“Lyric Essay as Perversion”

September 5, 2014 | 1

“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.

is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York and every so often writes things at kaulielewis.wordpress.com.