The book was comprised of four-to-eight-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, a poetic presentation of thinking set on a pedestal for our examination and edification. In The Self Unstable, Gabbert presented short takes on a variety of subjects: the self, the body, art, love, and so on. ![]() They tend toward shallow rather than deep thinking and offer, as their cute names hint, the promise of pleasure without a lot of effort. The essays have names such as “Dream Logic,” “Impossible Time,” “Variations on Crying” and they are short - three-to-seven-minute reads. Gabbert has described her new work as “one of those books of random bits and bobs of unrelated prose that only famous people get to do.” A compilation of previously published online work, the bulk of The Word Pretty appeared on Drexel University’s blog The Smart Set. Gabbert had previously published The French Exit (2010), The Self Unstable (2013), and L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (2016). The Word Pretty, by lyrical essayist Elisa Gabbert, was published late last year by Black Ocean. Authors of lyrical essays may wish them to inhabit a never-never-land between art and reportage, but it cannot be the case that a creative form of expression is exempt from critique by the rules that govern its use of language. One of the perils lyrical essayists face is that it is all too easy to write statements that are nonsensical, meaningless, or simply false, while the rule of “poetic license” provides them immunity from prosecution. The ongoing dialogue between D’Agata and the fact-checker Jim Fingal morphed into the book The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), in which they debated the liminal space between fact-based truth and art. The essay was rejected by Harper’s because of factual inaccuracies but was eventually published in The Believer. The idea that lyrical essays are more poetic than logical has allowed authors to play fast and loose with the truth, as D’Agata did in his 2010 essay “What Happens There,” in which he reported on the suicide of Levi Presley in Las Vegas. Like a concerto, then, essays generally adhere to a logical form.īut lyrical essays are more like jazz than a concerto. Arguments consist of premises leading to a conclusion. While a precise definition of “essay” has remained elusive, readers can generally agree that the genre typically presents an author’s thinking about a particular subject it involves an examination of a topic in the form of an argument. When D’Agata and Tall wrote that the lyrical essay “partakes of the essay in its weight,” they were pointing to the ways it draws from our common understanding of what an essay is. They are notably difficult to critique because of their association with poetry and the poetic license they claim as their due. Lyrical essays are often viewed as being closer to stream of consciousness or koan-like riddles than traditional essays. ![]() It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form. ![]() The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. An influential definition of the form, by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, was published in the Seneca Review in 1997: Over the years, the burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction, as well as the increased publication of personal essays, led to the development of what has come to be called the lyrical essay. Its antecedents can be traced back to 1966 when Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood (1965), introduced the idea of the “nonfiction novel” in an interview with George Plimpton for The New York Times. THE LYRICAL ESSAY has proliferated in recent years.
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