On Lyric Essays and Dancing in Sequined Pants

Steven Church

Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall

2012, pp. 173-179 (Review)

Published by Michigan State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fge.2012.0041

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/489801

[ Access provided at 7 Mar 2023 05:33 GMT from Abbotsleigh ]

review

On Lyric Essays and

Dancing in Sequined Pants
St e v en Church

Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford, eds., Between Song

and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century
autumn house, 2011. 420 pages, paper, $34.95.

Lia Purpura, Rough Likeness

sarabande, 2011. 224 pages, paper, $15.95.

We can dance if you want to. We can leave your friends behind. ’Cause your
friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, well they’re no friends of mine.
—Men Without Hats

When I give public readings of my nonfiction, occasionally afterward someone

will approach me to say that they liked my “poems.”
While I appreciate the kind words, I often feel compelled to inform them
that I don’t write poems. I write essays. If I’m feeling particularly prickly, I will
hold up the pages. “See? No line breaks.” And sometimes they’ll argue with
me and tell me that my essay “just sounds like a poem,” to which I usually
nod and smile and say thank you.
But I die a little bit on the inside.
Students in my graduate nonfiction workshop are forbidden from saying

3 173
174 3 fourth genre

of an essay, “This sounds like poetry.” If a student utters this phrase, he’ll
usually only say it once . . . not because he will incur some horrible, draconian
punishment (which is sort of redundant anyway in the gulag of a graduate
writing workshop), but simply because I will ask, ever so politely, for him to
explain precisely what he means by such a statement. I might ask him to read
the section aloud and explain why it “sounds like poetry.”
It’s not that I don’t like poetry. It’s just that such comparisons, one, don’t
seem to respect well-written prose and, two, feel entirely too reductive and
simplistic to be helpful in understanding the difference (if there is a relevant
one) between a poem and an essay.
The lyric essay, which posits itself as the cool compromise between the
two, I’ve realized, is the skinny-jeans-wearing, ironically messy “hipster” of
nonfiction writing—the leader of a movement dedicated to merging nonfiction
and poetry, committed to promoting writing that lives between classifications
and on the fringe of the status quo. And I like this new prose stylist with his
chunky black-frame lenses, his odd juxtapositions of patterns and stripes, and
his cool cardigan-sweater, singer-songwriter vibe.
I appreciate the lyric essay movement (and it is a movement with all of the
requisite prophets, acolytes, and haters) not because it seems ultra-cool and
hip and fresh, but for the way it has opened up the discussion of nonfiction
and pushed the emphasis away from confessional memoir back toward a
critical appreciation of the essay’s flexibility and reach. I like it for the way it
has tried to bridge the gap between genre provinces in MFA programs and in
publishing, and for the way it has even forced us to expand our understanding
of narrative. What troubles me (though I’ve been guilty of it myself) is what
I see as the attendant drive, the almost colonial push to plant a flag in any
prose or other territory that pays attention to or emphasizes language, calling
it “lyrical” or “poetic.”

In the Autumn House anthology Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-
first Century, editors Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford take a stab at
defining the lyric essay, offering up a clearly articulated editorial aesthetic and,
 Steven Church 3 175

more importantly for teachers, students, readers, and writers of nonfiction,

an outstanding collection of contemporary essay models.
One look at the table of contents and the essay nerd in each of us will
recognize numerous examples of the breadth and depth of contemporary
nonfiction writing. With fine selections from Ander Monson, Toi Derricotte,
Lia Purpura, Debra Marquardt, Brenda Miller, Brian Doyle, David Gessner,
Dinty W. Moore, Michelle Morano, and many others, this is perhaps the best
collection of nonfiction I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve excitedly told more than
one colleague or friend about it, giving them what is probably the highest
compliment I can give an anthology: I would definitely teach this book. But
it’s also just a joy to read, and positioned well, I think, to offer a middle ground
between Lopate’s classic, The Art of the Personal Essay, and John D’Agata’s
anthology of essays, The Next American Essay.
The nature and environmental focus that dominates many of the selec-
tions wouldn’t necessarily be my first instinct as an editor; but it does allow
for some excellent thematic and stylistic pairing of essays (e.g., Monson and
Marquardt on weather, Doyle and Gessner on nature writing). The editors have
also compiled an accomplished cast of lyric essays, pieces that I see as the best
sort of examples of the genre or form or whatever it is we’re supposed to call
it. You can point to Lia Purpura’s “On Form,” or Brenda Miller’s “Season of the
Body,” even Michele Morano’s excellent piece on loss, language, and grammar,
“Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood,” and say, “That’s a lyric essay.”
In their introduction, St. Germain and Whitford identify the “poetic
sensibility” as being what separates the lyric or “song” essays from the nar-
rative or “story” pieces. This sensibility includes elements of craft such as
“intense focus on sound, rhythm, music, imagery, metaphor, and nuance,” a
“finely-tuned attentiveness to language,” combined with “vivid description,”
and what they call the “turn to metaphor.” But this definition doesn’t really
help me understand the difference between a poetic sensibility and a literary
or essayistic or even narrative sensibility. It seems to me you could use these
characteristics to describe all good writing, not just lyrical writing.
It’s not until the editors begin talking about essays that foreground form
and consciousness that I think they get closer to a pedagogically and practically
useful definition of what separates lyric from narrative. They talk about essays
that “use organizing principles such as segmentation, montage, listing, and
176 3 fourth genre

