GUEST MEAN: Daniel Nester

October 27th, 2009 / 4:44 pm Blake Butler—

i gotta be honest, i kind of like a good ‘lyric essay’ even if the term sucks

john d’agata’s ‘the next american essay’ is one of my favorite books i own

but i agree with you daniel, it is often indeed a way for people to try to hide behind form while having nothing real to say

October 27th, 2009 / 5:08 pm Daniel Nester—

Not all writing that purports to be a lyric essay sucks. But anyone who sits down and says to oneself, “today I am going to write a lyric essay” or, “maybe this sucky poem would work better instead as a lyric essay,” in your guest Mean Person’s opinion, needs to step back from her or his desk and take a breather.

D’Agata’s anthology is good for most of the stuff it includes, sure. There’s some real stinkers in there, too. For teaching, it’s great–students re-sell that sucker like nobody’s business, it has “The White Album,” it’s like a glorified class packet. Moving forward from that, however, there’s a lost of D’Agata-begat projects and works that just stink to high heaven.

October 27th, 2009 / 5:09 pm Blake Butler—

totally agree. sitting down to write anything specific in that way seems a really bad approach.

what essays do you not like in the anthology? i’m curious…

October 27th, 2009 / 5:21 pm Daniel Nester—

As I look at TNAE, I see there’s a lot of great stuff, sure. Stuff that I can’t stand in there: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, David Antin, Brian Lennon, Joe Wenderoth, James Wright, Thalia Field. They might work as writing, sure, but not so much as essays. As writers, sure, they’re good writers. James Wright is great. But these particular pieces, much more than the others, indicate to me where this term lyric essay is/was going, which is warmed-over bleh.

October 27th, 2009 / 6:00 pm Adam Robinson—

“Leave writing non-feeling non-person-aware wankathons to the poets.”

Just who are you trying to piss off here?

October 27th, 2009 / 6:04 pm Daniel Nester—

I dunno, Adam. Perhaps poets who wank off without feeling and without emotion, and call the results lyric essays, for starters. We can move on from there.

October 27th, 2009 / 7:14 pm John Madera—

The limitations of genre terms notwithstanding, I don’t find a compelling argument against the lyric essay as a form here. I understand “lyric essay” to be an umbrella term under which many different forms may fall. Utter dismissal doesn’t qualify as criticism. It seems Nester wishes to preserve some idea of the essay that he thinks has somehow been contradicted, usurped, denigrated by the lyric essay. How do those pieces by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, David Antin, Brian Lennon, Joe Wenderoth, James Wright, Thalia Field “work as writing” but not as “essays” anyway? Why not lay out what an essay is supposed to do and then perhaps we’ll understand exactly what your prejudices, biases, etc. are? Should Lia Purpura be dismissed as well? Albert Goldbarth? Jenny Boully? Seems to me Annie Dillard has more to say about the lyric essay than this rant:
“Prose genres have been blurred all along….The essay is, and has been, all over the map. There’s nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them.”

October 27th, 2009 / 7:25 pm Amy McDaniel—

totally agreed. this screed takes one kind of really bad reason for playing with the essay form and uses that to impugn the whole practice. the illogic is startling. the word ESSAY means _literally_ to make an experimental attempt, to try, to test, from the latin for the act of weighing. to me that’s quite lovely. and yeah, i agree with the dillard quote–anyone who thinks there’s such a thing as a conventional essay has very little versing in the history of the genre.

October 27th, 2009 / 7:56 pm Daniel Nester—

John — I appreciate your even-toned take on what an essay is, and see your points. I do fail to see how I wish to “preserve” anything; it connotes some sort of conservative stance that isn’t applicable if for no other reason to move on to that dreaded word “neocon.”

Here’s some thoughts, and tell me what you think. I think this will probably come out more Mean and Grumpy than my initial post, which, admittedly, was an email to Justin in the middle of the night.

Here’s one of my deals: As I see it, essays explore an idea–“subject matter” as Dillard calls it–from a particular speaker’s vantage point. “What do I know” and all that jazz. If said piece of writing doesn’t have an idea, doesn’t have a subject matter, doesn’t explore it, and doesn’t have an “I” that links to either, or, or preferably both, then it’s not an essay and it might not even be essayistic.

