essays about lyric poetry

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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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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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Lyric Essays

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

These resources discuss some terms and techniques that are useful to the beginning and intermediate creative nonfiction writer, and to instructors who are teaching creative nonfiction at these levels. The distinction between beginning and intermediate writing is provided for both students and instructors, and numerous sources are listed for more information about creative nonfiction tools and how to use them. A sample assignment sheet is also provided for instructors.

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.

Course Syllabus

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play

Experiment with form and explore the possibilities of this flexible genre..

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Each week provides:

• discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
• written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

• the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for instructor and/or peer review 
• additional optional writing exercises
• an optional video conference that is open to all students(and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

Week 2: Experiments with Form: Braided Essay and Hermit Crab Essay

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

Week 3: Lyric Vignette and the Prose Poem

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

Week 4: Witnessing the Self: Essays by Poets

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

Week 5: Hybrid Forms and the Documentary Impulse

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, Roz Chast and Maira Kalman for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

Vise and Shadow

Essays on the lyric imagination, poetry, art, and culture.

Peter Balakian

224 pages | 6 color plates, 2 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2015

History: General History

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

• Table of contents
• Author Events

Related Titles

"Here are the burdens of literature. Here is the perpetual wandering of ideas that have found a good home. Every chapter is an awakening. Every reflection, something not heard before."

Grace Cavalieri | Washington Independent Review of Books

“While Balakian’s essays [ Vise and Shadow ] reveal the ways history and its discontents inscribe themselves in the smallest features of familiar texts, his poems [ Ozone Journal ] offer a mournful silence in the face of these social upheavals, and their aftermath, that is only possible within the realm of art. Readers will find both texts equally necessary and equally moving.”

Kristina Marie Darling | Colorado Review

“Peter Balakian is the preeminent Armenian writer in English today, whether the genre is poetry  (Ziggurat , Ozone Journal ), memoir ( Black Dog of Fate ), history ( The Burning Tigris ), or, as in the present case, cultural criticism. . . . [ Vise and Shadow ] offer[s] new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form . . . by exploring two dimensions of the lyric imagination in poetry, art, and culture.”    

Keith Garebian | World Literature Today

" Vise and Shadow  stands as an important contribution to the ongoing dialog about culture, modernity, and memory."

“Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian, and his significance as a poet of social consciousness is complemented by his work in other genres.”

David Wojahn | Tikkun

" Vise and Shadow belongs on a shelf alongside the literary essays of J. M. Coetzee, Adrienne Rich, and Seamus Heaney--all of whom are absorbed by the very same questions haunting and inspiring Balakian."

Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows

"With soaring critical erudition, Peter Balakian’s essays range across multiple genres--poetry, memoir, film, visual art, history, ’literary rock’--to create a brilliant collage of both American imagination and Armenian memory. An elegantly written, seminal work of sweeping importance."

James Carroll, author of An American Requiem

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Romantic things.

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A Transnational Poetics

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Pitch of Poetry

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10 of the Best Examples of the Lyric Poem

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A lyric poem is a (usually short) poem detailing the thoughts or feelings of the poem’s speaker. Originally, lyric poems, as the name suggests, were sung and accompanied by the lyre , a stringed instrument not unlike a harp. Even today, we often use the term ‘lyricism’ to denote a certain harmony or musicality in poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest short lyric poems written in English from the Middle Ages to the present day.

1. Anonymous, ‘Fowls in the Frith’.

We begin our whistle-stop tour of the lyric poem in the thirteenth century, a whole century before Geoffrey Chaucer, with this intriguing and ambiguous anonymous five-line lyric:

Foulës in the frith, The fishës in the flod, And I mon waxë wod; Much sorwe I walkë with For beste of bon and blod.

A ‘frith’ is a wood or forest; the poem, written in Middle English, features a speaker who, he tells us, ‘mon waxë wod’ (i.e. must go mad) because of the sorrow he walks with.

Because the last line is ambiguous (‘the best of bone and blood’ could refer to a woman or to Christ), the poem can be read either as a love lyric or as a religious lyric.

We have gathered together more classic medieval lyrics here .

2. Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘ Whoso List to Hunt ’.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, hélas , I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind …

One of the most popular and enduring lyric forms has been the sonnet: 14 lines (usually), in which the poet expresses their thoughts and feelings about love, death, or some other theme. In the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet the poet usually brings their ‘argument’ to a conclusion in the final rhyming couplet.

Here, however, Sir Thomas Wyatt offers an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, but he introduces the distinctive ‘English’ conclusion: that rhyming couplet. In a loose translation of a fourteenth-century sonnet by Petrarch, Wyatt (1503-42) describes leaving off his ‘hunt’ for a ‘hind’ – in a lyric poem that was possibly a coded reference to his own relationship with Anne Boleyn.

3. Robert Herrick, ‘ Upon Julia’s Clothes ’.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes …

This very short lyric poem, by one of England’s foremost Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, is deceptively simple. It seems to be simply a description of the woman’s silken clothing, and its pleasure-inducing effects on our poet.

But the poem seems to hint at far more than this, as we’ve explored in the analysis that follows the poem (in the link provided above). It might be described as one of the finest erotic lyric poems of the early modern period.

4. Emily Dickinson, ‘ The Heart Asks Pleasure First ’.

The Heart asks Pleasure – first – And then – Excuse from Pain – And then – those little Anodynes That deaden suffering …

So begins this short lyric poem from the prolific nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86).

The poem examines what one’s ‘heart’ most desires: a common theme in lyric poetry. The heart desires pleasure, but failing that, will settle for being excused from pain, and to live a life without suffering pain.

5. Charlotte Mew, ‘ A Quoi bon Dire ’.

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a popular poet in her lifetime, and was admired by fellow poets Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy. ‘A Quoi Bon Dire’ was published in Charlotte Mew’s 1916 volume The Farmer’s Bride . The French title of this poem translates as ‘what good is there to say’. And what good is there to say about this short poem? We think it’s a beautiful example of early twentieth-century lyricism:

Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead …

Follow the link above to read this tender lyric poem in full.

6. W. B. Yeats, ‘ He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ’.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light …

The gist of this poem, one of Yeats’s most popular short lyric poems, is straightforward: if I were a rich man, I’d give you the world and all its treasures. If I were a god, I could take the heavenly sky and make a blanket out of it for you.

But I’m only a poor man, and obviously the idea of making the sky into a blanket is silly and out of the question, so all I have of any worth are my dreams. And dreams are delicate and vulnerable – hence ‘Tread softly’. But Yeats, using his distinctive lyricism, puts it better than this paraphrase can convey.

7. T. E. Hulme, ‘ Autumn ’.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night – I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer …

This short poem by arguably the first modern poet in English was written in 1908; it’s a short imagist lyric in free verse about a brief encounter with the autumn (i.e. harvest) moon. This poem earns its place on this list of great lyric poems because of the originality of the image at its centre: that of comparing the ‘ruddy moon’ to a … well, we’ll let you discover that for yourself.

8. H. D., ‘ The Pool ’.

After Hulme’s free verse lyrics came the imagists – a group of modernist poets who placed the poetic image at the centre of their poems, often jettisoning everything else. H. D., born Hilda Doolittle in the US in 1886, was described as the ‘perfect imagist’, and ‘The Pool’ shows why.

In this example of a short free-verse lyric poem, H. D. offers what her fellow imagist F. S. Flint described as an ‘accurate mystery’: clear-cut crystalline imagery whose meaning or significance nevertheless remain shrouded in ambiguity and questions. Here, H. D. even begins and ends her poem with a question. Who, or what, is the addressee of this miniature masterpiece?

9. W. H. Auden, ‘ If I Could Tell You ’.

Lyric poems weren’t all written in free verse once we arrived in the twentieth century. Indeed, many poets of the 1930s, such as the clear leader of the pack, W. H. Auden (1907-73), wrote in more traditional forms, such as the sonnet or, indeed, the villanelle: a form where the first and third lines of the poem are repeated at the ends of the subsequent stanzas.

In this tender lyric poem, Auden explores the limits of the poet’s ability to communicate to the world – or perhaps, to a loved one?

