Saturday's MWPA Workshop: The Art of the Lyric Essay

Philip Lopate writes:

The essay form as a whole has long been associated with an experimental method. This idea goes back to Montaigne and his endlessly suggestive use of the term essai for his writings. To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed. . . . There is something heroic in the essayist's gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found.

I expect that Lopate's explanation sounds very familiar to poets, who are constantly using language "to make a run at something without knowing whether [we] are going to succeed." But for those of us still trapped in the vortex of the high school research paper or who have fallen into situations that require journalistic or argumentative patterns of writing prose, the lyric freedom of the essay can seem mysteriously daunting.

Barring the onslaught of yet another snowstorm, I'll be leading a workshop, "The Art of the Lyric Essay," this Saturday afternoon, March 2, from 1 to 5 at the University of Southern Maine's Glickman Family Library in Portland. I'm quite excited about this workshop, which will be an in-depth chance to teach essay writing as I teach poetry--which is to say by means of the propulsion of the language rather than by anecdote, argument, or other such approaches. We'll be studying the work of several very different writers--Seneca, Natalia Ginzburg, Zadie Smith, and Richard Rodriguez--and then trying out various drafts using the techniques that propelled these essayists into discovering what it was they needed to say. If you live in the area and are at all interested, I hope you'll consider signing up. The class is definitely full enough to run, but we do have a handful of spaces still available.