Brian Steel denies the charges against his client, who pleaded not guilty.

“The prosecution has taken a young man who was born into no opportunity, despair and hardship. And he has become a world-renowned, award-winning musical artist,” Steel told The Post last year.

Thug has essentially lived behind bars since his arrest, barring infrequent excursions such as a trip to his sister’s funeral last year. He is driven 20 miles from his jail cell to the courthouse every weekday morning, to bear silent witness to one of the most complex racketeering cases in Georgia’s history.

Legal experts told The Post that it is unconventional that Thug and his co-defendants are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — a legal framework prominently used in the 1980s to punish mafia activity, and which Willis and her prosecutors will also use to try former president Donald Trump on election fraud charges this summer.

RICO laws allow prosecutors to dismantle entire criminal organizations, from the street level to the top. If convicted, Thug and his five remaining co-defendants (the others either cut plea deals or will be tried separately) could face up to two decades in prison. But RICO cases are also notoriously massive, complicated and unwieldy, creating opportunity for disruptions and delays — all on ample display during this case’s long windup.

T he screams startled everyone. It was April 19, 2023 — midway through the case’s year-long jury selection process that sifted through more than 2,000 potential people. Thug’s head shot up and some of his co-defendants leaped to their feet as Rodalius Ryan — an alleged member of Thug’s crew already serving life in prison for a 2015 murder — cried for help from a cell down a hallway from the courtroom.

Footage of the incident shows deputies almost losing control of the room. Cordarius Dorsey, another co-defendant, tried to barge past deputies at the door in an apparent attempt to reach Ryan. Max Schardt, who was representing Shannon Stillwell, implored the room with outstretched arms: “Everybody just chill!”

It was later reported that Ryan was screaming as deputies strip searched him. They allegedly found two packages of marijuana sewn into his underwear, according to body-camera footage aired on local news.

On most days, the courtroom is kept under control by Judge Ural D. Glanville, a career Army man and a joyful disciplinarian, who enters the courtroom each day with his service dog, a black Labrador named Jack.

When a potential juror skipped court to visit the Dominican Republic last year, Glanville ordered them to write a 30-page essay in APA style, with primary and secondary sources. When a juror asked for the courtroom to be made warmer, Glanville replied that he kept it cold to keep everyone awake. The judge told an attorney who showed up late to a hearing in May that he would be held in contempt unless he bought everyone lunch. (The lawyer ordered chicken wings from a nearby strip club.) And as Glanville grows frustrated with the trial’s plodding pace — prosecutors by mid-April had so far only made it through about a quarter of more than 200 expected witnesses — he has threatened to hold court on the weekends.

But the surreality of the case sometimes gets away from the judge. Glanville inadvertently went viral on social media in the trial’s first week for reading out Young Thug’s lyrics in his monotone drawl. “F--- the police (f--- ’em), in a high speed,” Glanville recited, butchering the flow. “F--- the judge.”

Young Thug - Slime Sh*t ft Yak Gotti [Judge Ural Glanville Remix] pic.twitter.com/RbJLislE0v — THUGGERDAILY ひ (@ThuggerDaily) January 5, 2023

Other incidents have been more serious. A video of a defendant’s interrogation was leaked online last year, sparking an investigation. A defense attorney in the trial has been arrested on charges of bringing prescription pills into the courthouse and allegedly throwing his cellphone at a deputy’s head. A potential juror was briefly jailed for recording court proceedings.

Less than a month of the start of the long-anticipated trial, in December, Glanville paused proceedings for several weeks after Stillwell was stabbed in the Fulton County Jail.

P rosecutors have been using rap lyrics as evidence since at least the 1990s, with mixed success and despite criticism that White musicians are rarely accused of doing the things they sing about. (No one ever charged Johnny Cash for saying he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.)

A history of prosecuting rap lyrics

“I think we should all be uneasy when forms of artistic expression are taken as literal truths almost as public confession. There’s a real slippery slope,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta.

Asked for comment, the DA’s office pointed to the judge’s November 2023 ruling that “the lyric and related social media evidence is logically and legally relevant and, thus, conditionally admitted.”

The trial is a sensation online, with thousands of comments under a live stream from the courtroom and entertainment sites covering every legal argument and cultural repercussion. “Chance the Rapper’s Birthday Wish Is For Young Thug To Be Released From Jail,” read a BET headline Wednesday.

In Atlanta, where rap is a multibillion-dollar industry , up-and-coming artists also have a wary eye on the trial.

