I think that if somebody were to ask me, in one of those vaguely accusatory ways people have of asking questions whose real object is not information but classification, whether I am a poet or an essayist, I would probably say essayist, though not without feeling, almost immediately, the little internal cringe that comes from knowing that the answer is both true and evasive. Because it is not that I do not write poems. I do. Or at least I write things that look enough like poems, typographically and sometimes spiritually, to embarrass me later. It is rather that poetry and the essay seem to me to operate on different psychic frequencies, different moral bandwidths, different relations to the reader’s patience and pride and capacity for being made to work.
A lot of people write poetry who are not poets, and some people who are poets may not, in any ordinary bookstore-shelving sense, write “poems” at all. This sounds precious, but I mean it fairly literally. The question is not merely one of genre but of discernment. Poetry is hard not only to make but to receive, because its freedom from law is purchased at the cost of density. The freer the poem becomes, the more cruelly it depends on the reader’s having the right kind of ear, the right kind of wound, the right history of symbols stored somewhere below the level of ordinary cognition. Which means that great poetry can look, to the insufficiently initiated, a lot like bad poetry, and bad poetry can, under certain theatrical conditions, briefly impersonate greatness. Maybe only a great poet can really know great poetry when it is standing there in plain clothes.
And this is before one even gets to the problem of private languages, or grammars, or symbolic economies, or the whole weird fact that esotericism only works among people who already have a partial key. A secret cannot be communicated to someone who has no category for secrecy. Poetry, at its most serious, is an art of nearly intolerable subtlety. Blunt poetry tends to collapse into slogan or greeting card or threat. The strongest poetry often requires a context so delicate and exact that removing it is like removing the atmosphere from around a planet and then wondering why nothing living remains.
The essay, by contrast, is vulgar in the best possible sense. It comes out and says things. It accosts. It shakes the reader by the lapels, or pretends to, though of course the lapels are metaphysical and the shaking is done through syntax. The essay is open with respect to subject but less mysterious in its social contract. It argues. It advances. It risks being wrong in public. It wants, even when it is ornate or evasive or self-interrogating, to make itself legible as an act of thought. Poetry asks the reader to excavate. The essay brings a shovel and then explains, perhaps at excessive length, why this particular patch of ground matters.
This does not mean the essay is less beautiful. In fact, one of the private pleasures of writing essays is smuggling poetry into the machinery of argument: letting rhythm intensify a claim, letting image do a portion of the thinking, letting a sentence become, for a moment, less a vehicle than a weather system. At its best, the essay tries to map reality through pressure, qualification, counterclaim, return. The aesthetic imagination does something similar, except with atmosphere and contour and light. One draws borders; the other makes the borders glow.
Poetry, though, often seems to require commentary, or at least to be strengthened by it. There is a sense in which the complete poetic act might include not only the poem but the apparatus by which the poem teaches you how to suffer it properly. Even a great philosopher, if rendered only in poetry, risks looking merely obscure. And obscurity is a dangerous thing, because it can be either the shadow cast by depth or the fog machine of emptiness. I distrust interpretive gambles, maybe because I have too much pride, maybe because I have too much fear, maybe because my own thoughts come out of imagined corridors lined with poets and philosophers whose faces I cannot quite see. My poems may never be understood, and this fact is either tragic or convenient.
Poetry is a delicate tea. The essay is a stronger drink, the sort whose fumes alter the behavior of everyone near the glass. The difference, finally, may be control. Poetry is a form of vulnerability, a wager with the reader and with fate, and wagers require humility even when they are dressed up as grandeur. The essay permits a different posture. It allows one to say: here is what I think; here are the reasons I think it; here is the blade, and here is the angle at which I intend to use it.
So if asked again whether I am a poet or an essayist, I would still answer: essayist. Partly from humility. To call oneself a poet feels like claiming not merely a practice but a consecration. It seems unbecoming to say. I may arrange words on a page, but it is for others to decide whether the arrangement has crossed whatever invisible threshold separates verse from poetry. Essays, on the other hand, have their own more modest and more aggressive dignity. If the poet is a boxer, working through rhythm, timing, force, and bodily risk, the essayist is a fencer. The fencer’s épée does not need to roar. Its sharpness is its argument. Even at rest, pointed outward, it changes the room.
