ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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Jehanne Dubrow
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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. Poems are small vehicles of argument, and the volta is an essential concept employed by the poet-as-rhetorician; it’s a move that essayists—with their deep awareness of how argumentation shifts or evolves over the length of a text—will find both familiar and novel. Volta comes from the Italian, meaning turn,” as in the turn one makes in a dance. Traditionally, the volta is the rhetorical turn that takes place in a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. In the liminal space between the poem’s opening eight lines and its closing six lines, the sonneteer shifts the argument so that the two parts of the poem work in opposition to one another. Petrarchan sonnets frequently engage in binary arguments: on the one hand, one the other hand, this or else that. The volta also occurs in Shakespearean sonnets. If the Petrarchan sonnet is an argument in two parts, then the Shakespearean sonnet is often an argument divided into three parts: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In other words, a Shakespearean sonnet may function as a dialectic. Whatever sonnet form the poet has chosen, there’s always a pleasing tension between the opening eight lines of the poems and the closing six lines. It’s helpful too to remember that, while the volta marks a shift in the poem’s argument, this turn is frequently accompanied by a clear change in the imagery, in the handling of metaphor, or even in the diction. Prose writers may bring these same considerations to bear in their work, paying attention to how the argument impacts an essay’s shapeliness” as well as its handling of literary devices and its deployment of different levels of language, the high and the low. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Phillis Levin writes that the volta promotes innovative approaches because…the poet is compelled, by inhabiting the form, to make a sudden leap at a particular point, to move into another terrain.” Furthermore, she explains, the poet’s anticipation of the volta guides every move” that the poet makes. Anyone who has written a sonnet can attest to how an awareness of the volta shapes the poem’s energy. In those opening eight lines, as the poet builds toward the volta, the poem seems to gain momentum and tension. The sonneteer writes towards the formal constraint of the volta, which exerts a kind of gravitational pull. And once the turn occurs, the sonneteer then writes with a new sensitivity of what happened before the volta, conscious of how that initial argument has been altered by the counterargument that follows. Energy. Momentum. Tension. A writer of prose can certainly understand such concerns with pacing. An essay too must be delicately structured to hold the reader’s attention and to offer a persuasive vision of the world. Like a sonnet, an essay can make sharp turns that surprise. As Montaigne’s work demonstrates again and again, even an essay’s digressions and asides serve to regulate the speed with which we move through the text, building tension and increasing the reader’s curiosity: how will this end? In recent years, poets have begun to consider the volta outside of the sonnet’s 14 lines. Scholar Michael Theune’s website, Voltage Poetry,” presents close readings of a wide variety of poems with a focus on the function of the volta. Theune asserts that the turn is not only of utmost importance to the sonnet tradition, it is vital for virtually all of poetry.” This makes sense, given that all poems make claims and that those contentions—if they are nuanced and complex—contain rhetorical shifts. And Theune’s exploration of the volta beyond the sonnet creates a precedent for employing the volta in a piece of prose as well. As if an illustration of Theune’s point, Lia Purpura’s Some Beauty” falls one line short of being a traditional sonnet, but it nonetheless possesses a volta and feels sonnet-like in its approach. In the poem, the speaker argues that beauty is ruthless,” that the beautiful is a complex matter, nothing,” she says, as simple as / loss being ruinous.” Beauty can be found in unexpected places, such as the oil spill with its undeniable rainbows.” It can be found in sulphureous puddles” on the concrete, bright yellow splashes of goldfinch” or lemon.” In the spirit of the sonnet, Purpura’s poem engages in a turn slightly past the halfway point of the text, when the speaker asks herself, now what,” a rhetorical question designed to shift the poem away from a description of beauty and toward an interrogation of the ethics of beauty. Now what, the speaker asks. What do we do with beauty that appears in unexpected places and that is the result of something spilled, something lost? The poem answers its own question by acknowledging that beauty’s terrible plumage” can be so compelling it forces us to forget our own grief. Beauty makes us keep looking” and disturbs what Purpura calls our despair.” In other words, beauty is amoral. It exists adjacent to—and sometimes because of—loss. It is indifferent to our feelings. In the face of beauty, we may become amoral too, swept up by what is aesthetically pleasing while forgetting the real cost of that pleasure. Purpura is, of course, not only a gifted poet but also a skillful essayist. It’s helpful to look at her Autopsy Report” for an example of how the volta may serve a piece of prose. In this lyric essay, Purpura describes the experience of visiting a morgue and observing a series of forensic autopsies over the course of a day. The text opens with anaphora (another craft element that originates with verse). I shall begin,” the persona says, and then I shall stand,” “I shall touch,” and I shall note,” before the piece begins to fragment, moving away from the self toward descriptions of different cadavers and their respective causes of death. The turn in the essay arrives shortly after the persona confesses that she laughed out loud” when she saw the assistants cutting open the first body. The laughter itself is not the volta. The shift occurs when Purpura explains, And now that I’ve admitted laughing, I shall admit this, more unexpected, still: When the assistants opened the first body up, what stepped forth, unbidden, was calm.” Notice how she returns to her use of anaphora here, writing, I shall admit this.” She preserves the syntactical pattern of that repetition, but the observation she makes breaks with what has come before. The recognition of calm—that the autopsy is a process of what Purpura calls precise, rote gestures”—marks the turn in the essay. The persona had expected one experience, perhaps something shocking and dramatic. But what she gets instead is tranquility, a peaceful examination of a still body performed by quiet, serene experts. To emphasize the rhetorical shift she is making, Purpura’s images also alter here, becoming more precise, scalpel-like in their precision and sharpness. Following the volta, the language Purpura uses to describe the autopsied bodies is cool, detached, and utterly calm, form mirroring content and content mirroring form. One thing to note about these two pieces by Lia Purpura is that in both cases the volta occurs in approximately the same place where we would find the turn in a sonnet, that octet/sestet proportion which approximates that of the golden rectangle: 
Or, maybe, it resembles the proportions of many paintings by Mark Rothko, including his Number 14:
Or, put another way, there’s something elegant and mathematically pleasurable about placing the rhetorical turn slightly past the midpoint of the text, whether we’re talking about a traditional sonnet, a poem in free verse, or an essay.
I think many writers of creative nonfiction crave this kind of structure, the pressures of working within the formal rules that poets so often encounter. This might be why hermit crab essays have become so popular within the genre; the hermit crab is the closest that an essayist comes to working within the strict boundaries of a fixed form such as a sonnet. Earlier, I quoted Phillis Levin, who says that “the poet’s anticipation of the volta guides every move” that the sonneteer makes. Why not let this same anticipation guide the nonfiction writer? In preserving that 8-6 ratio, the essayist can build toward the volta, feeling that same gravitational pull, experiencing that same tension between argument and counterargument. The essayist can emulate the sonneteer’s rhetorical approach and, in doing so, can craft a text that achieves Tall’s and D’Agata’s notion of “density and shapeliness,” writing prose that doesn’t merely partake of general notions of lyricism but actively engages with the rigorous constraints of a specific poetic tradition. |
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Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including most recently Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her next collection of poems, Civilians, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025. A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, is also forthcoming next year. Her writing has appeared in New England Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
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