The New Essay, Part 1

I am a writer and a teacher of writing. Over the last few years I've spent more time teaching than writing. I have no regrets. In fact, there are times when I really don't have much to say, or if I do, I'm not sure what form the words or images should take. Form, structure, play. As we learn to observe, we also learn what it is to experiment. All our efforts to form thought are experiments and, outside the innate human need to express, no experiment is terribly important in and of itself--it's the collection of experiments that matter, experiments that allow culture to breathe and shift and grow. There would be no need to shift if an ideal culture could be reached and settled upon, but of course there is no such dwelling, and those who propose otherwise offer ideologies that more often than not depend upon the forces of war in all its manifestations as a chief means of expression. The New Essay resists such settling, moves along so much like a river, endless in its approach and entrance into the mysteries of the deep.

       While the New Essay is not only about change, the practice of the melding and movement of genres is essential to the endeavor.  John D'Agata's work both as essayist and editor is a good example of how the borders of any given genre are often crossed in an effort to allow for an honest form that might carry our thoughts, or for a thought that might spontaneously fall into a form. (Robert Creeley would suggest there is no difference between the processes.) For example, in The Lost Origins of the Essay, which D'Agata edited, he opens the international anthology with the fragments of Heraclitus, moves through Greece and Rome, Plutarch and Seneca, to China and Japan in the East, pithy wisdom and Pillow Talk, into the more common pieces of Montaigne, Frances Brown and Frances Bacon.  What I find most interesting about the collection is the inclusion of Mallarme's A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance and Rimbaud's Illuminations, both 19th Century classics that are by and large understood as poetry.  Add the inclusion of William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" as a precursor to both, and we begin to understand the borders of genres, at least according to D'Agata, are nowhere fixed, that the form of the essay is ephemeral, open, alive.  While the essay is not fiction nor poetry, it is fed by both, just as it feeds--the relationship is symbiotic.  I see the essay in documentary film, in YouTube presentations, in a series of photos found in so many halls, in all trees that grow from a seed.  Everywhere is an essay, if we care to search, and everything is an essay, if we care to look beyond the surface. Perhaps this is our only requirement, to search, and to allow our search to find a form, or for the form to find our thoughts.  Perhaps Creeley had it right. We are each an essay ready to be received, just as we are each receptacles waiting for the essay to arrive.