We have analysed this poem here .

10. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘ Syntax ’.

Duffy’s work shows a thorough awareness of poetic form, even though she often plays around with established forms and rhyme schemes to create something new.

First published in 2005, ‘Syntax’ is a contemporary lyric poem about trying to find new and original ways to say ‘I love you’. Duffy’s poem seeks out new ways to express the sincerity of love, explored, fittingly enough, in a new sort of ‘sonnet’ (14 lines and ending in a sort-of couplet, though written in irregular free verse). A love poem for the texting generation?

We introduce more Carol Ann Duffy poems here .

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The Lyric Theory Reader

edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins

Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry.

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre...

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric.

Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

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edited by David A. Brewer and Crystal B. Lake

The thesis of The Lyric Theory Reader —that the very existence of the genre is more a critical extrapolation than anything solid and real—may seem to be itself a kind of critical conceit, but only because the argument serves the Reader exceptionally well as a cogent frame for taking stock of a diversity of approaches. Accordingly, the Reader would seem especially useful as a primer for up and coming scholars... Overall, the Reader should be considered essential in the formation of a thoughtful scholar of poetry and its criticism.

Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson and Prins show that although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric, it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical existence of literary forms.

A distinct account emerges of the life-history of the conception of the lyric as a genre—from the moment of its recognition as a genre that is said to have always been central, to the New Critical insistence that lyric is available because everyone can overhear it, to the increasing equation of lyric with poetry that occurs as the collapse of the genre system washes over both the novel and the lyric, leaving narrative and poetry in its wake. The Lyric Theory Reader is a worthy counterpart to Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel . It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the lyric, in poetry.

Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have done tremendous service to poetics in the nuanced and comprehensive work of constellation and accompanying commentary—providing a model of editorial lucidity, a library in a box, and a ceaselessly generative contradiction which is in the end perhaps itself the strongest argument for the lyric’s eccentric centrality.

Book Details

Acknowledgments General Introduction Part I. How Does Lyric Become a Genre? Section 1. Genre Theory Section 2. Models of Lyric Part I. Twentieth-Century Lyric Readers Section 3. Anglo- American New

Acknowledgments General Introduction Part I. How Does Lyric Become a Genre? Section 1. Genre Theory Section 2. Models of Lyric Part I. Twentieth-Century Lyric Readers Section 3. Anglo- American New Criticism Section 4. Structuralist Reading Section 5. Post- Structuralist Reading Section 6. Frankfurt School and After Section 7. Phenomenologies of Lyric Reading Part III. Lyric Departures Section 8. Avant- garde Anti-lyricism Section 9. Lyric and Sexual Difference Section 10. Comparative Lyric Contributors Source Acknowledgments Index of Authors and Works

Virginia Jackson

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Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry Paperback – January 23, 2007

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An essential collection of essays by important contemporary poets about the forms and rhetorical strategies of lyric poetry We are delighted when we recognize patterns and continuities, as we are delighted by a new poem's radical adjustment of, critique of, rejection of, or simple application of those patterns and modes. A poem means something because of previous poems. ―from the Introduction Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry. David Baker and Ann Townsend have assembled an important anthology, vital to any serious reader of poetry. Contributors include Linda Gregerson, Richard Jackson, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, and Stanley Plumly.

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Graywolf Press
• Publication date January 23, 2007
• Dimensions 6.17 x 0.88 x 8.86 inches
• ISBN-10 1555974600
• ISBN-13 978-1555974602
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David Baker is the author of Midwest Eclogue and Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry . He is the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Graywolf Press (January 23, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1555974600
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1555974602
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.17 x 0.88 x 8.86 inches
• #2,495 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
• #8,161 in Essays (Books)
• #10,734 in Literary Criticism & Theory

About the authors

Ann townsend.

Ann Townsend is the author of three collections of poetry: Dear Delinquent (Sarabande Books, 2019), The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005), and Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), winner of the Gerald Cable Prize. She also is the editor of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, (with David Baker), published by Graywolf Press in 2007. Her poetry and essays appear in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, and many others. She has read her poems and lectured on poetry and poetics at colleges, universities, writer's workshops, and bookstores around the country.

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University, she teaches courses in creative writing, twentieth century poetry and literary translation. She lives on a small farm in Granville, Ohio where she hybridizes modern daylilies and tends several acres of woods, gardens and orchards.

You can find Ann on Twitter at @anntownsendpoet.

David Baker

David Baker is author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently "Whale Fall" (W. W. Norton, 2022), "Swift: New and Selected Poems" (W. W. Norton, 2019), "Scavenger Loop" (Norton, 2015), "Never-Ending Birds" (Norton, 2009), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011, and "Midwest Eclogue" (Norton, 2005). His six books of prose include "Seek After: Essays on Modern Lyric Poets" (SFA University Press, 2018), "Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems" (Michigan, 2014) and, with Ann Townsend, "Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry" (Graywolf, 2007). Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Mellon Foundation, and Society of Midland Authors. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, and is Poetry Editor of "The Kenyon Review."

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The Writing Seminars

The american sonnet: an anthology of poems and essays.

• Dora Malech (co-editor)
• University of Iowa Press , 2022
• Purchase Online

Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies.

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Here in Futures of Joy (On San Diego Community Poetics) 

In memory and rememory of Elaine Joy de la Cruz (1978–2003)

Perhaps we were already living these futures. Perhaps we were already living these possibilities. Perhaps, on that rainy and soft-hearted, Manila-like, humid summer afternoon in downtown Chicago, you and I were living a critical moment foretold. I like to believe so. I like to believe that ancestors broke open some sky that summer. I like to believe deeply in the ars poetica of our conversation. 

It was 2003, and by that summer we’d already become dear comrades and collaborators. In San Diego, we’d struggled side by side (along with our other dear comrades) for educational justice, for ethnic studies, for a living wage for campus janitors, for dignity and liberation at the onset of a brutal, imperialist War on Terror. We’d performed raw and materialist and urgent poems at both campus and citywide protests, at the Poetry Slam at Urban Grind, Poetic Brew at Claire de Lune’s, Pass the Peas at Galoka, on the Porter’s Pub stage, at Che Café, the UCSD Cross-Cultural Center, and in the middle of Price Center. We’d been inspired by the generous and unapologetic Chicago hip-hop radical realism of I Was Born with Two Tongues, the deeply Bay Area lyrical swagger of 8th Wonder, the anti-imperialist rap chant poetics of the Los Angeles-based Balagtasan Collective, and the bluesy, folksy spiritual medicine of the Michigan-based Long Hairz Collective. And of course, we’d learned about the critical poetics of geography and space-making genius right here in San Diego from the local and legendary Taco Shop Poets. We built solidarity with fellow poetry crews across the city like Elevated, Able Minded Poets, and Goat Song Conspiracy, shared stages across the state with crews like Zero 3, iLL-Literacy, and Proletariat Bronze. We, so young and inexperienced but so committed, had even been invited a few times to run spoken word workshops for local high school students. Those early years had been so intense, so formative, so future-making. How expansive the geographies of our literacies and literature! 

Now here we were in the summer of 2003, in downtown Chicago for the APIA Spoken Word Summit. I had braved the first day of the summit alone and was anxiously awaiting your arrival. When you arrived, everyone was all about you. Of course they were—you were an undeniably gifted,  gorgeous, and relentless force of lyric and litany, a living example of the poetics of liberation. Who wouldn’t have wanted to say that they knew you? Spoke to you? Witnessed you reading a poem? Dedicated and read a poem to you? That rainy and humid summer afternoon, you and I were eating sandwiches outside Subway. I was debriefing about the first day of the summit. I was inspired and impressed that so many of these poets had come up through or were now teaching and mentoring with literary arts nonprofits like Youth Speaks in their respective regions. “We need something like Youth Speaks in San Diego,” I said. And with all of your calming and confident wisdom you said, “Let’s just build one.” I didn’t then have the capacity to receive that invitation and push. I didn’t realize that this was the conversation that I would return to year after year. 

