‘Your essay inspired something of mine today. You wouldn’t know from the content it had anything to do with your essay. The form was more like a kind of trigger.’

Alison wrote generative, stream-of-consciousness pieces after the AM bustle, called her scribbles and brilliance ‘morning pages’, and for this one, was she at her local café as the train to the city rushed past the large windows, the noise of it forcing her to lift her eyes from her words and remember she’d ordered coffee, and there it was, in front of her, steaming and ready to sip?

Her email said, ‘It even made me wonder if the poem should really be an essay.’

I hear her emphasis on the word be and I’m thinking about form: her poem, my essay, where she has gone now that her body has left our earthly world.

When I reread the sentence I just wrote, I emphasise the word she.

I thought I was going to write about poetry but I think I’m going to write about essays. If you ask yourself what is the lyric essay if not poetry and essay and memoir combined and what is lyric poetry if not poetry and memoir combined then you’ll see that ‘essay’ is the crux of differentiation. A structural presence for one form of memoir, a structural absence for the other. I could say this:  

I have a memory of lunching with Alison at the Loose Caboose before our boys were teenagers; now they are men.

I could say this:

I have a memory

of lunching with Alison

at the Loose Caboose

before our boys

were teenagers;

now    they are men. 

The differences between the two are obvious. So are their similarities.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Forward Prize for Poetry – one would assume it’s a book of poetry.  

Its full title is Citizen: An American Lyric and maybe it’s the word ‘lyric’ that has everyone confused but in my thinking it is a seven-section book in which six sections are essay, and I’d go so far as to argue that the last section, which opens with a lineated poem, is still a form of a fascinating essay. When I read Citizen – a many-layered artful book exposing the daily micro-aggressions of Rankine’s Black, female, American life – the snippeted paragraphs were meant to be read as prose poetry. I mean, all the cool poets were reading it that way. As I anticipated lengthy ruminations on the redefinition of poetry, I found I couldn’t stop redefining the essay.

I don’t know if I trust definitions, though I do know I want to.

‘In Australia, prose poetry grew out of various writers’ production of “prose pieces” — a form of prose-poetical writing of varying lengths, sometimes divided into sections.’

This is a quote from the poet and critic Cassandra Atherton, taken from her paper on Ania Walwicz, who is the first person I think of when I think of prose poetry. If Walwicz were to rewrite the passage from Citizen about Serena Williams that reads: 

‘Perhaps the committee’s decision is only about context, though context is not meaning.’

It might sound like this:

Perhaps the committee’s decision to do-da is only about context, context without text means with, though context is not meaning, ‘meaning’ meaning the do-da day.

Alison is the first person I think of when I think of Ania Walwicz’s poetry. We discussed her work a lot, each time one of us exclaiming Oh I love Ania Walwicz as if we’d never declared it before.

My intention was to write about Lucy Van’s The Open, which is a book I wanted to shortlist for a poetry prize even though I didn’t actually think it was poetry, and that’s the core of everything, unless it’s Alison who’s the core. After I read The Open I emailed Alison to tell her how much I thought she’d like it since both her and Van practice possibility of form and were published by Cordite Books, who publish only poetry but I think they’re like Greywolf, who published Citizen. In the email to me about her morning pages Alison thanked me for mentioning Citizen, said it inspired her to pick it up again. ‘And I'd agree that of course it's an essay, albeit a kind of hybrid form of one.’

I used to say ‘hybrid’ all the time but now I want to stop. I wish I could talk to Alison about this. I’d say, If so much exceptional literary and critical writing is considered to be hybrid these days, is the term losing its pungency and therefore meaning?

I think it is.

I think it has. 

We would’ve filled the better part of an hour talking about the punch – or lack thereof – of ‘hybrid’.

Definitions are strict, unlike Alison with her morning pages when she was alive. Though she’d like to have done them every day, she couldn’t. Even without chemo and radiation it would have been impossible. There needed to be fluidity for it to really work. My mornings tend to find me in admin-mode for the home, and I know I’m making myself sound important but I am incredibly important to those in my home. In my memory I’d once met Alison at the Loose Caboose mid-morning, disrupting both of our schedules. We still had children in primary school and were very busy mothers but we were discussing poetry, and when is it ever not crucial to discuss poetry?

Before she died, we did it all the time, and that’s something I loved about brunching with Alison. We’re doing it now, in a hybrid email essay fantasy truth-telling way.

