(The) Writer's Mind: The Lyric Essay
The Background
The lyric genre has a strong personal element that is highly reflective, that is, it opens up an inquiry for its addressee that may not provide ready answers to the inquiry.
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To know how to question means to know how to wait, even a whole lifetime. But an age which regards as real only what goes fast and can be clutched with both hands looks on questioning as “remote from reality” and as something that does not pay, whose benefits cannot be numbered. But the essential is not number; the essential is the right time, i.e., the right moment, and the right perseverance. |
We have worked in this class to distinguish two sorts of relationships to inquiry, the inauthentic and authentic. Inauthentic inquiry cannot tolerate the inquiry and so aims to end the inquiry in ready-made answers. Moving through and beyond answers to keep the inquiry alive is the distinguishing quality of an inquiry that is authentic, and it is the distinguishing feature of the genre of lyric essay writing.
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An authentic inquiry aims to open up new possibilities for being whatever it is that you are inquiring into. For instance, if you are authentically inquiring into what it means to be a student, a teacher, a partner, a wife, a husband, etc., you will likely uncover powerful insights into what it means to be that kind of being and so grow and develop according to such insights.
However, the way into authentic inquiry may only be through the door of owning up to our own inauthenticity. You see, that might be the whole problem with inauthenticity: we think we are being authentic when we don't know that we are not. Think of it this way: the viewpoint we are born into tells us that if anything is valid, it must be understandable. Therefore, as a result of this view, whatever we do not immediately understand must be useless, false, etc. This is called "Cartesian rationality," a way of being that cannot admit to anything that defies its own forms of certain knowing. The lyric essay actually works to question this Cartesian "way of being," and it is a genre of writing that upsets the Cartesian in us.
In contrast, the lyric essay
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The Lyric Essay
Given your preparation, write a fully developed lyric, the first draft of which will follow a "braided" arrangement of a combination of several narratives already written. This is the "Combination" draft of the Lyric Essay.
In ANY case, to effect a significant revision from this first draft you must bring into play multiple lyric strategies, in addition to incorporating a variety of stylistic sentences (at the very least, 10 different and challenging sentence types):
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The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, after the fact, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate...
(Nietzsche “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” 76)