The Work Room Interview: Yanyi on the Lyric Essay

CA: What was your journey to the lyric essay? Or in other words—how did the lyric essay find you, or vice versa?

Y: It found me, I suppose. I was writing these short prose pieces as a private thinking practice. Yet, the more I wrote, the more I noticed the connections between them. I was interested in the pieces alone but I was even more interested in what they said together. In fact, it felt as though they needed to be together for the view to be whole. My first lyric essay and, as it turns out, my first understanding of what distinguishes a group of poems from a book. That turned into The Year of Blue Water.

CA: In addition to being a lyrical essayist and poet, you're also a talented critic! How does the headspace you enter when writing criticism differ from that of your other writing?

 Y: Thank you. Criticism is much more public-facing for me. I write it to elucidate a piece of the world for myself and others and, when it is appropriate, ask the propulsive questions, as Elizabeth Méndez Berry has called it, to further the art as a whole. The thinking and feeling process appears out loud. With my writing, I am doing many of the same things, but the elucidation and propulsion is turned inward. I write to understand what it is that I'm living, so that my time on this plane can be richer in all that I can know and feel.

CA: How do you personally define the difference between prose, poetry, and lyric essay? Where do the genre lines blur?

 Y: They are different in scale and nature of form. A lyric essay is made of singular parts, like a book of poems, but its full expression requires the space of the entire piece, as a novel might. The pieces are interdependent. The tension that keeps each part away from the others, often in an order out of time like a lyric poem, is also a part of the piece.

 The lines blur at the moment of writing. At that moment, any kind of writing can come out. But the form you choose should align, and highlight, the strengths of the work. When I submitted the final manuscript for my forthcoming book, Dream of the Divided Field, my editor remarked how beautiful certain lines were from a new poem I had included in that draft. The piece was a prose poem from an earlier draft she had read. The only thing I had changed was adding lineation.