Forms of Self-Disclosure in the Lyrical Essay

The questions I want to pursue here arose for me as I was finishing two pieces of creative nonfiction, both essays in what I think of as a lyrical mode. I found myself worrying over how much of myself I had exposed, about the details I’d revealed and that I knew I would be shy about offering directly to my colleagues and even to some very good friends. And yet each essay seemed to my sensibility exactly right in terms of revelatoriness: this was who I wanted to be on the page. I didn’t think I had been gratuitously provocative or explicit. I had tried to use personal information to generate a certain mood and a kind of momentum—the kind of compressed urgency that characterizes poetry. But I was suddenly troubled by self-consciousness about what readers would know about me and wondered if I had somehow gone too far.

The complaint against personal essay as an inherently self-indulgent form has become a familiar if uninformed critical chestnut, while scholarly conversations about the ethical dimensions of self-writing have, in a more thoughtful way, deepened our understanding of the ramifications of writing anybody’s life.¹ Both might serve as constraints against some types of self-disclosure. At the same time, though, the personal essay is nearly by definition a space that elicits the less polite details of one’s life as a threshold onto psychological meditation and philosophical inquiry. Lyrical essays may owe their tonal allegiance and associative structures to poetry, but they’re still held to an expectation of reflective openness, I think, as what differentiates the essay from a poem (and, too, from certain works of postmodern fiction). The lyrical essayist is thus cautioned against the excesses of confessionalism as a deterrent to the sort of generalized life lesson many readers want from autobiography, but also against the oblique symbolic connections typical of poems. How much is too much or not enough self, then, in this particular form of self-writing?

One question I may be asking here is simply how much the signature of an essay, the factual if not interpretive conflation between author and narrator, determines the way lyrical essayists shape their stories, given that many such writers come to the genre with an inclination toward poetry. While we may make a temporal and conceptual distinction between an autobiographical protagonist, narrator, and author, we nonetheless understand these figures as iterations of the same, real person. But conventional reading practices instruct us to sideline—if not actively suppress—biographical detail in our unpacking of a poem’s situation, and encourage readings that resist the notion of a one-to-one correspondence between a poem’s emotional content and the author’s particular life. We expect that lyric poems may be autobiographical but hold author and speaker apart and thus tend to read intimate details of desire, sex, loss, pain, greed, self-abasement, and so on as poetic tropes that communicate something other than their strictly personal import. Nor do we expect poems to name others specifically or to abide by chronological order.

I’m stating the case in very broad strokes, of course, minimizing the degree to which contemporary poets (the inheritors of New York School aesthetics and language poetry, which made confession a dirty word) must grapple with how to write autobiographically without being disparaged as overly narrative or sentimental. I want to make the point that while poems may be read as autobiographical or even as autobiography, they do not have to be “true,” and this has some impact on how we receive their juicier details. As a friend of mine recently said of poems in which he’d distorted real events but was still engaged in emotional honesty, “it’s poetry!” And that seemed to justify not only the liberties he was taking with actual experiences but also the very explicitness of the situations as he poetically rendered them. Poems get to divulge as they twist the truth and vice versa; but what are the rules governing essays? Can the lyrical essay also...