I do not mean to make any grand claim for my own ability here. This essay is plainly an essay; whether it is a good one is another matter, and not finally mine to determine. But an essay, even a failed one, declares its species. It can be contended with. Poetry is more like an ideal than a form. The worst thing one can say of a poem is not that it is wrong but that it is not poetic. And because poetry is free, because it is not identical with line breaks or lyric mood or metaphorical vapor, it sometimes appears where no one intended it. Perhaps the highest poetry is the poetry that happens without strain. Forced poetry is often only self-consciousness wearing flowers.
This is why I am first an essayist. The essay does not require ideals, but it can house them beautifully. I still have, or think I have, a poetic impulse. But I write poems in the traditional freestanding sense only when the lines arrive with such force that refusal would feel like a more embarrassing kind of vanity than obedience. Ideals should not be handled casually. Poetry, if the word is to retain any heat, has to remain a sacred undertaking. And yet anyone who carries an ideal inside himself begins to see its traces everywhere. The illustrator sees a building and privately admires the discipline of its angles. The musician hears birdsong and cannot help arranging it into relation. I reread my own essays and find, sometimes to my annoyance, that I care less about the clean progression of the argument than about the texture of the sentences, their cadence, their small weather, their nearly illicit desire to become beautiful.
Still, the desire for control remains. I am an essayist because I have claims to make, and because I believe the essay is the most potent vehicle I possess for making them. Poetry can create understanding by deeper and less direct means, but to be called a poet one must surrender more completely to poetry than I have yet been willing to surrender. I remain bound to the essay, to its visible architecture, its argumentative obligations, its sharpened instruments. But appearances, obviously, are not the whole of reality. Discernment can still draw light from murky water. So if asked whether I am a poet or an essayist, I would answer, once more, that I am an essayist.
Which is to say: like every esotericist, I am also lying.
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,734 Reviews
Had a hankering for essays and this hit the spot-- absolutely delightful work!
hello there, fellow team lemonade!
i went into this expecting an essay, but it seems i got in a bit over my head... usually i try to avoid reviewing poetry, since it's often so inherently abstract and subjective, but it seems this essay is more poetic that some proud poems i've read...
though, i did find myself, despite my initial misgivings about reviewing, really liking this piece. it was inspiring, so much so i had to go jot down my own little poem halfway through.
the argument you're making is really compelling to me. you just barely shy away from concretely defining the difference between poem and essay through similes, metaphors and ornate descriptions.
i found myself agreeing with a lot of what you were saying, and recognizing a lot of what you were describing.
'And obscurity is a dangerous thing, because it can be either the shadow cast by depth or the fog machine of emptiness.'
this specifically i've found myself thinking about a lot. it's hard to find the balance between your words and the words people will receive. you have to give a little piece of your most intimate experiences, while also staying separate from the vessel through which you convey it. it makes you wonder who you're actually writing for.
though, it's not always a bad thing. sometimes the fog machine gives way for a rainbow.
'Poetry is a form of vulnerability, a wager with the reader and with fate, and wagers require humility even when they are dressed up as grandeur.'
this is a very self-aware take. essentially all presentations of poetry are a surrender. you offer someone a glimpse into your mind and all you can do is plead for them to understand, but in the end it'll always depend on them.
now, i hate to critique art, really. but, as this is at least an essay-hybrid, i'll take the liberty to also look at this from a structural standpoint.
some of these sentences are really, really long. for example:
'I think that if somebody were to ask me, in one of those vaguely accusatory ways people have of asking questions whose real object is not information but classification, whether I am a poet or an essayist, I would probably say essayist, though not without feeling, almost immediately, the little internal cringe that comes from knowing that the answer is both true and evasive.'
is the very first sentence. it does give a bit of flowy, spoken, victorian-esque prose, but it gets pretty heavy. especially coupled with very dense paragraphs.