But that’s fine: it can be done, and done well. Another possible conclusion: it’s not an essay in the first place.

Here’s my second deal: Essays that don’t have an idea, don’t explore subject matter, and don’t have a speaker, are not essays. Go ahead and call them “lyric X.” if you want. That’s fine with me. It’s the “essay” part that gets me going all Mean Week and all; it indicates to me there is no strong narrative voice or point in the enterprise of reading it.

Maybe I propose that lyric essays aren’t essays at all. As Phillip Lopate puts it in a 2007 Seneca Review’s issue dedicated to the Lyric Essay–which is kind of like U2 recording a tribute album to itself, but that’s for another topic–“I have yet to be blown away” by lyric essays. Also, as Lopate points out in the same piece, Seneca review lyric essay editor John D’Agata may like to point out that a dozen lyric essays from Seneca Review have been selected for Best American anthologies, but have not been been selected as Best American Essays. Rather, they’ve been as Best American Poems. This may have changed in the past couple years.

Granted, I get tired with genre distinctions in a genre-less world. But here’s how I am a neocon or trying to “preserve” something: To call something an essay without much regard for the 400-plus-year history of the genre, longer than the novel, doesn’t appeal to me and not to many other readers. What gets on my nerves, moreso even than the careerism AWP niche-creating of it all, is, as Lopate again puts it, the lyric essay’s “refusal to let thought accrue to some purpose…the quality of rumination.’

The other point I make in my Mean Week rant is that many of the people drawn to calling their writing lyric essays are poets who come from certain branches on the poetry scene’s family tree, poets who see an easy way out of the poetry world. While I am all for breaking away from the poetry scene and writing in another genre, I fail to see how much of the stuff is different than poems.

OK, I am probably how “accruing to no purpose” myself. But that’s my take on the situation. I am, admittedly, in the minority in these views, but I can’t stop sticking to these guns [kisses left, then right gun].

October 27th, 2009 / 8:05 pm Daniel Nester—

Amy —

We cross-posted, but safe to say that I am so not against playing with the essay form. There’s no prescriptive form for an essay. I know that. I know the word root, the whole essai thing. What I am against, I think, is this business of niche-carving a niche that is unhelpful to me as a reader or writing, the term “lyric” essays. Do you like the term lyric essays?

October 27th, 2009 / 8:20 pm Okla Elliott—

I could not agree more. There are a few good lyric essays out there, certainly, but mostly it’s just a form designed for people unwilling/incapable of plot, character development, aesthetic continuity, and emotional depth. But who needs those things, right? All I need is pretension, lots of deleted articles (definite and in-), and purposely opaque imagery.

Thank you for driving the first stake into this monster’s heartless chest (maybe there are some other organs in there that can be damaged enough to kill it).

October 27th, 2009 / 8:23 pm Amy McDaniel—

Daniel–
Glad to hear that I misread you on that point. I have complicated feelings about this. When I first read the Lopate piece that you quote–which was assigned to me by the man himself, in his workshop at the New School, where I studied nonfiction–it felt so good to me–I was at that time tired of this idea that nonfiction is supposed to be just like fiction but true, the whole “creative nonfiction” thing that to me ignored all these great peculiarities of the essay genre that have developed over the last few millennia.

But over the course of the semester I began to feel that Lopate had a kind of particular confessional, personal–yes, even ruminative–ideal that he wanted us students to adhere to. Sometimes I wanted to make a statement and let it just hang there, without interpreting it for the reader. I am interested in striking poses, in leaving a lot of reader-room, in sometimes not being 100% candid, etc.

When I first heard the term lyric essay, I was so excited! I thought it suggested an openness to the kind of thing I wanted to do. Maybe it’s lame, but I think hearing the term actually helped my confidence in writing what I wanted to write. But I ended up going the other way from the person you describe–I began writing very short essays that have found a more ready audience if I call them poems or essays instead. Maybe they aren’t essays, but I like to think of them that way in my own heart, because I love essays so much. I’m not sure I’ve answered your question.

