A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.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 pra...

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Main Authors: Robertson, Rachel, Hetherington, P.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Multilingual Matters Ltd 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51771
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author Robertson, Rachel
Hetherington, P.
author_facet Robertson, Rachel
Hetherington, P.
author_sort Robertson, Rachel
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.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.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-517712017-09-13T15:37:23Z A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay Robertson, Rachel Hetherington, P. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.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. 2016 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51771 10.1080/14790726.2016.1235204 Multilingual Matters Ltd restricted
spellingShingle Robertson, Rachel
Hetherington, P.
A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title_full A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title_fullStr A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title_full_unstemmed A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title_short A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
title_sort mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51771