Mosaic | Karen Kao
Detail from Hanoi Ceramic Road. Photo credit: Karen Kao Lyric essay is a hybrid creature. It has the legs of memoir, the musculature of a polemic and the wings of poetry. Make it the way you would a mosaic out of fragments, shiny shards of memory and bits of string. Use a lyric essay to make an argument without ever stating your point or perhaps even knowing in advance what the point is supposed to be. The lyric essay meanders and surprises. It’s been around for a long time. Writers like Seneca, Bacon, Sei Shōnagon in the tenth century, Montaigne, hundreds of others: all could be said to write essays whose forms were inherently lyric; that is, they did not necessarily follow a linear, narrative line. Brenda Miller, “ A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay ” in Tell It Slant, ed. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola Taking the plunge The term lyric essay, however, is relatively new. In 1997, the US literary journal Seneca Review chose to popularize the f...