October 27th, 2009 / 8:27 pm Amy McDaniel—

*i mean if i call them poems or stories

October 27th, 2009 / 8:32 pm John Madera—

Thanks Daniel. I have to say, though you may have kissed your guns, not only have you missed your target (it’s still unclear what it is), you haven’t even shot any bullets. And it’s still unclear who or what your exact targets are. You present this image of poets who sit down with this idea of writing a “lyric essay” and then fail. Who are these poets and what exactly are they writing? Where has their writing been placed exactly? You appeal to a “400-plus-year history of the genre” of the essay but fail to illustrate just exactly what the tropes are within it and how the lyric essay fails to correspond with this history. Also, I don’t see how any writing can not have an idea. I also don’t see how an essay, in order to be attributed as such, or any kind of writing, for that matter, doesn’t have “subject matter.” Even if we were to accept your restrictions on the from, where exactly are those lyric essays don’t “have an idea, doesn’t have a subject matter, doesn’t explore it, and doesn’t have an ‘I’ that links to either, or, or preferably both.” It’s a neat trick to say that you’re not a conservative and then to contradict it in the same breath. But what does that actually do for your argument?

October 27th, 2009 / 9:17 pm Okla Elliott—

Let me help out a bit here (though if I end up not helping your argument, Daniel, just tell me to shut my piehole).

Lyric essays — and I’m talking about the bad ones, which are the super-majority of them — use the opaque imagery advocated by the imagist movement in poetry from nearly 100 years ago and add to that an opacity of interiority we’re accustomed to seeing in the fiction of, say, Cormac McCarthy or Hemingway (though, it must be noted, that those authors make use of other narrative elements the lyric essayist generally eschews).

So…what we get is an aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable work. The essay for the past 400 years — let’s start with the Grandpappy thereof, Montaigne — has had as its central aim the elucidation of both an external subject and the essayist himself. And here is what I dislike about the lyric essay. It obfuscates where essays ought to elucidate. It also so often makes no claims to factualness, thus tossing out the window the “non” part of “nonfiction”.

All this said, far be it from me to reduce the range of what literature can do. I’m all for experimenting and pressing boundaries. I’m just basically arguing for why I dislike the subgenre and why I think of it as an anomaly that has likely already had its heyday. After the popular explosion of creative nonfiction, there had to be a self-consciously unpopular (stricto sensu) of the form. It was reactionary and lacked nearly all the joys of the larger genre. It was easily reproducible because it got rid of nearly all the tasks before us (plot, character, interiority, reflection, self-reflection, etc) and basically just left language (and we know what happened to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, right?).

So, I fully endorse people doing whatever they want in literature. There are too many rules as it is. But I have to call BS when I see it.

October 27th, 2009 / 5:49 pm John Madera—

Okay Okla, let me get this right, if a work for you is “aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable,” then it fails for you as an essay because an essay for you is an “elucidation of both an external subject and the essayist himself.” So if we grant you these restrictions and definitions (and that’s a huge concession), what exactly are those works that are “aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable”? What if those so-called aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable aren’t to others? What makes your bent more persuasive?

I also don’t see how you’re able to make these statements and then feel like you can say, “All this said, far be it from me to reduce the range of what literature can do. I’m all for experimenting and pressing boundaries.” Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.

Oh, and what exactly happened to to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry exactly in your estimation? Are all of those poets and critics are somehow unimportant, and if so, why?

October 27th, 2009 / 9:59 pm John Madera—

“What if those so-called aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable aren’t to others?” should read:
What if those so-called aesthetically and intellectually impenetrable works aren’t to others?

October 27th, 2009 / 10:05 pm Okla Elliott—

Look, they’re still essays, just ones that I don’t like for the stated reasons. And ones I think will be seen as anomalies, historically speaking — again, for the stated reasons.

