My Attempt at the Lyric Essay

So, I’m still not quite sure I know what I’m doing, but here it is. I wrote an autobiographical poem using words only from the titles of the books in my room. Keeping the titles in tact made the piece sound too much like a list, but I hope that in the scrambling of words the integrity of what a lyric essay is remains.

***

Life in Literature

The birth of Lady Venus in Wonderland.
The master of the spirits, reading.
The aspiring writers everlasting project
To write like Chekhov.
When you go put strengths to work
Like the soul awakening intuition
The spirit of the elixir called love sounds true.
Random obsessions deflowered the paradiso.
Pride and prejudice, ignorance and war.
Your portrait of a daring genius of the enlightenment, engulfed in flames
The frenzy of the kill remains.

What is your Buddha?
The world living life as a thank you.

Lolita, the cosmic navigator, the poetry oracle, making star signs, sun signs matter.
The path to love: the art of laughter and forgetting.
The dialogues of fathers and queer sons are the feasts of freedom.
One hundred years of philosophy on the edge of evolution. Unbearable.
The day you want adventure. Journal.
Memory: the clockwork muse.
Looking at the time writers connected the secret law to how
It’s never too late to be what you might have been.
Writing of the being, the secret to live by.

This side of paradise beats of brave new literature.

***

The theme is my personal journey as a beginning writer, the state of the world, and my personal state. I was really surprised that I could convey what I mean using this limited set of words.

I had some fun writing it, I hope you enjoy reading it.

I’m lazy, but so was Chekhov

In a letter to his editor, Chekhov tells about the six month journey he is about to go on which will require “contant physical and mental work, which is precisely what my sluggish nature requires. I need discipline.”  I need discipline too.

I decided that some sort of formal training is necessay to get me off my feet. I write when I write, but without a deadline and an assignment I’ll end up with a bunch of story beginnings and outlines and no stories (which is exactly what I have now). So, after some research I decided to join the online writing community, specifically, writers.com. I was late for the daily-writing-find-your-voice class, so I opted for The Lyric Essay class.

I have no idea what a lyric essay is. It sounds nice though. More importantly, it sounds like discipline. After reading about what such an essay entails (a short story written in any unorthodox form you chose) and reading three completely different examples of what this can look like (mind you, this type of essay has unlimited appearances, styles, and forms), I have to write one myself. Due Friday.

I’m savoring my confusion right now. Wanting to write wonderfully is intimadating; your mind thinks about all the great writing you’ve ever read, all the rules of it entails, and all the ways you can, and probably will, mess it up and not be among the great writers. This lyric essay business is about breaking down boundaries, rules, order, form, all that limting stuff and just writing in a creative (and kinda confusing) way.

If I’m not any good in lyric essay writing, I’m OK with that, this isn’t my shtick. But the way it liberates me, as a person of limits, is surprisingly amazing. I think I need this class to get me going, break my guards down, put some stuff (no matter how bad) on paper. I’ve been free to not write and when I do I censor what I write: a true recipe for never becoming a writer. With this class I am forced to write and be free of my creative blocks. I was disciplined where freedom is needed and undisciplined where structure is needed. Let’s see if this untangeling (via enrollment in this class) works.

I’ll post here what I turn in on Friday.