Lyrical Essay Introduction
“The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.”
~ Deborah Tall and John D’Agata
The English portion of our Narrative Project challenged us to investigate a topic of our choice through research and lyrical essay writing. We were allowed create a project on any topic we always wanted to explore creatively—like many Freestyle student projects, we were, for the most part, given the reins on the ideas and production. Our guidelines were simple: 1 to 3 pages, the choice to creatively arrange our text, footnotes with research, and a bibliography.
Lyrical Essay – Night
Below are some screenshots of my essay in its entirety. While the screenshots do mean that the text is a little blurry, I could not easily format the essay on my website—and the formatting and style of the essay is pivotal to the emotion and passion the essay carries with it.
Lyrical Essay Production
After writing the lyrical essay itself, we were tasked with making it into a full video—with music and images to accompany our reading of the essay.
To create the Lyrical Essay Production, I combined royalty free music, my reading audio, stock images, and original art. I used some simple animation to fade in and out both audio and visual so nothing seemed too sharp.
Reflection
“Night”, as its name suggests, is a lyrical essay about night. I chose to write this lyrical essay in the first person because this essay is a personal statement—much of what is contained in this essay may not hold true for others, but it does for me. In an attempt to recreate the admiration I feel for night, I attempted to write in an overly passionate voice, while at times meditating on statements I’ve made and reflecting information I covered in my research. While the research was necessary to include, I tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible—this is an essay full of emotion, written in the moment, a strike of passion—having aspects of an expository essay ruins its flow. The text itself is arranged double-spaced on purpose: having the normal 1.15 spacing created large blocks of text on the page, which was something I tried to avoid. However, the amount of writing, even when spaced regularly, amounts to more than a page, so I have more than met the requirements. The last sentence deserved its own page—a conclusion to the essay that I thought needed as much drama and passion in its placement as the essay itself contained.
This essay was reviewed by my peers early on in its creation—it was nearly the same, sans the spacing, footnotes, and bibliography. I didn’t get much feedback on it—for the most part, positive, but also some confusion. My writing is very wordy, and can often contain vocabulary or phrasing that is alien to some of my peers. However, I felt that changing the essay to make it easier to read would ruin the heart of the essay itself—and so I kept it the way it was. I was inspired by myself, and myself only: I had no outside input—in fact, I nearly had no input myself. The idea came to me in the middle of the night—literally, I woke up, shot out of bed, wrote half of the current essay in a craze, then immediately fell back asleep. It truly felt like a fever dream, but when I woke up and saw my work the next morning I knew it was going places.
I had a lot of fun with this production. The essay itself was a true passion project: As mentioned earlier, I actually woke up in the middle of the night with the idea, and ran to my computer to write it. I took great care in text formatting, and really liked the overall outcome—both the substance and the style. The visual production was more of a follow-up project for me, and while fun, wasn’t quite the stroke of passion the original essay was.