“Three Steps Ahead, One Change of Course: Seneca Review Promotes Lyric Essay”

From "News and Trends" in the September/October 1999 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine:

While creative nonfiction is appearing with increasing frequency in writing programs and on bookstore shelves around the nation, Seneca Review is charting its own contribution to the genre. In honor of its 30th year, the biannual literary journal of Hobart and William Smith Colleges is publishing an issue devoted to the "lyric essay." The magazine will be accepting lyric essays as well as "experimental nonfiction and hybrid-genre work" through the month of October for its anniversary issue, to be published in the spring of 2000.

Founded in 1970 by James Crenner and Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review reaches a thousand readers worldwide, having developed a reputation for publishing poetry in translation. Like many literary magazines, it features a mix of emerging and established poets.

Although the magazine has a substantial history, its inclusion of the lyric essay is a new endeavor, inaugurated in the Fall 1997 issue. "I'm basically a poet," says editor Deborah Tall, whose most recent book, Summons, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and will be published by Sarabande Books in the fall of 2000. "But in the last ten to fifteen years I started writing nonfiction and was very interested in experimental nonfiction. Then John D'Agata came along." D'Agata, who was Tall's student in creative writing as an undergraduate, recently received two MFAs - one in poetry and one in nonfiction - from the prestigious University of Iowa. "Through him and our collaboration and thinking about this for so many years together, I was inspire to include him and to really start publishing the work that we cared about," says Tall.

D'Agata joined Seneca Review as associate editor in 1996. His own book of lyric essays, Hall of Fame, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in Fall 2000. He is also at work on an anthology that traces the lyric essay through history; it features work by such greats as Cicero, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett.

But what exactly is the lyric essay? To say it is a form of creative nonfiction, a genre that Tall describes as "baggy," does not quite capture the formal concerns that the two editors look for in such works. And both editors are concerned that creative nonfiction has come to mean memoir in the minds of many writers and readers. "Memoir is becoming the voice of nonfiction, which is extremely dangerous. It would be dangerous for any form in any genre to take the place of every form in that genre," says D'Agata. "The poetry world would be up in arms if, for example, epic poems and nothing else all of a sudden started becoming known as poetry."

In the introduction to the Fall 1997 issue, the editors define the lyric essay as a form that "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 forms."

Tall admits, however, that what makes a lyric essay is not always clear-cut. "Sometimes we find things we think of as essayistic and the author may say, 'No, that's really a poem,' and might not want it to be classified as a lyric essay. We're very interested in that boundary line and what it is, and we're interested in trying to find work that complicates the definition."

As for D'Agata, he is most interested in the work of "writers who experiment in what could normally be viewed as a traditional nonfiction narrative, those who experiment with travel writing or journal entries or nature writing - even scientific writing and statistics. I love essays that combine research and journalistic impulses in very hyperpersonal narratives. I love watching people use it as a grab bag to try to create literature."

While Tall and D'Agata have already slated for the anniversary issue lyric essays by writers like Maxine Chernoff, Stephen Dunn, Barry Lopez, Jane Miller, Mary Oliver, Peter Sacks, and Richard Selzer, they will be selecting work by emerging writers from the submission pile. "Some of the most exciting things I ever published came from someone I never heard of without a cover letter," says Tall.

Submissions should be sent to Seneca Review, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456-3397. For more information about the magazine, visit its Web site at www.hws.edu.

Copyright © 1999 by Mary Gannon. Originally published in "Poets & Writers Magazine," September/October 1999. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poets & Writers, Inc., www.pw.org.