Creative nonfiction and poetry are closely related literary forms, and the lyric essay, which borrows qualities from each, is where these two forms meet. But what is lyric essay exactly? And how does one distinguish lyric essays from personal essays and poetry?
Lyric Essay – Structural Appearance on the Page
When attempting to define lyric essay, it's important to first establish its structural qualities. A lyric essay is prose, meaning that on the page it relies on the same structural boundaries as a standard nonfiction or creative nonfiction essay. The left and right margins are typically used in lyric essays to begin and break the lines, and paragraphs and section breaks are used to control tempo. Note that this differs from poetry, which freely uses line breaks, space within lines, and stanzas to dictate tempo.
In this sense—the way it appears on the page—a lyric essay looks like standard prose at first glance. However, from a structural standpoint, lyric essays are often much shorter than standard nonfiction essays, and can be as short as a single paragraph. Why lyric essays tend to be shorter has much to do with its poetic qualities, which will be explored in the following section.
Lyric Essays as Poetry
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a lyric essay is its focus on images over narrative, on emotionality over clear, deliberate storytelling. Often a lyric essay will move between related narrative threads rather quickly, using them to create an emotional tone within the confines of nonfiction prose rather than a cohesive narrative. A good example of this can be seen in Claudia Rankine's Don't Let me be Lonely (2004), a book of inter-connected lyric essays, which provides an excellent example of the form. The following excerpt comes from the book's first paragraph:
There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where's the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn't seem like a death...I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home...He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead.
Note how Rankine weaves a number of fragmented narrative pieces together in a single paragraph to tell the story of death in her family, or rather the feeling of death as it was translated by Rankine's parents when she was a child. In a work of creative nonfiction, each piece in the above paragraph, from her mother's miscarriage to her grandmother's death, would likely be expanded into larger sections where they could each be fully explored. However, in this lyric essay, Rankine works as a poet, establishing images and emotionally charged fragments that create the feeling of a story rather than a clear narrative.
Lyric Essay as Creative Nonfiction
While lyric essay is similar to poetry in its focus on the imagistic, it also has the freedom to create complete scenes or stories within its prose, which themselves can become metaphors or extended images. It is this quality—a lyric essay's ability to use longer narrative sections when desired—which places the form within the creative nonfiction camp. Again, Rankine's Don't Let me be Lonely provides an excellent example of this. The following excerpt closes the same essay begun in the paragraph cited above:
You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o'clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number...Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had a momentary lapse of happily...He shrugs and in turn explains that you need to come quietly or he will have to restrain you. If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult...You climb into the ambulance unassisted.
Notice how Rankine here closes the essay with a complete (if fragmented) narrative of calling a suicide call center and the subsequent experience with the ambulance attendant. In this section, Rankine holds the emotion of her story within a well-crafted piece of creative nonfiction, within a single narrative piece.
It is in this section that Rankine turns from poet into essayist, and demonstrates not only that lyric essay can contain both elements, but that there is a close relationship between the essay and poetry.
The Lyric Essay as Cinematic
The lyric essay's ability to move between images and scenes freely gives the form a cinematic quality, in that the prose becomes a screen upon which imagistic pieces are projected and woven together with little concern for smooth transitions. Like a movie's use of fading and jump cuts, lyric essays provide prose writers with a form which allows for the lyric to contain a piece's central idea.
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