The Essay's Volta
Jehanne Dubrow
11.1
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In the 1990s, when Deborah Tall and John D’Agata began publishing essays in the Seneca Review which they characterized as lyrical, they said such pieces formed a fascinating sub-genre” that straddled the space between the essay and the lyric poem.” They were, of course, pointing to the fact that nonfiction can use poetic technique.
The word “lyric” strikes me as rather abstract. It implies music; it gestures toward many of the characteristics of poetry. But I would like to propose something a little more concrete than Tall’s and D’Agata’s assertion that the lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language.” I would like to suggest that nonfiction writers can systematically employ certain craft elements of poetry in a deliberate, intentional way. In particular, a poem’s handling of what is known as the volta can provide the essayist with a valuable rhetorical tool, a technique that can also help to mold the overarching structure of an essay. Click here to continue reading. |
Wholly Fragmented
James Allen Hall
11.1
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I think I’ve been living in a line break my whole life. Experiencing my queerness before I had words for it. Wondering why I always felt like the break in a conversation. Why I always felt like the fissure in the world. You learn to make yourself smaller when you are the fragment. When your wholeness endangers another wholeness—because heterosexuality represents itself as the sentence, after all, and I for one am glad I was not sentenced to that.
Which makes me think I have been considering fragmentation in a wrong way: as piece of something else, as that which remains. Which casts the fragment in the role of an elegy to the blasted monument, as a breaking or broken thing. A fragment need not be broken. The fragment invites metaphor without surrendering. It is the form of resonating detail. It allows for the gesture toward a wholeness which—if it doesn’t exist—the fragment participates in remaking. My thinking here is informed by Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as imitation of that which does not exist. Perhaps the fragment gestures toward a whole that has never existed, either. Which would make the gesture, the fragment which resounds past its borders, taking on implications beyond itself, into the whole. Click here to continue reading. |