I’m not really sure if “new lyric” is even a thing anymore. Like in 2013 I found out in 2008 people were trying to get a handle on that satisfying middle ground between lyric poem and personal essay, and I thought, this is where I want to be. I want to read poems that are personal essays being poetic or appreciating the role lyric and story and disclosure could take on when they’re in that mimesis trance state, that state of mind state, that thinking and reading process bound together state. I want to read things that lure me into thinking like the writer was thinking while they wrote the piece. Not because I’m empathetic, or I aspire to extreme empathy, but because I find thinking to be a satisfying state of mind. And reading puts me in the mind of thinking anyway. But with work that I would call “New Lyric,” I feel like I’m really feeling the writer. We’re considering the subject together, even if it’s the writer actually doing the work on the page.
So even as Anna Sandy-Elrod’s essay, Beauty, Gaze Unaverted (from Pleiades 42.2 & 43.1) considers what feels like a concrete subject involving womanhood, using these very concrete angles to bring a reader like me into that subject, so I feel involved with the subject, maybe I’d even say I feel framed within the subject (though it’s not my lived experience), I also get the pleasure of reading the text. I like how her essay establishes a common ground with me by opening with an observation about Medusa. We all know of Medusa, and we might have varying knowledge about the gorgon’s backstory. And don’t worry. Sandy-Elrod is going to elaborate that common ground so she and her reader occupy similar spaces. I like how texts do that. Inform me and teach me.
And then, with Sandy-Elrod’s essay, how the informational is implicitly tied to her private life. And also tied to her understanding of life as it’s lived by a young woman growing up in a patriarchal church. Little did a reader of her essay know, this life can relate to the story of Medusa, or be felt by the writer so it’s resembling Meudsa. I’m not entirely sure how to articulate the nature of Sandy-Elrod tying her life to Medusa. It might be more a congruity with that isolation Medusa had imposed on her as a result of her monstrosity. And it’s the nature of the writer’s private information, or her sexuality that feels like a secret now folded into the lyric essay form that, I would argue if it’s still relevant to argue something is or isn’t an example of New Lyric, sets Sandy-Elrod’s piece in that between lyric-and-prose space. Taking advantage of the unique ways lyric can engage a reader with its subject, then exploit the lyric fragment so reading is an intentional search for the next relevant point, engaging, say, with a paragraph’s ending. So when the reader is piled onto an entirely new subject they are looking for the implicit that lives in the gap between two paragraphs to serve the essay.