THE LYRIC ESSAY / LYRIC PROSE

"Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving." - Deborah Tall
A few of our favorite EIR-published lyric essays, lyric prose, and prose poems thus far:    

Suzanne Cody's Knit One
Rachel Chenven's Access to Grace
Sarina Bosco's The Latin Names for Living Things
Amaris Feland Ketcham's How We Echo 
Jane Harrington's Ossein Pith
Life Code by J A Knight
Signs by Kathleen Hellen
Dirty Cities by Laura Bernstein-Machlay
The Leavings of Flame by Jennifer Ruth Jackson
Alexandra Ledford's Scream
Jan Schmidt's A Glint in Parchment​
Halee Kirkwood's A History of Metal and Light
"Imagine a warp in time, centuries deep, where writers gather on full-moon nights.  Perhaps it surrounds a Concord bar where in the darkest corner sit Henry David Thoreau and Sylvia Plath.... Years later their progeny Lyric Essay—half-prose and half-poetry—dresses in loose tunics, wears his hair slightly too long to be considered conventional, and whiles away his days wandering through forests and meadows while contemplating metaphors for life and love.  He spends his nights lying in soft grass gazing at the constellations while neighbors gossip across the fence and cluck their tongues at his seeming lack of discipline.  These casual observers never notice that the maze Lyric Essay has worn in the grass is a labyrinthine path; they never notice that Lyric Essay’s wanderings are structuring a carefully crafted border."

"Like our fictitious 'wild child,' a progeny of poetry and prose, the literary lyric essay is often misunderstood, considered a self-indulgent, willy-nilly collection of disjointed thoughts and sentences that lead nowhere.  But a careful study of lyric essays will reveal a cornucopia of connectors and structures rooted in both poetry and prose—mythology, reflection, irony, repetition, spiraling perspective, lists, sensory details, voltas—binding the fragmented imagery within braided, hermit crab, collage, and elegy structures—bringing order to apparent literary chaos and allowing lyric essayists the freedom to push and prod poetic prose until an emotional message pops from the page. - Diana Wilson
"Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language - a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement."

and

"We turn to the lyric essay - with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language - to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways. Anne Carson, in her essay on the lyric, 'Why Did I Awake Lonely Among the Sleepers' (Published in Seneca Review Vol. XXVII, no. 2) quotes Paul Celan. What he says of the poem could well be said of the lyric essay: The poem holds its ground on its own margin.... The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found." - both excerpts from Deborah Tall

"I would summarize thus: The lyric essay values the tension of juxtaposing objective and subjective material. The lyric essay emphasizes language as a means of engagement, equal to or exceeding its value in conveying information. The lyric essay does not emphasize argument or traditional closure.So why turn to the lyric essay? On a pragmatic level, here are some circumstances in which the lyric essay might prove advantageous:

-The essay concerns a personal episode in which the author lacked power. Lyric moves, particularly fragmentation and passive voice, enact a lack of agency on the page. ...

-The author does not have access to sources for key aspects of the traditional "story." Lyric moves, particularly litany and stimulative truth, bridge these troublesome gaps. 

-The language and images are the driving motivation of the piece, and stream-of-consciousness observation, sacrificing traditional narrative, is the only way to go." -  Sandra Beasley
"Although it does feature subjective consciousness, the lyric essay is not the same as a personal or memoir essay, in that its main purpose is not to narrate the personal experience of the writer. Instead of experience, the lyric essay engages primarily with ideas or inquiries, lending it an aspect of intellectual engagement that is not usually foregrounded in the personal essay. The tension comes when such engagement is blended with a poetic, subjective sensibility." - Laura Tetreault
​“This past year, I attended a reading of 'lyric essays,' and nothing I heard was, to my mind, lyric. My ears did not quicken. My heart did not skip. What I heard was philosophical meditation, truncated memoir, slipshod research, and just-plain-discursive opinion. A wall of words. But not a lyric essay among them. The term had been minted (brilliantly, it seems to me) by Deborah Tall, then almost immediately undermined. Not all essays are lyric. Repeat. Not all essays are lyric. Not even all short essays are lyric. Some are merely short. Or plainly truncated. Or purely meditative. Or simply speculative. Or. Or. Or. But not lyric. Because, to be lyric, there must be a lyre.” - Judith Kitchen
"Writing the lyric essay offers the author a frolic in the pool of memoir, biography, poetry and personal essay mixed with a sprinkling of experimental. Sound confusing? It can be. .. In lyric essay the narrative might break up into sections, evolve and trail away into white space, poetry and often, repetition.The author’s imagination can explode with the possibilities. ...Lyric essay flourishes with the braiding of multiple themes, a back and forth weave of story and implication, the bending of narrative shape and insertion of poetic device such as broken lines, white space and repetition. There is a similarity between this form and flash fiction or prose poetry. In this genre, the author must offer his/her truth, a unique perspective, whatever that might be." - Kaye Linden
"A snippet of image here, a stray bit of dialog there, nested in the telling: the logic of the traditional story reversed. It purposefully avoids a steady progression towards meaning, a predictable arc of exposition, climax, revelation, and denouement, preferring instead allusive, anecdotal, and abstract swipes at an opaque theme. ...It is, in other words, a mash-up: borrowing from all, beholden to none. It likes to betray the genres from which it borrows, making wily little jabs at their most dearly held conventions. It mocks creative nonfiction in its manipulation of facts: sometimes reinventing them for the sake of “art,” sometimes subverting their claim to objective truth by repeating or removing them from context. It mocks fiction in using these untruths, these distorted or altered facts, not as story but as dry, lyrically stylized information." - Sarah Menkedick [Art for art's sake? And so much more.]
Personal thoughts:
  • An interview at 3288 Review where I opine on the lyric essay.
  • The lyric essay, by definition, will not easily fit into the category of "grounded" writing. Generally, markets that use the "grounded" terminology when referring to creative nonfiction want narrative, a constructed and followable story, but the lyric essay just wants to play. Larger issues can be addressed, are often addressed, in the lyric, but subserviently so. Don't take it too seriously; look for the playfulness in it; hear the music and dance.  
  • The first line(s) of a lyric essay should surprise the reader with its language or new idea or twist of thought, as should points between beginning and end. But of course this should be true of any genre. 
  • Maybe, in some ways, the lyric essay is but a playful, experimental, creative nonfiction essay hoping to contrive an entirely new tune using one of a variety of word instruments.
Favorite lyric essays, and those which we perceive to be truest to the lyric form:

Judith Kitchen's Circus Train

The 3 essays that comprise Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. (Online excerpt.)
The essays that comprise Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Online, find one of them: "Living Like Weasels."
Dillard's "Total Eclipse."
Anne Carson's essays.

Deborah Tall's essay on the lyric essay (link above) is also an excellent example.
Good links to peruse: 

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/narrative-of-fragments/

http://thelitpub.com/manipulations-of-the-world-on-the-lyric-essay/

Also, it might be good to see what Wiki has to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyric_essay