you use a lot of metaphors, and though i do think all of them are lovely, they rarely introduce new ideas. to me it felt a bit like it kept circling around the same point over and over, touching on it but not quite diving in.
again, this feels like a poem in an essay's clothing, and poems are very flexible grammatically. though, you want readers to have an easier time getting through this piece it might be worth shortening some sentences
Hai :3
This is such a sharp, self-aware essay!! I love how it feels like an argument that keeps catching itself in the mirror. There’s this gorgeous tension between classification and evasion, between wanting to name the self and knowing that every name is already a little false. The whole thing feels cerebral, yes, but not cold!! It has this anxious intimacy beneath the intellectual control, like the speaker is fencing not only with the reader but with their own private need to be understood. I’m obsessed with that!!
This opening is fantastic!! It immediately establishes the psychological texture of the piece. The “vaguely accusatory” question is such a specific social pressure, and I love how the narrator frames genre not as an innocent category but as a kind of interrogation ~~ Like, being asked “what are you?” already contains a demand to be legible to someone else. Also, “both true and evasive” is SUCH a good hinge for the whole essay. That’s basically the essay’s soul!! Every claim here has a counterclaim sleeping inside it. You keep making distinctions and then complicating them, which makes the piece feel alive instead of merely declarative.
!!!! This is so strong
This is one of my favorite sentences in the piece. It’s clean, severe, and memorable. “Purchased at the cost of density” has this sacrificial quality to it, like poetry earns its freedom by becoming less easily entered. That’s such a compelling idea!! I love that you don’t romanticize poetry as pure liberation. You make it sound dangerous, demanding, almost elitist, but not in a shallow way. More like: poetry requires a kind of spiritual literacy, and not everyone has the same alphabet.
^^^ I do wonder, though, if the essay risks overstating the opacity of poetry just a little? That is not because the argument is wrong, but because poetry can also be radically immediate. Since your essay is so invested in discernment, subtlety, and private symbolic moments, I’d maybe love one small gesture toward poetry’s ability to bypass the “right kind of ear” and strike anyway. That could make the argument feel even more nuanced. < Same with essays, as mentioned in your other review!!
Oh my goodness, what a sentence!!
This feels like the secret thesis of the essay. It’s philosophical, but it lands emotionally, too. There’s something lonely in it. It makes poetry feel less like self-expression and more like failed or partial transmission, like the poet is always speaking through a locked door to someone who may or may not know that doors can be locked. I adore that!! This is also where the essay’s esoteric undercurrent really starts glowing.
This is so funny and so precise!! I love when the essay allows itself these little moments of wit. “The lapels are metaphysical” is such a good example of the voice at its best: elevated, self-aware, a little absurd, but still meaningful. The humor humanizes the argument you're building towards.
The contrast between poetry and essay here is also really satisfying. Poetry excavates, while the essay brings a shovel and then explains the ground. That metaphor is almost too perfect for the piece because it shows the essay as both practical and comically over-explanatory ~~ There’s affection in the critique, but I like how you don't back down.
This is where the essay starts committing its own gorgeous crime, hehe. You are literally describing the poetic impulse taking over the essay, and the sentence itself becomes what it names. “Less a vehicle than a weather system” is such a lush, wonderful phrase. It gives prose atmosphere, pressure, movement, unpredictability. That’s such a poet’s way of thinking about an essay, even while the narrator keeps insisting on essayistic control.
^^^ I would maybe think about whether this section could be expanded by just a hair. The idea of “smuggling poetry into the machinery of argument” is one of the richest parts of the piece, and I wanted a little more time there. What does that smuggling feel like in practice? Is it betrayal? Pleasure? Indulgence? Embarrassment? You touch on all of that later, but this moment is so central that I think it could have another sentence or two.
LOVE.
