A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay

ABSTRACT

This paper arises from a collaborative practice-led research project between an essayist and a poet/prose poet that theorises the lyric essay as mosaic-like in terms of its form and patterning. The project involves on-site creative practice in four cities and examines five primary themes – time, hands, identity, brokenness and risk. Raymond Edouard Isidore’s highly suggestive pique assiette mosaics are our initial point of departure for this paper, representing as they do the joining and juxtapositioning of material that would otherwise be dispersed and fragmented. We read Isidore’s work as an analogue for the fragmentation and juxtapositioning of the texts of lyric essays which, in turn, enables us to consider the lyric essay’s positioning between narrative explicitness and poetic compression, and the relationship between time and space within such essays. We make use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to tease out ideas of literary time and space, and also employ Erwin Straus’s idea of ‘presentic’ space and movement, ‘free of direction or limits’. We discuss lyric essays by Paul Hetherington and Brenda Miller to illustrate and exemplify our key points.

KEYWORDS:

• Lyric essay
• mosaics
• time
• space
• chronotope
• presentic space
• creative practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Rachel Robertson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Western Australia. She is the author of Reaching One Thousand (Black Inc, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2013 Australian National Biography Award, and was winner of the 2008 Calibre Australian Book Review Essay Award. Her work has been published in journals such as Westerly, Island, Griffith Review, Axon: Creative Explorations, and Life Writing. Her research interests include creative writing pedagogy, Australian literature, critical disability studies, ethics, memoir and narrative non-fiction. She is co-editor of Purple Prose and Reflections Editor of Life Writing.

Paul Hetherington is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra and Head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) there. He has published 10 full-length poetry collections, most recently Burnt Umber, and five poetry chapbooks. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry), was a finalist in the 2014 international Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition and was shortlisted for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize. He is one of the founding editors of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations and a founding editorial committee member of the Meniscus journal. He was awarded one of two places on the 2012 Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland and in 2014–15 completed an Australia Council for the Arts Residency in the BR Whiting Studio in Rome.

ORCiD

Paul Hetherington http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8757-3108

Notes

1 In this paper and in our project, we adopt Tall and D'Agata's 1997 definition of the lyric essay.