Two months later, you died in a car accident. To this day, we are still here, gathering and making sense and space for Joy. To this day, I speak to you in prayer. I have your signature tattooed on my forearm. I carry you with me—or rather, it’s you who carries me, isn’t it? I sometimes wonder what an alternative timeline might have presented, what a different relationship to poetry and poetics I might have had, what our collaborations might have been. To this day, I ask: What if we had built that poetry and liberation center in San Diego? What if we had grounded that space in experimentation, collaboration, and genuine solidarity? I wonder what worlds open up when we model a radical poetics of relation, when we reckon with our historical and literary entanglements and intimacies, when we develop a shared grammar of past, present, and future. I wonder what worlds open up, what clarity comes, when our poetics remain in the Undercommons—as fugitive, anti-disciplinary, insurgent knowledge from below. Yes, I stay principled, stay anti-imperialist, stay anti-capitalist, stay rough draft, stay ethnic studies, stay close to the ground, stay rooted, stay poetry for the people. And so many we’d met along the way have continued this vital work of community poetics. I often route myself through that seemingly quotidian summer conversation and I wonder if—even that early on—we already knew how to do this work. We were a future organizing for a future of futures. That small conversation opened up so many possibilities, opened up so many spaces to return to. 

Here in San Diego, here on occupied Kumeyaay land, here on the coast, here against the border, it feels like the poets and organizers are moving within and returning to these futures, possibilities, and spaces for return. It’s humbling and healing to witness this work, to reflect on it, and to have that same conversation with you over and over again. I know for sure, my dear kasama , that if you and I were to check in right now, as I hold this poet laureate post, as I continue to organize through poetry, you would remind me of how we came up, how poetry and community and solidarity and relationality and liberation have always been the same project; how we commit to this work in a way that shows it’s always people before poetry, always food before poetry, always the U.S. out of the Philippines before poetry, always abolish prisons and police before poetry, always LAND BACK before poetry, always PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW before poetry, always END THE OCCUPATION before poetry, always FREE PALESTINE before poetry.    

Jason Magabo Perez , poet laureate of San Diego, California, is the author of   I ask about what falls away,  forthcoming in 2024;  This is for the mostless  (WordTech Editions, 2017); and  Phenomenology of Superhero  (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). In 2023, he was named an  Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow . Perez will launch a youth empowerment poetry project that includes youth mentorship and workshops on poetry, performance-making, filmmaking, and video art. The project will feature collaborations with local high school ethnic studies and English teachers and the development of open-access poetry curricula, grassroots publishing initiatives, and a culminating youth poetry summit in San Diego.

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Author Interviews

A conversation with the author of 'there's always this year'.

NPR's Scott Detrow speaks to Hanif Abdurraqib about the new book There's Always This Year . It's a mix of memoir, essays, and poems, looking at the role basketball played in Abdurraqib's life.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

The new book "There's Always This Year" opens with an invitation. Here's a quote - "if you please imagine with me, you are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting one free hand atop yours. And I am saying to you that I would like to commiserate here and now about our enemies. We know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection, how quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love." And what follows from that is a lyrical book about basketball but also about geography, luck, fate and many other things, too. It's also about how the career arc of basketball great LeBron James is woven through the life of the book's author, Hanif Abdurraqib, who joins us now. Welcome back to the show.

HANIF ABDURRAQIB: Thank you for having me again, Scott. It's really wonderful to be here.

DETROW: You know, I love this book so much, but I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. It's part memoir, part meditation, part poetry collection, part essay collection. How do you think about this book?

ABDURRAQIB: You know, it's funny. I've been running into that too early on in the process and now - still, when I'm asked to kind of give an elevator pitch. And I think really, if I'm being honest, that feels like an achievement to me because so much of...

DETROW: Yeah.

ABDURRAQIB: ...My intent with the book was working against a singular aboutness (ph) or positioning the book as something that could be operating against neat description because I think I was trying to tie together multiple ideas, sure, through the single - singular and single lens of basketball. But I kind of wanted to make basketball almost a - just a canvas atop which I was laying a lot of other concerns, be it mortality or place or fatherhood and sonhood (ph) in my case. I think mostly it's a book about mortality. It's a book about the passage of time and attempting to be honest with myself about the realities of time's passing.

DETROW: Yeah, it seems to me like it could also be a book about geography, about being shaped by the place you grew up in and that moment where you choose to stay or leave, or maybe leave and come back. And I was hoping you could read a passage that that deals directly with that for us.

ABDURRAQIB: Of course. Yeah. This is from the third quarter or the third act of the of the book.

(Reading) It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave. Yes, when LeBron left, the reactions made enough sense to me, I suppose. But there was a part of me that felt entirely unsurprised. People leave this place. There are Midwestern states that are far less discernible on a blank map, sure. Even with an understanding of direction, I am known to mess up the order of the Dakotas. I've been known to point at a great many square-like landscapes while weakly mumbling Nebraska. And so I get it. We don't have it too bad. People at least claim to know that Ohio is shaped like a heart - a jagged heart, a heart with sharp edges, a heart as a weapon. That's why so many people make their way elsewhere.

DETROW: What does Ohio, and specifically, what does Columbus mean to you and who you are?

ABDURRAQIB: I think at this stage in my life, it's the one constant that keeps me tethered to a version of myself that is most recognizable. You know, you don't choose place. Place is something that happens to you. Place is maybe the second choice that is made for you after the choice of who your parents are. But if you have the means and ability, there are those of us who at some point in our lives get to choose a place back. And I think choosing that place back doesn't happen once. I mean, it happens several times. It's like any other relationship. You are choosing to love a place or a person as they are, and then checking in with if you are capable of continuing to love that place or person as they evolve, sometimes as they evolve without you or sometimes as you evolve without them. And so it's a real - a math problem that is always unfolding, someone asking the question of - what have I left behind in my growth, or what has left me behind in a growth that I don't recognize?

So, you know, Columbus doesn't look the way - just from an architectural standpoint - does not look the way it looked when I was young. It doesn't even look the way it looked when I moved back in 2017. And I have to kind of keep asking myself what I can live with. Now that, for me, often means that I turn more inward to the people. And I began to think of the people I love as their own architecture, a much more reliable and much more sturdy architecture than the architecture that is constantly under the siege of gentrification. And that has been grounding for me. It's been grounding for me to say, OK, I can't trust that this building will stay. I can't trust that this basketball court will stay. I can't trust that this mural or any of it will stay. But what I do know is that for now, in a corner of the city or in many corners of the city, there are people who know me in a very specific way, and we have a language that is only ours. And through that language, we render each other as full cities unto ourselves.

DETROW: Yeah. Can you tell me how you thought about basketball more broadly, and LeBron James specifically, weaving in and out of these big questions you're asking? - because in the first - I guess the second and third quarter, really, of the book - and I should say, you organize the book like a basketball game in quarters. You know, you're being really - you're writing these evocative, sad scenes of how, like you said, your life was not unfolding the way you wanted it in a variety of ways. And it's almost like LeBron James is kind of floating through as a specter on the TV screen in the background, keeping you company in a moment where it seems to me like you really needed company. Like, how did you think about your relationship with basketball and the broader moments and the broader thoughts in those moments?

ABDURRAQIB: Oh, man, that's not only such a good question, but that's actually - that's such a good image of LeBron James on the TV in the background because it was that. In a way, it was that in a very plainly material, realistic, literal sense because when I was, say, unhoused - right? - I...

ABDURRAQIB: ...Would kind of - you know, sometimes at night you kind of just wander. You find a place, and you walk through downtown. And I remember very clearly walking through downtown Columbus and just hearing the Cavs games blaring out of open doors to bars or restaurants and things like that, and not having - you know, I couldn't go in there because I had no money to buy anything, and I would eventually get thrown out of those places.

So, you know, I think playing and watching basketball - you know, even though this book is not, like, a heavy, in-depth basketball biography or a basketball memoir, I did spend a lot of time watching old - gosh, so much of the research for this book was me watching clips from the early - mid-2000s of...

ABDURRAQIB: ...LeBron James playing basketball because my headspace while living through that was entirely different. It's like you said, like LeBron was on a screen in the background of a life that was unsatisfying to me. So they were almost, like, being watched through static. And now when I watch them, the static clears, and they're a little bit more pleasureful (ph). And that was really joyful.

