Hello! If you’re interested in the Lyric Essay, you can sign up for a five-week guided group course of my design on the Wet Ink platform, opening tomorrow (Monday 3/25). The class is $50, and you can read about it and sign up here. The course is asynchronous— you don’t have to be there at any specific time.
How it works:
Students go through the course as a group. This is the self-guided version of the class, so there is no instructor feedback.
Each week provides:
discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers
written lectures and a selection of readings
Some weeks also include:
the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for for peer comments
additional optional writing exercises
What each week covers:
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, and Alison Bechdel 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.