Lia Purpura - On Looking: Essays

Author Asks

My wildest hope is that you (students, teachers–readers–anyone out there) read my essays and sit back and think, sit forward and feel, feel spoken for, or spoken to, by them. Feel exasperated/elated/found out–moved, in other words. In other words, I don't know you and you don't know me, except that this work is where we meet, this site is where I believe you exist and you believe I do, too, and when I say moved, I mean we exert a force on one another. And we enter into a shared space, I believe, with a sense of each other's presence, and imagine each other into being. And more important than that, even, imagine, by way of words. I know that these words–moved, imagine, being are unfashionable. That's ok with me.



Certain forms of silence or reticence are good for a writer–and for a reader. A writer's silence is easy, in at least one practical way, to explain: I sit in a room, alone, and work, maybe break the silence by reading aloud as I am working. But a reader's silence is powerful as well. I believe reading is, in itself, a creative act, not a passive one. To think that you might, whoever you are, use these essays to furnish that very private and sustaining space is amazing to me. I think it's essential that this space be maintained and fed and watered even in school, where we traditionally learn communal methods of thinking and entering literature. I mean a "book" and not a "text."



How, then, to help you enter my work–without wrecking the solitude and privacy of each others ever-eroding space? I guess I don't think you really need any help at all. At the Baltimore Museum of Art the other day, I read a quote by artist Bruce Nauman situated near an installation of his: "Pay attention in art and in life to each and every action, detail, shading, implication, increment." This set of instructions seems widely applicable, and a perfect way to think about an essay you encounter. His terms are open enough to allow any curious reader to wade around in the work, to go by feel with his or her own hands.



Here's a similar moment of encounter described by another artist, Eric Fischl, who tells in an article in the New York Times a while back, about coming to Max Beckmann's triptych "Departure" for the first time: "Confusion and dismissal were part of my first response. It seemed that I would need too much text and scholarship to understand and penetrate the references to history, religious iconography and philosophy. But when I made myself repeat back the basic descriptions of what I could see each figure doing, associations would occur that took the painting to interpretative realms I could understand. Without knowing the artist's thoughts, the painting began to read. Everything I needed to know was in the painting in front of me and I was letting it speak. . . ."



I'd like you to know, too, that my motives and intentions remain largely hidden to me, and are, therefore, tricky for me to discuss, question or analyze for anyone else. Often I discover my interests and preoccupations when I look back and see where I've gone in an essay or a poem. But that's what it's like to write, to a greater or lesser degree, for any writer: the world comes to you and you accept your reactions and intrigues, and follow them. Here is a quote I read in the Baltimore Sun just the other day from an artist, Mark Eisendrath. He's talking about his work, and a plane crash he and his family survived a few years ago: "I was pulling my mother out of the plane, and I was noticing all these incredible embers that were falling from the trees that had been hit by the plane. They were covered in fuel, so they were burning and changing color and sizzling and snapping and were really just beautiful. I kind of took that home with me."



To populate your path to these essays, I should tell you that some readers have said straight out, "Lia, these are poems" or "Lia, these are prose poems." I am aware that many of the essays in On Looking move like poems (I began, after all, writing poems and now write both essays and poems simultaneously). They leap around, slip images together and are interested in the rhythms and sounds of words and sentences, and even lines–those elements most readily associated with poetry. I believe they are essays, though, and that they think in essayistic ways. I should also tell you that they have been called "lyric essays." That pleases me. I hope I do attain a sense of the "lyrical"–a state of song and movement in my work. I think of the "lyric" essay not so much as a sub-genre, but more as a quality that others might apply to the work. The "lyric essay" has been described beautifully by the editors of the Seneca Review. I'll quote from their issue on "The Lyric Essay" in which they fixed a helpful and contemporary frame for certain kinds of essays (I say "contemporary" because this form has been alive for centuries and in many countries): "Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of ideas, circumstance, language–a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement."



Perhaps it is my own critical failing that I cannot both write and critique my writing, or write and assess my writing, or lead you any closer by way of a traditional study guide. But I feel, honestly, in a very certain and gut way, that I can do best by my work, and by your interest in it, if I can encourage you to encounter writing in a way that preserves its initial mystery, its tidal pull, its bareness, its offering.



This all said, I can, in a sidelong, slant way, offer the following: a few wide-ranging questions to ponder which might open some useful portholes to or ways of sitting with essays and poems at large, both mine and others.


1. How would you describe your relationship to this writer? Do you feel you "know" the writer after reading her/his work? When you "imagine her/his presence" what images do you find?


2.What is the nature of the experience of your reading? Has your thinking or feeling changed in any way as a result of reading?


3. Do you believe reading is a "creative act?" How so? What was "creative" for you in your reading of X's book?


4. What of the author's work stays with you after your reading (words, phrases, lines, sentences, gestures, slants, angles)?


5. What of this work might you want to quote, keep, hold, elaborate on, converse with in your own work?