DETROW: LeBron James, of course, left the Cavs for a while. He took his talents to South Beach, went to the Miami Heat. You write - and I was a little surprised - that you have a really special place in your heart for, as you call them, the LeBronless (ph) years and the way that you...

ABDURRAQIB: Oh, yeah.

DETROW: ...Interacted with the team. What do you think that says? And why do you think you felt that way and feel that way about the LeBronless Cavs?

ABDURRAQIB: I - you know, I'm trying to think of a softer word than awful. But you know what? They were awful.

DETROW: (Laughter).

ABDURRAQIB: I mean they were (laughter) - but that did not stop them from playing this kind of strange level of hard, at times, because I think it hit a point, particularly in the late season, where it was clear they were giving in and tanking. But some of those guys were, like, old professionals. There's, like, an older Baron Davis on that team. You know, some of these guys, like, did not want to be embarrassed. And...

ABDURRAQIB: ...That, to me, was miraculous to watch where - because they're still professionals. They're still NBA players. And to know that these guys were playing on a team that just could not win games - they just didn't have the talent - but they individually did not want to - at least did not want to give up the appearance that they weren't fighting, there's something beautiful and romantic about that to me.

DETROW: It makes a lot of sense why you end the book around 2016 when the Cavs triumph and bring the championship to Cleveland. But when it comes to the passage of time - and I'll say I'm the exact same age as you, and we're both about the same age as LeBron. When it comes to the passage of time, how do you present-day feel about LeBron James watching the graying LeBron James who's paying so much attention to his lower back? - because I don't have anywhere near the intense relationship with him that you do. But, I mean, I remember reading that Sports Illustrated when it came out. I remember watching him in high school on ESPN, and I feel like going on this - my entire adult life journey with him. And I feel like weirdly protective of LeBron James now, right? Like, you be careful with him.

ABDURRAQIB: Yeah.

DETROW: And I'm wondering how you think about him today and what that leads your brain to, given this long, long, long relationship you have with him.

ABDURRAQIB: I find myself mostly anxious now about LeBron James, even though he is still - I think he's still playing at a high level. I mean, I - you know, I think that's not a controversial statement. But I - while he is still playing at a high level, I do - I'm like everyone else. So I'm kind of aware that it does seem like parts of him - or at least he's paying a bit more attention to the aches that just come with aging, right?

ABDURRAQIB: I have great empathy and sympathy for an athlete who's dedicated their life to a sport, who is maybe even aware that their skills are not what they once were, but still are playing because that's just what they've done. And they are...

ABDURRAQIB: ...In some cases, maybe still in pursuit of one more ring or one more legacy-building exploit that they can attach to their career before moving on to whatever is next. And so I don't know. And I don't think LeBron is at risk of a sharp and brutal decline, but I do worry a bit about him playing past his prime, only because I've never seen him be anything but miraculous on the court. And to witness that, I think, would be devastating in some ways.

And selfishly, I think it would signal some things to me personally about the limits of my own miracle making, not as a basketball player, of course, but as - you know, because a big conceit of the book is LeBron and I are similar in age, and we have - you know, around the same age and all this. And I think a deep flaw is that I've perhaps attached a part of his kind of miraculous playing beyond what people thought to my own idea about what miracle is as you age.

And so, you know, to be witness to a decline, a sharp decline would be fascinating and strange and a bit disorienting. But I hope it doesn't get there. You know, I hope - I would like to see him get one more ring. I don't know when it's going to come or how it's going to come, but I would like to see him get one more. I really would. My dream, selfishly, is that it happens again in Cleveland. He'll come back here and team up with, you know, some good young players and get one more ring for Cleveland because I think Cavs fans, you know, deserve that to the degree that anyone deserves anything in sports. That would be a great storybook ending.

DETROW: The last thing I want to ask about are these vignettes and poems that dot the book in praise of legendary Ohio aviators. Can you tell me what you were trying to do there? And then I'd love to end with you reading a few of them for me.

ABDURRAQIB: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked about that. I haven't gotten to talk about that as much, and that - those were the first things I wrote for the book. I wrote 30 of them...

DETROW: Really?

ABDURRAQIB: ...I think. And of course, they all didn't make it. But that was kind of an exercise, like a brain exercise. And I was trying to play with this idea of starting out with folks who were literally aviators. So it begins with John Glenn and Lonnie Carmen, and then working further and further away from aviation in a literal sense, much like the book is working further and further away from, say, basketball in this concrete sense - because ascension in my mind isn't just moving upward, it is expansion, too. It is, I think, any directional movement away from where your position is. And so I got to be kind of flexible with ideas of ascent and growth and moving upward.

DETROW: And the last aviator you did this for was you. And I'm hoping you can read what you wrote about yourself to end this.

ABDURRAQIB: Oh, gosh. OK, yeah. This is Hanif Abdurraqib, Columbus, Ohio, 1983 to present. (Reading) Never dies in his dreams. In his dreams, he is infinite, has wings, feathers that block the sun. And yet in the real living world, the kid has seen every apocalypse before it arrives, has been the architect of a few bad ones. Still wants to be alive most days. Been resurrected so many damn times, no one is surprised by the magic trick anymore.

DETROW: That's Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the new book "There's Always This Year: On Basketball And Ascension." Thank you so much.

ABDURRAQIB: Thank you, Scott. I really appreciate it.

(SOUNDBITE OF FLEETWOOD MAC SONG, "ALBATROSS")

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5 Writers Who Blur the Boundary Between Poetry and Essay

"poets are the hoarders of the literary world".

There is a Bernadette Mayer writing exercise that suggests attempting to flood the brain with ideas from varying sources, then writing it all down, without looking at the page or what spreads over it. I have attempted this exercise multiple times, with multiple sources, and what I love about it—along with many of Mayer’s other 81 prompts—is that what comes out can literally take any form. The form is not dictated by the content I read, nor the rules of the exercise. The information I collect prior to writing may be entirely disparate, seemingly unrelated, but through the writing, it begins to take shape, and links are found. In the process of communicating information in a lyric way, barriers to form withheld, I am able to develop a richer portrait of what thinking really looks like.

I heard someone say once that poets are the hoarders of the literary world: collectors of facts, dates, quotes, newspaper headlines, ticket stubs, and love letters. Indeed, another of Mayer’s prompts is to keep a diary, or diar ies , of such useful things. As these journal pages begin to overflow, content spilling over the borders, the writing becomes something we might not always call a poem. Reflecting on his poetry collection The Little Edges and a book of essays The Service Porch , both of which appeared in 2016, poet and critic Fred Moten said , “The line between the criticism and the poetry is sort of blurry. I got some stuff in the poems that probably could’ve been collected with the essays.”

There is a long-standing tradition of poets who have refused genre, or reinvented it, and who continue to push the boundaries of form. Here are five, but just a cursory glance into any of their work will lead you to uncover many more.

Jenny Boully

The first essay in Jenny Boully’s latest collection Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, published last month, is a journey into two illusive linguistic temporalities: “the future imagined and the past imagined. ” By positioning the reader in a space of hypothesis, Boully tests the limits of memory and lived experience, never quite allowing her reader to land on stable footing. With this linguistic trick, a redefinition of what is the personal begins to emerge.

Throughout her work, Boully is interested in reorienting the role of the reader from passive to participatory and reorienting the structure of the text from chronological to sensory. In an introduction to Boully’s work, Mary Jo Bang writes , “She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with poetry.” It’s no wonder that excerpts from her first book The Body , written as footnotes to an imaginary text, were included in both John D’Agata’s  The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002 .

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is a seamstress of language. Her work stretches the definitions of narrative writing by incorporating literary appropriation, cut-ups, collage, and détournement, or the act of turning a recognizable cultural product on itself, a technique developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. Her poetic “cunt ups” take works of the traditional poetic canon and reinvent them with a contemporary feminist voice, directly splicing the historic masculine texts with pornographic imagery. The 2013 collection Cunt Norton employs the original language of 33 canonical poets, twisting them into erotic poems as an act of love for her predecessors. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy wrote of the work . Her experiments began to take a more prosaic form as she desired further space for her content. “I was writing linked poems that kept getting longer and more narrative,” she said in an interview .