A hybrid is a cross, a mixture, an amalgam, a fusion – in literature it’s genre defying. Claudia Rankine and Lucy Van, Sarah Manguso, Justy Phillips, Maggie Nelson, whose Bluets ‘is a meditation on love and grief; an exploration of loss; a reverie of blue; a syncopated arrangement of 240 prose poems –’. I’m struck that the reviewer clearly defined them as ‘poems’ but then recognised himself and added ‘at least bookshops often file it under “poetry”.’

The only people I know who’ve read Bluets are poets, but the publisher, whose website is not www.wave.com but rather www.wavepoetry.com, says the book ‘further confirms Maggie Nelson’s place within the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.’

(Alison, I just reread The Argonauts, which was the first Maggie Nelson book you’d read, and I’d been the one to lend it to you. It’s about a woman who was pregnant while her partner was taking testosterone, both of their bodies morphing into the questionable. As it happened, you read it during the time you began referring to your middle child as they, which is why while rereading The Argonauts I thought of you often. It’s as if you lived in the pages, giving the book new form.) 

I’m confused, wrestling with fluidity.  

I’ve reread The Open. I’ve reread Citizen. I’ve reread Bluets because it’s a book of fragmented poetic prose pieces that speak of a time in Nelson’s life when she was stranded in a bramble of loss, and it’s memoir, theory, so many facts about the colour blue, 240 of them that Nelson calls ‘propositions’, wiping out essay, wiping out poetry, wiping out, even, the lyric.

Alison was thinking about my lyric essay while doing her morning pages, said she was playing with ideas for a long poem about some crabs she’d seen in Queensland. In her poetry, words span the page like viscous droplets, a phrase here you can’t rub off, then over there a remnant of that indelible thought, another bubble-idea centred below. You think you’re reading about one thing but really it’s about another, and that other thing is always too large to understand on its own, and I love that about her poetry, I love that about the essay I’d written that felt to me like a series of paragraphs: a sentence following a sentence following a sentence until there’s a paragraph, and breathe.

Alison said of her crab piece, ‘It even made me wonder if the poem should really be an essay.’ [Emphasis mine.]

It was at a poetry festival where I first read these words by Ai Qing: ‘If it’s a poem, no matter what form it’s in, it’s a poem. If it’s not a poem, no matter what form it’s in, it’s not a poem.’ I don’t know who gets to make these decisions and less and less I’m feeling it’s me, but it seems mostly it’s poetry publishers, the brave ones.

In the preface to The Open Van says: ‘Writing these poems has something to do with being in the lands like this.’

I write: ‘Reading these lyric pieces has something to do with getting lost in dreamy paragraphs.’  

My favourite ‘poem’ in the book is ‘The Esplanade’, a series of paragraphs, one of which ends with the words, ‘[T]hat’s not how you tell a story.’

In trying to recapture Alison I’ve been rereading her poems. One is about a fox. One is about windows. One is about her child recognising for the first time that a cup is a vessel for holding space, and when it is let go, crashing to the ground, there is, for her daughter, ‘an awareness of being and not being.’

The poem is a vessel, an essay a vessel, and if you drop them and let their words scatter, will they not retain their meaning?

It’s a skewing of the definitive, which is why there are so many ways to tell a story.

We live in a free kind of tameness that refuses to yield to the structures we impose, like weeds pushing up through cement cracks and males born in female bodies then later giving birth.  

If Alison were here now we’d cheers to suburban eco-poetics in a non-binary world, and since we’re so linguistically adaptable I’d throw in ‘paragraphics’ next to Nelson’s ‘propositions’ to continue our conversation. Like those we had over bowls of noodles when we spoke of our children and their understanding of sexual and gendered fluidity, marvelling at how their natural acceptance of LGBTQIA+ was helping us grow: maybe, as the Queer community has discovered, we need more labels to encourage fluidity, to stop ourselves weighing up the either / or tag of a style of writing that’s not necessarily poetry and not necessarily essay?

I’d sent Alison a copy of an earlier draft of these paragraphics nine months before she died. She’d told me she’d been in the bath while writing the morning pages that spawned this meditation, not at the Loose Caboose café, where trains passed by the large windows. She’d said thinking of poetry as a form of memoir brought to mind a solo renga – renga being a Japanese form of collaborative poetry in which a group of poets build a poem through their own varied contributions of stanzas; solo renga being renga composed by only one poet. The fact that there even exists a solo renga is a testament to slackness of definition yet a desire to define.  

Before we met, Alison led renga sessions in Orkney. I’m holding the image of her surrounded by a group of hungry young poets, then dropping it, their faces shocked at first as the room of them falls and shatters, all of their words scattering to the floor in shards of tempered white, milk glass.

Alison remains, nevertheless. Being exactly what she no longer is and precisely what she is.