collage,” and that “move as poems do, in concentric circles.” Though I still
don’t get the fetishizing of the poem and the poetic sensibility, I do think their
focus on movement, form, and structure gets closer to what separates a lyric
essay from a narrative essay.
It’s not the sound or turn to metaphor, or even just an attention to form,
but the logic of an essay that makes it “lyrical” or not—because form, move-
ment, and structure are intimately connected to the logic of the essay. A lyric
essay acts and moves, when it moves at all, with its own idiosyncratic internal
logic, or at least with logic that transcends or subverts the more traditional
cause-effect logical progression of realistic narrative, or rhetorical progression
of argument and exposition. Rather than an if-then causality, the lyric essay
might instead adopt an if-if or if-what logical progression. The logic often
goes beyond the digressive and tangential thought of the classic Montaignian
essay and employs associative, fragmented logic driven by abrupt and often
jarring juxtaposition. Its focus is on the author’s subjective consciousness
and not on an objectively shared consciousness and conventions of essaying
and storytelling.
Lia Purpura’s first book of essays, On Looking, is in my opinion one of
the best examples of the lyric essay form published in the last ten years. Her
newest collection, Rough Likeness, offers further evidence of essays that meet
St. Germain and Whitford’s expectation that they exhibit “doubleness,” living
between the song and story, as well as what might be called a “poetic sensibil-
ity.” These pieces demonstrate an “intense focus on sound, rhythm, music,
imagery, metaphor, and nuance,” as well as a “finely tuned attentiveness to
language.” They also meet my understanding of a great lyrical essay by having
an internal logic that is simultaneously subjectively strange and also oddly
objectively accessible.
Her 2011 Best American Essays contribution, “There Are Things Awry Here,”
begins with Purpura’s encounter with a suburban Tuscaloosa, Alabama, big-box
shopping center, and her observation that this place “feels like nowhere, is so
without character that the character I am hardly registers,” a sentiment that
many readers can understand. But what separates Purpura from the average
observer or writer is the way she responds, the way she sees and thinks about
this everyday landscape. She says, “I’ll get to work, in the only way I know
how,” and what follows is an essayistic “walk” around the perimeter of the
store during which she views everything through her own idiosyncratic lens.
 Steven Church 3 177

A “proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery,” becomes the driver of a