Due to her inventive and often hysterical treatment of language, Bellamy’s voice is engaging on any topic. The themes she tackles in her collected essays When the Sick Rule the World range from the gentrification of San Francisco, her experiences with a women’s writing group and a moving tribute to the late equally inventive writer Kathy Acker, in the form of a catalogue of the contents of her wardrobe.

Claudia Rankine

When Claudia Rankine’s Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the judges’ citation read, in part, “It’s not (just) poetry.” The prose-poetry hybrid is a current throughout her work; her previous poetry title Don’t Let Me Be Lonely  was described, alongside Citizen , as “lyric essays” in the  The New York Review of Books . Rankine’s work uses investigative tools of poetry to probe what it means to be human and to encourage readers to examine their personal responsibility to others. Through experiments in form, she highlights the dangers of lazy classification of people and experiences; her words in any medium provoke self-reflection.

In Citizen , a 2015 essay on Serena Williams finds a comfortable home alongside prose and list poems. With her employment of the second person throughout the collection, Rankine prompts her readers to enter into the very experiences she is describing, whether they are wholly familiar or not. As such, her approach is in equal measure confrontational and humanizing.

David Rattray

When the poet, critic, and renowned translator David Rattray passed away at the age of 57 in 1993, the experimental writer Lynn Tillman wrote , “He swept us away also with his ‘bad attitude,’ his insubordination to authority and to the authority of what he knew.” This was true not just in the manner he lived his life, but also how he captured life in text. A principle translator of Antonin Artaud, Rattray’s own poems display a diary-like quality: they are grand narrations stuffed full of dates, places, people.

A collection of essays and stories exploring his relationship to close friends, grief, drugs, travel, and literature called How I Became One of the Invisible was put together by Chris Kraus just before his death. Through narratives that are at once breathless and directional, and full of poetic references and quotes, Rattray reveals his deep feelings for those with whom he shared his life. “He believed people were gems, precious, and treated them accordingly,” Betsy Sussler wrote , following his passing. And so too did he treat his words, allowing us to enter into his world imbued with sensitivity.

Maggie Nelson

Asked in an interview by Emily Gould as to how she decides on which genre(s) she will employ when writing a new book, Maggie Nelson replied , “Genre, for me, is determined by the unfolding of my interests, which is unknowable at a projects’ start.” Her defiance of category is not only evident in her bibliography, but in the bibliography of each book which makes it up. Bluets , which began as an investigation into the color blue and its varying manifestations throughout history, became a book of prose poems. The Art of Cruelty , a personal reflection on the employment of violence in art, became a book of academic criticism. Begun as a work of criticism, The Argonauts became a personal memoir, with its background research spilling, literally, into the margins. “I find my way to the right tone, idiom, form or set of subjects as I bumble along,” Nelson says.

It is her very adaptability of form and expression that has become one of her signature attributes, despite the literary world’s continued insistence on writerly classification, and in turn mimics the fluidity of her subjects. Hilton Als writes , “It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves . . . that makes her readers feel hopeful.”

Listen: Claudia Rankine talks to Paul Holdengräber about objectifying the moment, investigating a subject, and accidental stalking.

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知 / Know

Frederick Jackson Turner, lecture to the American Historical Association, 1893

Come waves of men with capital; come broadcloths,                 silks, leghorns, crapes, all the refinements the train ushers into each village, and the settler                 revolts, pushes into the interior, flees what's turned to edifices of brick, orchards, gardens,                 colleges, churches: roll instead westward into the frontier's crucible in which                 all former servants of Europe become American. Without the war cry                 of Cheyenne and Iroquois, would we be ourselves? Would we have battled,                 consolidated, traded, made self and liberty our germs of government?                 Would we have stayed and called home the lands of the upper Yadkin                 had they remained untamed by farm and corncrib, their timbers not made                 girdled, deadened, fenced? The West is too much                 for any man. It takes him from board room and steam engine and loses him                 to birch bark canoe. We see a mountain and level it; we see a plain                 spread out like a meadow to overrun; nature the fault and fall line                 we trace to our next destination, following the arteries                 of our nation's geology: lost shores of inland seas, shale scarps and carapaces                 carved from eastern Kentucky. All now replaced by these joins and joints                 of an iron nervous system. Again and again, we return to the primitive                 line which we alone believe marks progress; history does not move only forward                 for the American, but back. The settler will not settle his desires, and so the soul                 of our country stays restless, nervous, intolerant of administrative experience and education; hews                 to the press of private liberty, which knows no bounds, gives few benefits, risks                 government laxity and a spoils system. We are Boone. We are Kit Carson. Hunter, trader, occupant                 of the moment. We are the land we can't forget once thrived without us. This                 is America, at the end of a hundred years of life                 under the Constitution. The train is here. Our frontier is gone.

“Know” is part of a book-length sequence of poems entitled  West: A Translation  that “translates” a Chinese elegy carved by an anonymous writer into the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station sometime during the Chinese Exclusion Act. I use this elegy as the frame-text to reimagine the history of the transcontinental railroad, and the railroad’s cultural impact on American culture as a whole.  West  also comes with a digital companion of video poems that readers can access and play. You can click  here  to access the video rendition of “Know.”’

Feature Date

• March 30, 2024

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“知 / Know” from WEST: A TRANSLATION: by Paisely Rekdal. Published by Copper Canyon Press on May 2, 2023. Copyright © 2023 by Paisley Rekdal. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Featured Poet

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale , Appropriate: A Provocation , and, most recently, West: A Translation , which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the editor and creator of the digital archive projects West, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.

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Port Townsend, Washington

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“Through these poems, readers are asked to wrestle with the complex, layered histories of race, creed, class, and gender that are all too often overlooked in monolithic presentations of America’s past and present. Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning.” — Publishers Weekly

“Paisley Rekdal has always been a breathtakingly ambitious poet, and this is her most ambitious book so far — a work of seamlessly blended poetry and history. In lyric poems in many forms and spoken through many voices, as well as in corresponding essays, Rekdal traces and grieves the sorrowful politics that link the building of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (‘Congress had to pass an act/ to make the building stop’). She excavates an American shame that has yet to be reckoned with, though this extraordinary book, which finds a fresh purpose for poetry as a reliquary of evidence, perhaps makes a start.” —Craig Morgan Teicher

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Structure: Lifeblood of the Lyric Essay

Writing mostly poetry for the last two years, I had pretty much given up on prose. Until I met the lyric essay. It was as if I found myself a new lover. I was on a cloud-nine high: I didn’t have to write a tightly knitted argument required of a critical essay. I could loosely stitch fragments—even seemingly unrelated ones. I could leave gaps. Lean on poetic devices such as lyricism and metaphor. Let juxtaposition do the talking. I did not need to know the answer, nor did I need to offer one. It was up to the reader to intuit meaning. Whew!

Okay, so it’s not as easy as that. I can’t just stick bits together. Not if I want to write a decent —fabulous! —lyric essay. Structure is work. A work of craft, like shaping a poem, requiring space and patience. In her essay “The Interplay of Form and Content in Creative Nonfiction,” Eileen Pollack writes “…finding the perfect form for the material a writer is trying to shape is the most important factor in whether or not that material will ever advance from a one- or two-page beginning to a coherent first draft to a polished essay [my emphasis].”

But why such weight on structure?

The lyric essay, say Deborah Tall and John D’Agata , is useful for “circling the core” of ineffable subjects. And in her Fourth Genre essay , Judith Kitchen states that its moment is the present, as it “goes about discovering what its about is [Kitchen’s emphasis].” As such, traditional structures—e.g. narrative logic and fully fleshed arguments that help the writer organize what he or she already knows—don’t befit the lyric essay (as per Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in Tell It Slant ).

This makes sense. Because when I tried to write prose I would flail in too many words, unable to say what I felt. Hence, the poetry. But now I had discovered a prose genre where the writer leans on form— consciously constructing it or borrowing a “shell” like the hermit crab [1] —to eloquently hold the inexpressible aboutness , to let meaning dance in the spaces between its juxtaposed parts.