As for innovation as a whole, I enjoy writers who incorporate what are usually considered “experimental” tactics (William T Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Volpi, Roberto Bolano, etc, etc), so I am not interested in making some sort of claim like “lyric essays ought not to be written” as I think what we find a lot of times is the tactics in an overly defined “experimental” genre can be extracted and used elsewhere, later down the road. So…not only due just a general belief in freedom of expression but also for the overall health of literature, I fully endorse the practice of all kinds of literary tactics that I do not, personally, think are very interesting or good or lasting in themselves.

As for what happened to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, it is taught way less, there are very few new recruits to the movement, so I’d say it’s heyday is over. It was all the rage and now it’s a cool little anomaly, the tactics from which are informing other poems with more at stake in them than the reactionary retreat to language only.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:07 pm Okla Elliott—

oops….”its heyday” not “it’s heyday”.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:15 pm Daniel Nester—

Don’t get me wrong–I am excited–completely excited at stretching the idea of what an essay can do. At the same time, I see a complete and utter peeing-on-paraded-ness of the lyric essay in particular, a solemn, consciously captial-P poetic essay that, more and more it seems to me, be basically conceptual writing with the word lyric essay tacked onto it.

I would call these essays in question essays. No need to fence them off from the rest of the world and make up a special name for them. As Stevens might say, “all essays are experimental essays.” This previous sub-genre-fication of essays just reminds me of why I left poetry in the first place.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:17 pm Okla Elliott—

Well, let’s be clear here — I am not talking of all lyric essays (which I’ve pointed out several times), but rather the super-majority of what I’ve found in anthologies, journals, and workshops I’ve taken. So, we’d have to talk about specific pieces, and for some I would say that maybe the person who gets it is just smarter or better attuned than me. And others, ones in which no one has been able to tell me one personal fact about the narrator, the setting, or even vaguely what the piece is about (I’ve had this debate with friends who are very pro-lyric essay), then I’d say they’re not getting it, but rather have decided to be on Team Lyric Essay and refuse to admit a certain piece’s failings. I admit the failings of all kinds of writing all the time, but it seems when someone decides to get into a camp, they refuse to do so. (This, btw, is true of strict traditionalists as well, so I’m not pointing fingers at only the lyric essayist here. We see in in free verse vs formalist verse, “academic” academics vs “creative” academics, and a dozen other stupid turf wars.)

October 27th, 2009 / 10:18 pm Daniel Nester—

I dunno, John. I think the argument is fairly straightforward. I gave you a provisional definition of what I and others define and essay as, then talked about why I and others (well, Phillip Lopate) name as objections and reservations to the term. It seems you want me to name examples of lyric essays that qualify. I will try to drum some up, I suppose.

As for whether writing is capable of not having an idea, there’s whole wings and traditions of conceptual writing dedicated to this task. And some of it is wonderful. They’re just not essays.

Maybe I am conservative. So be it.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:24 pm Daniel Nester—

If I could chime in here, Okla–let me go on record to say I am skeptical of Lopate and other skepticism of lyric essays. One doesn’t need to be all too-information-y to qualify as an essay. Often that’s not what’s called for in a piece of essay writing.

What I would also say is that I think my reservations are more careerist and tacky then Lopate et al’s. I think the term lyric essay comes from the land of poetry, not essay-writing; it is precious; it makes my skin crawl.

I get the it’s/its thing wrong all the time.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:30 pm Daniel Nester—

John — I dunno. I might be tempted to call them “experimental essays,” but as I said before invoking a misquoted Wallace Stevens I think all essays are experimental. Even the most I-went-out-to-the-woods-with-my-dog-and-thought-about-the-Holocaust essays. This also might beg the questions, if I were to be totally Mean Week-ish: do only aesthetically or intellectually impenetrable essays qualify as lyric essays? Because if that’s what people think, I have a stack of Thomas Carlyle books for people to read.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:31 pm Daniel Nester—

What Okla said.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:37 pm Daniel Nester—