“They’re looking at [DA] Fani [Willis] like she’s turned Atlanta into Gotham,” said musician Langston Bleu. “It’s not cool to be guilty of something just because you’re really good at selling that.”

Atlanta musician Cade Fortunat, who sings under the name 4TUNAT, found it laughable that lyrics could be considered evidence. When a rapper puts the word “Glock” or “AK-47” into a track, he said, they are more likely to be considering the syllabic structure of the word than remembering a real event.

Z6Saint, native Atlantean and rapper, noted Young Thug’s imprisonment has not drawn many public protests. But he worries what will happen to the next generation of rappers if Thug and others are muzzled.

“I don’t think people are too worried about it,” he said. “They probably should be more worried about it.”

If Thug has been chilled, it’s not readily apparent. He released a new album, “ Business Is Business ” in June 2023, illustrated with an image of himself at the defense table beneath an empty judge’s bench.

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After Reports About Trump Jurors, Judge Demands Restraint From the Press

Some news reports have included details about jurors that had been aired in open court. One was excused after she developed concerns about being identified.

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By Jesse McKinley ,  Kate Christobek and Matthew Haag

• April 18, 2024

The judge in former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial ordered reporters to not disclose employment information about potential jurors after he excused a woman who said she was worried about her identity becoming known.

The woman, who had been seated on the jury on Tuesday, told the judge that her friends and colleagues had warned her that she had been identified as a juror in the high-profile case. Although the judge has kept prospective jurors’ names private, some have disclosed their employers and other identifying information in court.

She also said that she did not believe she could be impartial.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, promptly dismissed her.

Moments later, Justice Merchan ordered the press to not report the answer to two queries on a lengthy questionnaire for prospective jurors: “Who is your current employer?” and “Who was your prior employer?”

The judge conceded that the information about employers was necessary for lawyers to know. But he directed that those two answers be redacted from the transcript.

Justice Merchan also said that he was concerned about news outlets publishing physical descriptions of prospective or seated jurors, asking reporters to “simply apply common sense.”

“It serves no purpose,” Justice Merchan said about publishing physical descriptions, adding that he was directing the press to “refrain from writing about anything you observe with your eyes.”

William P. Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill, said that Justice Merchan’s order appeared “constitutionally suspect.” Professor Marshall said that a landmark Supreme Court ruling in a 1976 case, Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, struck down a trial judge’s ruling barring the news media from reporting information introduced in open court.

“The presumption against prior restraint is incredibly high in First Amendment law,” Professor Marshall said. “It’s even higher when it’s publishing something that is already a matter of public record.”

Lawyers for news outlets, including The New York Times, were expected to seek clarification on the order.

With the loss of the female juror on Thursday morning, six seated jurors remain.

In early March, Justice Merchan issued an order prohibiting publicly disclosing the names of jurors, while allowing legal teams and the defendant to know their identities.

But before the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers requested that potential jurors not be told that the jury would be anonymous unless he or she expressed concerns. Justice Merchan told the parties that he’d “make every effort to not unnecessarily alert the jurors” to this secrecy, merely telling jurors that they would be identified in court by a number.

On Thursday, Justice Merchan seemed frustrated by news reports that included identifying characteristics of potential jurors that had been aired in open court. He said: “There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury, and we’ve taken the measures we have taken.”

“It kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there,” he said.

He added that “the press can write about anything the attorney and the courts discuss and anything you observe us do.”

But he also said he had the legal authority to prevent reporters from relaying employer information on prospective jurors. He added that “if you can’t stick to that, we’re going to have to see if there is anything else we can do to keep the jurors safe.”

Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering upstate New York, courts and politics. More about Jesse McKinley

Kate Christobek is a reporter covering the civil and criminal cases against former president Donald J. Trump for The Times. More about Kate Christobek

Matthew Haag writes about the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He has been a journalist for two decades. More about Matthew Haag

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

News and Analysis

Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan took a startling turn when two jurors were abruptly excused , demonstrating the challenge of picking citizens to determine the fate of a former president.

Prosecutors argued in court that with a steady stream of social media posts, Trump had violated the gag order  imposed on him seven times, urging the judge overseeing the trial to hold him in contempt.

Our reporter joined “The Daily” to explain what happened during the opening days  of the trial against Donald Trump.

More on Trump’s Legal Troubles

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations  at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker:  Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases  involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know .

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