For fun—and to appreciate the significance of structure—I juxtaposed two essays from Ellena Savage’s debut collection Blueberries : the titular essay “Blueberries” and “The Museum of Rape,” essays with very different forms; in fact, the whole book is a goodie bag of experimental forms.

I saw that while “Blueberries’” structural unit looked like the paragraph, its appearance is deceptive: the usual paragraph-by-paragraph logic is non-existent; instead, each paragraph acts as an individual poetic musing, making it more like a stanza, which literally means “room” in Italian. Some rooms are big—a single block of unindented text that can be longer than a page—and each room is separated by a single line break. As such, “Blueberries” could have easily become an amorphous piece of writing that leaves the reader thinking What’s the point of this? or scares them off with the lack of white space, but Savage uses metaphor and the lyricism of repetition to build a sturdy, stylish house.

The phrase “I was in America at a very expensive writer’s workshop”—or variations of it—appears in almost every room. Other words and phrases such as blueberries, black silk robe, gender-neutral toilets, reedy and tepid and well-read [male] faculty member, also often fleck the essay. This syntactical play and repetition, delivered in long, conversational sentences as if talking passionately to a friend about something weighty (which she is), are used as metaphors—tangible stand-ins—allowing Savage to have a broader conversation about complex abstract themes, in this case the intersection of privilege, gender, and making a living as a woman and a writer. Crucially, the repetition also makes associative links between the rooms, giving the reader agency to intuit meaning. As such, these structural devices create layered connotations (like a poem), making structure integral to the completeness—and coherence—of “Blueberries.”

In “The Museum of Rape,” Savage sections the content by numbered indexes – e.g. 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, like museum labels for pieces of artwork; hence, performing the essay’s title on one level. Savage uses these indexes to direct the reader to different parts of the essay, associating (in some instances ostensibly unrelated) fragments together, whereas in “Blueberries” Savage uses repetition as the associative device. This structure invites the reader to navigate the essay in multiple interwoven ways, intentionally making meaning a slippery thing that can “fall into an abyss”—a phrase that Savage often directs the reader to. In this way, the structure—labyrinthine and tangential—mimics the content, which is much more allusive— elusive even —than “Blueberries,” given its themes of trauma, memory’s unreliability, and, as beautifully summarized by a review , “the lacunae of loss (of loved ones, faith, and even the mind itself).” Savage captures this essence in index 8.0:             What I’m saying is that I understand the total collapse of structured memory.

I asked myself, what it means to anticipate the loss of one’s rational function (7.0, 7.1, 7.2)…I comprehend tripping into the lacuna with my hands tied behind my back.

The museum-label structure also offers plenty of lacunae: There is almost a double line break in between each of the indexed fragments, because the index number is left-adjusted and given an entire line. Also, the fragments are, on average, shorter than the rooms in “Blueberries,” with many paragraphs indicated by an indent or a line break rather than a block of unindented text. There’s a poem in there, too, peppered with cesurae. These structural devices further signify the content, whereas “Blueberries” is purposefully dense to indicate a pressing sense of importance. Which is to say, the form used for “Blueberries” could not convey the aboutness of “The Museum of Rape” and vice versa—proof that form is the lifeblood of the lyric essay.

Now all there’s left to do is construct one. So, let’s play.

Choose a nonfiction piece you’ve already written or are working on, preferably one with a subject matter that’s tricky to articulate. Now reconstruct it by building or borrowing a form that’ll illuminate (even perform) the aboutness of your piece. Here are some ideas:

• A series of letters, emails, tweets or diary entries (epistolatory)
• An instructional piece—e.g. “How to…,” a recipe, or a to-do list—using “you” as the point of view
• Stanzas/paragraphs (like “Blueberries”) that can stand alone, but when put together offer a bigger/layered meaning through repetition
• Versify, playing with lineation and cesura; you can also intermix a series of poems and prose fragments
• A “mock” scientific paper with title, author(s), aim, methods, results, conclusion, discussion, and a reference list, as a way to section the content

Above all, have fun experimenting. ____

Lesh Karan is a former pharmacist who writes. Read her in  Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Not Very Quiet  and  Rabbit , among others. Her writing has previously been shortlisted for the New Philosopher Writers’ Award. Lesh is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne.

[1] The “Hermit Crab Essay” is a term coined by Miller and Paola to describe an essay that “appropriates existing forms as an outer covering” for its “tender” content. A classic example is Primo Levi’s memoir The Periodic Table , structured using the chemical elements in the periodic table.

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Poetry scholar and critic Marjorie Perloff has died

Perloff, a world-renowned scholar of contemporary poetry and champion of experimental poetry, was known for her ability to untangle complex ideas in modern and conceptual poetry and explain it in jargon-free books and essays.

MARCH 29, 2024

Marjorie Perloff, the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, a world-renowned scholar of contemporary poetry and champion of experimental poetry, died March 24 at her home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 92.

A leading literary critic and author of more than a dozen books, roughly 250 scholarly articles and book chapters, and hundreds of book reviews, Perloff was known for her ability to explain complex experimental and conceptual poetry in jargon-free books and articles read by general audiences and literary scholars alike. 

Marjorie Perloff. Photo courtesy of Carey Perloff.

“Marjorie came to Stanford in 1986, at the peak of a distinguished career,” said  Roland Greene , the Mark Pigott KBE Professor and the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities in H&S. “Before she retired in 2000, she published several of her most influential books, mentored a generation of doctoral students, served as president of both the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, and gave Stanford a lifeline to the world of avant-garde poetry past and present. This is a place with a strong tradition in poetry criticism, but Marjorie was easily the most important poetry critic ever at Stanford.” 

Making the complex clear

Perloff was singular as a literary critic and scholar for her mastery of making complex ideas and writing clear.

“What made her such a compelling force in modern letters was her passionately engaged intellect, excited by experimentation but grounded in the literatures of the several languages she knew,” wrote Professor of American Literature, Emeritus,  Albert Gelpi  and Professor of English, Emerita,  Barbara Gelpi  in a joint statement. “She addressed difficult texts with clarifying empathy and argued out the issues that they raised.”

Perloff published her first books in the 1970s, and they focused on the works of William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara. In the 1980s, Perloff’s books explored poetic themes within larger avant-garde movements. These works include  The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage  (Northwestern University Press, 1981) and  The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture   (University of Chicago Press, 1986). Her byline also frequently graced the pages of  The Washington Post, Boston Review, and  The Times Literary Supplement .

She detailed her belief in the power of close reading and why it is critical for gaining a true understanding of literary and poetic works in her book  Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy  (University of Alabama Press, 2004). This collection of essays explored topics in writing that spanned modernism and contemporary avant-garde.  Differentials  received the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2004.

Perloff also made her mark as a teacher and mentor. At Stanford, her undergraduate and graduate classes explored topics such as literary theory; introductory, modern, and contemporary poetry; comparative British and American poetry; digital poetics; and visual arts analysis.

Former Stanford student and friend Craig Dworkin, professor of English at the University of Utah, described her dedication to teaching saying, “one semester our classroom was across an atrium from the building entrance, so we could see Marjorie arrive, and before she reached the room she would already be talking; I realized that she was always teaching, but only sometimes were you lucky enough to be within earshot.”

Perloff made many contributions to the Stanford community, including serving as director of the undergraduate honors program in the Department of English (1991) and director of graduate studies from 1994 to 1997.

From Vienna to the U.S.

Perloff was born Sept. 28, 1931, in Vienna. At age 6, she fled Vienna with her family three days after Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938. In her memoir,  The Vienna Paradox  (New Directions Press, 2003), Perloff recounted her early life in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to the U.S. and childhood in New York with her Jewish family, and how the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz became the English-speaking American girl Marjorie in her teens.

Marjorie Perloff. Photo by Dagmar Logie / Stanford University; Courtesy Stanford News Service.

She studied English at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, then Oberlin College, and Barnard College, where she graduated in 1953. She married Joseph Perloff, who became a renowned cardiologist and pioneered the study of congenital heart disease, in 1953. They had two children, Nancy and Carey.