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

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

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

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

October 27th, 2009 / 10:43 pm Amy McDaniel—

i totally get that. i don’t know much about the development or usage of the term “lyric essay.” i’m not that interested in defending the label itself, but hearing it did do something nice for me as a writer, the same way “collage essay” did (also first heard that from Lopate). of course these sub-genres names shouldn’t act like fences, but for me at least, as a reader and as a writer, organizing things into new, elastic, tentative categories can help me think about those things, what they are doing in the world, and how they relate to other earlier things. but from what you’ve said, it does sound as if this particular category in question has a lot of stink about it that i was unaware of.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:55 pm Daniel Nester—

For some odd reason, in the case of collage/montage/mosaic/vignette/episodic/segmented/list/jumpcut essay, all those terms don’t make me flail about like some freakavoid at all. They’re helpful, in fact, in both my writing and my teaching. The “lyric essay” term, however, in my mind, is backed and endorsed by the military industrial complex. Or Iowa.

October 27th, 2009 / 10:56 pm Daniel Nester—

freakazoid, is what I meant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMvONCMIqrU

October 27th, 2009 / 11:03 pm Amy McDaniel—

wait…so the term “lyric essay” makes you do the thing in that video? can’t that only be a good thing? i should be so lucky that something moved me like that.

October 27th, 2009 / 11:17 pm Okla Elliott—

You’re right about there being other species of impenetrability — and some I endorse, though usually the impenetrability comes from the hugeness and complexity of the subject (here I’m thinking of, say, Kant or Zizek and their ilk, some of whom are incorrigible blowhards but some of whom [like the two I just mentioned] are super-geniuses who have changed my worldview more times than I can count). I should have qualified that earlier. I’m not against difficult or seemingly impenetrable writing as a whole (I count Vollmann in my top 3 faves, after all).

October 27th, 2009 / 11:20 pm christian—

Oh, shit Daniel — I was totally with you until that Carlyle comment. I love a lot of his stuff.

But anyway, while reading this thread, I thought a lot about this old thread:

htmlgiant.com/?p=14528

I got the feeling reading that one that folks were using the same terms (particularly “narrative”) without having agreed on definitions.

So when you say —

“If said piece of writing doesn’t have an idea, doesn’t have a subject matter, doesn’t explore it, and doesn’t have an “I” that links to either, or, or preferably both, then it’s not an essay and it might not even be essayistic”

— I have a good idea what you’re describing, and I tend to agree with you.

On the other hand, I see what John’s getting at in challenging the terms. Still, I’d be surprised if he also didn’t have a good idea what you were describing it.

My problem with the kind of essay you describe, as with the definition of narrative i linked to above, is it seems to kind of only allow for free-association on the part of the reader, which may seem kind of liberating, but is ultimately limiting as I see it.

October 27th, 2009 / 11:55 pm Daniel Nester—

I get what John’s getting at, too, although I wouldn’t admit it to him directly. Wait. I just did. Crap. His Wu Tang nickname must be the Mad Term Challenga.

I tried, however gropingly, to define my term of essayistic, what I think essayistic is. All those paths leads to the notion of what genre is in the first place, and in that regard, I am doomed to fail. Which is fine.

I’m not as invested in that at all anyway–not nearly as much as I am as pointing out that the term lyric essay is out-of-thin-air-bunk and gets on my nerves, both for what it has stood for and what wings of writers promote it. It does lead to a dead-endish “limiting” reading experience, too.

October 28th, 2009 / 12:04 am Daniel Nester—

Oh I love Carlyle. Lots. Didn’t mean to imply that.

October 28th, 2009 / 12:30 am Matt Cozart—

“its heyday is over.”

But what lasts forever? People don’t write like Keats anymore, but does that mean Keats is less important? I mean, it would be silly and embarrassing to really earnestly try to write in Keats’s style now, but that’s certainly no evidence that his poetry and other poetry from that time is less good, right? (I sort of just said the same thing twice there. Sorry.)

August 17th, 2010 / 7:16 pm Notes against the lyric essay. « DanielNester.com—

[…] but I did not draw on those notes for my splenetic screed; here, in all its 194-word glory, is my Mean Week post: Lyric Essays. Let’s say your poems make discursive sense but lack human emotion. […]

GUEST MEAN: Daniel Nester

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