Chemlawn truck; a “rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands
on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock,” morphs into a man
on a riding mower; and a “farm woman, her shawl held against the wind,”
becomes in reality a woman, “juggling bags and pinning her name tag.” Faced
with a land that “babbled the way all useless things babble—fuzzy bees with
felt smiles, bejeweled and baubly plaques for occasions,” Purpura tries to give
the landscape a voice, tries to imbue the place with meaning.
Though it’s not always easy to follow the leaps of her mind, it’s always
rewarding to try. It’s as if you’ve stumbled into an Olympic-caliber mental
gymnastics class and don’t want to leave despite your occasionally clumsy
participation. Part of the fun is Purpura’s ability to let the reader in on the
project, to be conscious of her essay as essay, and to teach you how to leap with
her. In nearly every piece, she’ll tell you (usually early on) exactly what the
project is, even if it seems impossibly complicated. She’ll tell you the landing
target, the “about” in her essays, and then dare you to follow her flight.
She explains the origins of “There Are Things Awry Here” by saying, “When
the land would not speak and my characters failed, when the land was muffled
and my characters stock, this piece was born,” and we see what happens when
a fairly common, everyday subject—the wrongness of a suburban shopping
mall—is approached with artistic and gymnastic grace. What matters ultimately
is the way that Purpura’s mind works on the page, and like all good art, it is
work to explore a landscape so deeply, so thoughtfully, and so uniquely—work
that is a pleasure and an inspiration to witness.
The essays in Rough Likeness—whether the subject is ostensibly wood-
working, a postcard, the beauty of shit, or the bothersome descriptor “gun-
metal”—make deep sense and ring with resonance. They don’t really look like
line-break poems; they probably sound like poems, but each essay also indulges
in the unique subjective weirdness of Purpura’s consciousness. Her honesty
of intention inspires trust in her as a guide, and we are happy to follow her
deeply and darkly into the meaning of one singular moment. At times I worry
about her. It seems like it might be difficult to be Purpura, as if she is afflicted
with meaning-making, with this kind of obsessive, microscopic dissection of
the everyday; but then I think this is a sickness I crave as a reader and writer,
a pathology I want to pass on to my students.
178 3 fourth genre

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Eh, I could explain it, but you probably wouldn’t get it.

I was in graduate school when John D’Agata’s first book, Halls of Fame, and
his ideas about the lyric essay made the first splash in the nonfiction pond.
At the time, the term seemed dangerous, revolutionary, and exciting, as if
you really could be part of something new in literature—new but also old,
as D’Agata was always reminding us. The lyric essay itself is not new. The
movement to embrace lyric essays, to reclaim them from the grips of other
genre classifications, did seem new—as if we were all explorers setting out
across the frozen tundra or hacking through verdant jungles, planting flags in
anything that seemed to fit under this maddeningly wide and colorful umbrella
of the lyric essay. Armed with a new term and new permissions, we claimed
territory in poetry, fiction, art, film, philosophy, and other disciplines. But
perhaps like all colonial efforts, this one, too, was doomed to exhaust itself.
A couple of years ago, upon the release of his second book, About a Moun-
tain, D’Agata visited the school where I teach. During a question-and-answer
session, one student asked if he could define the term “lyric essay”; what I
remember most is the weariness with which D’Agata answered the question,
as if the weight of this term, this idea, this movement in the essay had become
a burden after so many years. He looked like a man who’d opened a secret
garden to the public and now couldn’t get the brats out of the fruit trees.
D’Agata readily admitted that he felt the term had become overused to
the point of becoming essentially meaningless. Worse yet, the lyric essay had
now become permission for a writer to “put on a pair of sequined pants and
dance around because he has nothing to say.”
We all laughed at this.
But what’s interesting here are both the negative connotations of “sequined
pants” and the real challenge implied in this critique—namely, that as a writer
of nonfiction, you must have something to say regardless of what kind of pants
you’re wearing on the page. Though D’Agata was giving us tacit permission
to wear them, sequined pants seem to be necessarily suspect; but what makes
them really bad is when there’s no serious thinking at work on the page.
 Steven Church 3 179

D’Agata also said that he felt the term “lyric essay” is essentially just that—a
term; that he believes it is most useful pedagogically for teaching writers and
readers how to embrace a kind of nonfiction writing that is artful, eccentric,
elusive, and perhaps impossible to define; and that the lyric essay as a thing
itself, distinct from other forms and styles of essaying or from other genres,
may not exist at all.
A strange thing happened, though, after D’Agata’s visit. “Sequined pants”
worked its way into the lexicon of our nonfiction workshop, morphing a
little bit into “fancy pants” or “sparkly pants,” but retaining the basic critical
analogy. It became a teaching tool, a kind of stand-in term for what we might
call an overly poetic sensibility, one where the essayistic purpose of the piece
is lost in the sequins.
If someone is showing off her linguistic pyrotechnics, maybe letting
content serve the form (rather than the other way around), operating with
an inaccessible internal logic, or just getting too gimmicky with form, one of
the workshop members will likely raise her hand and say, “I think this is kind
of a fancy pants moment,” and we will all understand what she is saying, nod
gravely, and cluck our tongues in disapproval.
Though perhaps fading a bit in coolness, aging and growing out of its
skinny jeans, the lyric essay still sounds like a poem and acts like an essay,
still imagines like a short story, argues like a manifesto, performs like drama,
and dances its dangerous dance.