After working as a movie subtitle writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Perloff moved to Washington, D.C. with her family. There, she earned a Master of Arts (1956) and a doctorate (1965) in English literature at Catholic University of America. Her doctoral dissertation, “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats,” was published as a book in 1970. Perloff became a full professor at Catholic University of America, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. Later, she taught at the University of Maryland (1971-1976) and the University of Southern California (1976-1986). In 1986, Perloff joined the Stanford faculty as a professor of English and comparative literature.

At Stanford, Perloff had a profound and lasting impact on her students and colleagues.  Robert Pogue Harrison , the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus, team taught  Introduction to the Humanities  and two graduate seminars on the French 19th-century poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud with Perloff in the late 1990s.

“No one who spent an hour in Marjorie’s company could ever forget her,” said Harrison, professor of French and Italian. “In addition to being the best scholar of modern poetry of her generation, she was multi-lingual, immensely articulate, and a tour de force of wit and storytelling. She gave greatly more to Stanford than she took from it. Team teaching with her was an exhilarating experience that I will always cherish.”

She received numerous awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981) and National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship (1985). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and American Philosophical Society (2012). She also received honorary degrees from the Chinese Foreign University in Beijing, Bard College, Chapman University, and the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

“She was an inspired teacher and committed mentor to generations of students,” wrote Albert and Barbara Gelpi. “Marjorie lived that same passionate commitment: companion and wife of Joseph Perloff, beloved mother and grandmother, and devoted and loyal friend. She was a vibrant presence in the world, and she will be remembered by the many near and far who grieve her loss.

Perloff is preceded in death by her husband, Joseph, who died in 2014. She is survived by her daughters, Carey and Nancy,   and her three grandchildren. A memorial service will take place in May.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Shirley Horn

The pianist and vocalist was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities share their favorites.

By Giovanni Russonello

We’ve spent five minutes with icons of the avant-garde , big-band heroes and saxophone titans . This time around, we’re putting the spotlight on one of jazz history’s rarest talents, the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn, who would have turned 90 next month.

Horn was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A daughter of Washington, D.C.’s Black bourgeoisie, Horn often attired herself in furs and white gloves, but she could outlast even the hardiest barfly as the night wore on. Her claim to fame will always be her way with a ballad — slow, smoothly poetic, not exactly beckoning but fully inviting — but she also had a ferocious knack for swing rhythm. As influenced as her musical language was by the French Impressionists, like Ravel and Debussy, the blues was always her mother tongue.

Born, raised and stationed throughout her life in the nation’s capital, educated in classical piano at Howard University, Horn developed a reputation in Washington by her mid-20s, but she had little interest in chasing the spotlight. She remained only a rumor in New York until Miles Davis — after hearing her 1960 debut album for the small Stere-O-Craft label — convinced Horn to bring her trio for an extended run opposite him at the Village Vanguard. The club’s owner had never heard of her, but Davis insisted: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play.” Her showing there led to a contract with Mercury Records, and a solid run of recordings followed, including the Quincy Jones-arranged “Shirley Horn With Horns.”

But Horn prized the comforts of hearth and community, and she had the benefit of plentiful local scene in Washington, where she had become a linchpin. For most of the 1970s she barely recorded. But she kept working, holding together the same trio of expert D.C. musicians for decades, with the bassist Charles Ables and the drummer Steve Williams. The three developed a joyous dynamic, not so much telepathic as alert from moment to moment, so that Horn’s suave but intensely improvised playing always had a plush bed to land in.

Here the fact of her immense slowness — Horn often played at tempos so draggy that, at 30 or 40 seconds in, it felt like the song had barely begun — became an asset: You’ll often hear Ables reroute gamely in response to a rhythmic choice she’s made or a transitional chord she’s adjusted. The famed vocalist Carmen McRae loved the sound of that trio so much, she hired them as her backing group; on McRae’s final album, from 1991, Horn can be heard tossing glittery harmonies on ballads and driving the band on up-tempo tunes . It was around this time that Horn swept back into the spotlight, thanks to a deal with Verve Records, and enjoyed one of the great late-career renaissances in jazz history, in particular with her Grammy-winning 1992 album, the now-canonical “Here’s to Life.”

Below, read a selection of appreciative takes on Horn’s distinctive sound from a mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities, some of whom knew Horn personally by way of the Washington scene. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.

Gwen Redding, radio D.J.

“the great city”.

Shirley loved D.C. because D.C. was home. It was her husband and her family. She stopped singing for a while so that she could take care of her family. And after everyone was grown, she decided that she would go back to work as a full-time singer. She just wasn’t the kind of person who was going to run to New York to record and perform. She’d rather be home in D.C., performing with Charles Ables and Steve Williams — which was just a perfect trio. “The Great City” is her singing about New York. “Seven million people and each one standing alone” — the lyrics really speak for themselves. When Europe and the rest of the world started calling her, she was very comfortable doing that. But she was never going to stop doing what she was doing, as far as her life went.

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Hannah Grantham, scholar

“wild is the wind”.

​​Listening to Shirley Horn is an intimate experience. The soundscapes she arranged immerse her audiences in different scenes of human life that are compelling and instructive. Her slower song-stylings make room for introspective thinking about our entangled human relationships. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her take on Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s 1957 standard “Wild Is the Wind.” Over the 67 years since Johnny Mathis liltingly premiered the song for the Paramount Pictures film of the same title, many artists have taken a turn at interpreting it, but Horn’s version stands out for its hushed tones that hint at the private sweet nothings exchanged between lovers.

At 26, Horn recorded “Wild Is the Wind” for the small label Stere-O-Craft in 1960. The song was released as a 7” single alongside the tune “Mountain Greenery” to promote Horn’s first album, “Embers and Ashes: Songs of Lost Love Sung by Shirley Horn.” From the start, Horn draws her listeners in with her moody piano, accented by Joe Benjamin’s bass and paired with Herbie Lovelle’s thumping, heartbeat-like drumming to amplify the earnest desire she expresses to escape into love’s embrace. Horn’s stretching of the lyrics envelops listeners in the heady intensity of a developing love’s quite moments. Her captivating performance extends the distinguished slower pace Horn perfected while playing in jazz clubs in Washington’s U Street Corridor during the 1950s.

Alison Crockett, vocalist

“this can’t be love” (live).

The way I came to Shirley Horn was through the record “Close Enough for Love.” The whole record is a masterpiece of rhythm, time, harmony and her amazing vocal storytelling ability. She was the singer that taught me how to phrase a song where I talked like my grandfather, slowly … with precision … and time … so you understand … exactly … what … she’s trying … to say. Horn is one of the sexiest singers you’ll ever hear. The song “I Wanna Be Loved” epitomizes that. However, the song that really made me love Shirley Horn was “This Can’t Be Love.” She turns this simple Rodgers and Hart song into a bluesy, swinging masterpiece. She has a simplistically complex way of comping and voicing chord changes that sets up the sound of the blues dripping out of her voice. Horn’s plain-spoken way of singing sounds so effortless that the listener is unaware of how deeply in the pocket she is. Take away the melody and she sounds like an African drum. Shirley is known for singing ballads in incredibly slow tempos, but don’t sleep on her ability to swing … HARD.

Lauren Du Graf, writer

“a lazy afternoon”.

In 1961, Shirley Horn was on a fast track to stardom, opening for Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard, where she was scouted by Quincy Jones for a deal with Mercury Records. By the following decade, the industry had all but forgotten her. She performed mostly in local venues and turned her attention to her family. Her recording career may have remained dormant had it not been for the drummer Billy Hart, her former bandmate and D.C. neighbor, who, in the late 1970s recommended Shirley to the Danish label Steeplechase.

The resulting work was “A Lazy Afternoon” (1979), her second album in 14 years. The project earned five stars in Downbeat, ushering in a wave of interest in her music that lasted until her death in 2005. Fittingly, the album’s title track is an ode to the absence of work. Originally a show tune, in Shirley’s hands the song is deconstructed, the tempo slackened beyond rubato, loaded with fermatas. Billy and the bassist Buster Williams intuit her every subtle shift and pause, as if to paint around the lyrics: “If you hold my hand and sit real still, you can hear the grass as it grows .” The magic of intimacy, the song suggests, surfaces in languor, as we retreat from the world of sound and motion into stillness.

Jason King, music critic and scholar

“if i should lose you”.

I wasn’t always Team Shirley Horn. While the jazz establishment raved about her string-laden 1992 album “Here’s to Life,” my teenage ears heard her starfish-slow singing as ponderous and her no-frills approach to melody as too understated. I’ve since come to appreciate the power of Horn’s approach to softness, silence and languorousness, forged by her classical music studies at Howard University in the 1940s, as well as the years she spent in the 1950s cutting her chops playing for discerning jazz audiences in D.C.-area nightclubs. For her 1960 debut, “Embers and Ashes: Songs of Lost Love,” Horn reimagines the 1930s Tin Pan Alley ballad “If I Should Lose You” as a spare fever dream. She transforms the melodramatic lyric into an emotionally naked essay on the erotics of codependency, simply through the intensity of her quiet singing. Inheritors of her pianissimo gift, ranging from Roberta Flack to Billie Eilish, deploy volume as suspense in similar ways. Shirley Horn’s sublime skill set made Miles Davis take notice — he’d invite her to open for him that year at the Village Vanguard. While they wouldn’t record together until 1991, the pair became kindred spirits in their lifelong pursuit of sultry minimalism.

Eliane Elias, pianist and vocalist

“this can’t be love”.

Although Shirley Horn has often been identified as a supreme balladeer, I personally also enjoy hearing her singing and accompanying herself on the piano on mid-tempo swing tunes. Listen to “This Can’t Be Love” as an example of what I mean. She had great taste in choosing repertoire and in arranging for her trio. Horn could really swing and was an expressive singer with a great feel. She was a master at telling the story at any tempo, and could always hold the listener’s attention. She certainly could hold mine. Horn’s sound and style influenced a whole generation of singer/pianists.

Giovanni Russonello, jazz critic

“estate (summer)”.

Shirley Horn is the most elegant and yet perhaps the least ostentatious singer you’ll ever hear. She inherited Billie Holiday’s knack for making atmospheres out of a half-whisper; this is easy enough to notice. But it’s less often observed that she can be seen as a connector between Holiday and a strain of avant-garde vocalists — like Jeanne Lee and Patty Waters and later Fay Victor — who put breath and physical coolness at the center of their sounds. Horn’s 1987 take on “Estate (Summer),” an Italian ballad with a melody that could easily tip into melodrama, showcases the gravity of her calm. Fitting that the song is an ode to the forces of nature: When Horn tells the summer air, “You sweep away my sorrow with your sigh,” she must know she’s describing her effect on us, too.

Billy Hart, drummer

“why did i choose you”.

One of my favorite records I’ve ever made was “A Lazy Afternoon,” with me and Buster Williams accompanying Shirley. And one of my favorite tracks from it is “Why Did I Choose You?” It’s amazing how she made us feel when we were on the bandstand with her. More than one time, she made me cry. It was embarrassing, in front of the audience, but I was so moved by the music. And her influence shows up everywhere, both as a singer and a pianist. When you hear Herbie Hancock, even, you say: Man, Herbie really heard Shirley Horn! Anybody would say that, but I in particular can say that because I played with Shirley Horn opposite Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard, more than once, and that’s when I met Herbie. A bunch of younger singers, like Diana Krall, really based their way of singing on Shirley. I was talking not long ago to Samara Joy , and she said that “A Lazy Afternoon” is one of her favorite records.

Andrey Henkin, music critic

“consequences of a drug addict role”.

Like contemporary Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist Shirley Horn started out as a reluctant singer. And, after her first success in the early 1960s, Horn became increasingly dissatisfied with the settings in which she was heard, so much so that she departed the spotlight in 1966. Before her re-emergence in the late 1970s and increasing fame through the end of her life, she made a single album in 1973 for the obscure Perception label, a return to the intimacy of her 1960 debut and again featuring her piano. Closing out the date, a set mixing Great American Songbook standards and recent pop fare, is the audacious divergence in Horn’s discography “Consequences of a Drug Addict Role.”

Over a sparsely sinister musical backdrop — Horn’s sole composer credit — is Harold Wing’s poetry recounting a life of dependency, lines like “a challenge a day/no work or play/nothing to say/but how’s the stuff today.” Horn’s unadorned vocal style is rendered all the more chilling by an added echo effect, especially striking when she repeats “Death” to close out the track. In six minutes, Horn puts you on the cold streets, looking for a fix while looking over your shoulder.

Fredara Hadley, scholar

“return to paradise”.

Whenever I find myself in a tropical and lush corner of our planet, “Return to Paradise” is the song that plays in my head. It happens every single time unconsciously. The brilliance of Shirley Horn’s vocal phrasing and sensitive piano playing means that even when I am not in a tropical and lush corner of our planet, listening to “Return to Paradise” creates a moment of sublime respite. I first fell in love with Shirley Horn when I heard Mark de Clive-Lowe’s remix of “Return to Paradise” for the 2002 “Verve Remixed” compilation. Twentysomething me danced and vibed to his version, but I loved her voice so much that I happily fell down the rabbit hole of her discography. I became a devotee of her unrushed melodic storytelling and a delighted eavesdropper on the intimate conversation between her voice and her piano. For me, Shirley Horn is paradise found.

Rusty Hassan, radio D.J.

“keepin’ out of mischief now”.

Shirley lived a few blocks from me. She was not only a friend, she was a neighbor. And as she got more and more famous and celebrated, with the income she had coming in, rather than move, she kept adding onto her house, building additions onto her home on Lawrence Street. One time I saw her, she said: “I can’t do any more — I can’t get any more permits. But I finally got the room I want that will fit the grand piano.” She was really tight with D.C. — her loyalty to D.C. was such that she always did New Year’s Eve at the One Step Down, on Pennsylvania Avenue. And her album “The Main Ingredient” was recorded at that house on Lawrence Street. The tune “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” is up-tempo, and something that people could easily be drawn to. The whole atmosphere was really like having a party. When you saw her in concert, she’d be well dressed, to the nines, wearing gloves, and really conscious of who she was in performance. But when she was off the stage, it was: “How you doin’, c’mon, let’s eat, let’s have some fun.” “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” is an old swinger, a Fats Waller tune, and I think that spirit is in the music.

Jordannah Elizabeth, music critic

“here’s to life”.

Jazz vocalists can be considered equivalent to the aging process of all wines, from widely produced California merlots to the rarest Bordeaux; time is of the essence. Shirley Horn’s later work, 1992’s “Here’s to Life” (Verve), became her signature modern standard, as the cooing string section behind her creates a potent sonic realm, flowing like new silk for Horn to deliver an unforgettable performance. Horn’s sensibility — controlled, romantic and intuitive — also feels very intentional, almost as if she knew “Here’s to Life” was to be an emblem of wisdom and survival that is more sweet than bitter. She is regal, classic and simply perfect.

John Murph, music critic

“you won’t forget me”.

Whenever I attempt to explain the erotic power of music, I go to this 1991 masterstroke. The first sound you hear is a muted trumpet stab from one of Shirley Horn’s biggest champions — Miles Davis, who became a fan from her 1960 debut album, “Embers and Ashes.” Three decades later, Miles appeared on the title track from her 1991 album, “You Won’t Forgot Me,” when she was experiencing a late-career renaissance. While Miles’s exquisite playing is noteworthy, make no mistake, this song is quintessential Shirley Horn. Horn excelled at suffusing her music with simmering eroticism — not only by smoky alto and languid yet conversational phrasing, but also from her penchant for prowling tempos and brilliant self-accompaniments on piano. In this song, she mesmerizes as she sings about her sexual prowess over a lover, caressing Kermit Goell and Fred Spielman’s lyrics like a siren. Steve Williams’s gentle, incessant drum rimshots and Charles Ables’s pulsating bass line concoct a groove of sustained ecstasy, while Horn’s sensual vocals shadow dance on top with Miles’s coruscating trumpet.

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