This is such a crisp distinction. It also reveals one of the essay’s deepest fears: not obscurity itself, but fraudulent obscurity ~~ The speaker doesn’t distrust mystery exactly; instead, they distrust mystery that has nothing behind it. That feels very true to the essay’s moral universe. There’s a strong ethical anxiety here about artifice, vanity, and consecration. I like how you’re asking what kind of seriousness you have earned, especially from a position as the essayist.
This metaphor is so fun because it feels like it should be too neat, but then the second sentence makes it stranger and more alive. The “fumes” altering behavior gives the essay a chemical quality, like argument is intoxicating or hazardous. I love that. It keeps the essay from becoming a simple binary where poetry = delicate and essay = blunt. Instead, the essay has its own atmosphere, its own danger. That's such a unique take on the act of writing!!
This is probably the most satisfying metaphorical turn in the whole piece!! The boxer/fencer distinction is so clear, so elegant, and so revealing. Poetry becomes bodily, risky, rhythmic, bruising, yet the speaker can't seem to escape its grasp. It fits the voice perfectly, like the spiraling tone the speaker takes on while still remaining intellectual in nature. I especially love “its sharpness is its argument.” That sentence has such finality!!
^^^ My only tiny hesitation is that the essay has a LOT of metaphorical systems: psychic frequencies, moral bandwidths, atmosphere around planets, shovels, weather systems, tea and alcohol, blades, boxing and fencing, flowers, water. Most of them are individually wonderful, but because the essay is itself about form and control, I wonder if trimming or consolidating one or two would make the strongest images feel even sharper?? The fencing metaphor, for example, is strong enough to dominate the room. Let it do more!!
This is mean in the best way!!
It’s aphoristic, funny, and a little cruel. I love when the essay gets slightly severe like this ~~ There’s an aesthetic ethic here: beauty cannot be merely decorative; it has to arise from necessity. That connects beautifully to the later idea that poems should only be written when refusal would be more vain than obedience... As a poet, I'm a bit on the fence, but I understand your sentiment!!
YES. Perfect ending!!
It snaps the whole essay shut while also opening it back up. The final line reclassifies everything that came before. The speaker’s insistence on being an essayist is true, but also incomplete; the essay itself has been an esoteric performance of poetic desire all along. I love that the ending doesn’t resolve the contradiction because that would make the speaker seem hypocritical, even as they do stand between conflicting ideas. The only thing I’d really watch is density of metaphor and whether every image is serving the motion of the essay.
Overall, love this!! It’s elegant, funny, intellectually rich, and quietly vulnerable beneath all that polish. The voice is so controlled, so elegant, and sooooo essayistic in exactly the way the essay claims to be. Amazing work, pixels!! ^_^
- Payton
pixels, it seems I'm a frequent flyer here? I love a good essay!
so, first of all, this essay is doing something very funny and very revealing: it argues for the essay as the form of control while constantly betraying that it is already being haunted by poetry. I'd say that is probably its central topic. you claim the essay because the essay lets you say things, because it declares its species, because it can be contended with; but the writing itself keeps drifting into various different metaphors. in other words, the essay is not merely about the difference between poetry and the essay because it is rather performing the instability of that difference while pretending, with great elegance, to have settled it. neat-o!
that final line is especially strong. "like every esotericist, I am also lying." I think it works because it retroactively charges the whole essay with irony without cheapening it. the essay spends its entire length building a defense of self-classification, and then the ending reveals that classification itself as an esoteric gesture: a way of withholding under the guise of disclosure. very fitting! it makes the narrator's "essayist" identity less a conclusion than a mask, or maybe a chosen discipline, which is more interesting. you are saying, "I refuse the social, spiritual, and aesthetic consequences of naming myself a poet." as someone who is a poet, maybe a self-indulgent one but a poet nonetheless, I understand the tension you're balancing here.
^ the strongest sections, to me, are where you distinguish genre from vocation. the claim that a lot of people write poetry who are not poets could easily sound pretentious, and it DOES sound a little pretentious, but the essay knows that and folds the pretension into its argument. this is important because the essay is very aware of how unbecoming it can be to talk seriously about poetry. I love how you are dramatizing the embarrassment of wanting poetry to remain sacred in a cultural environment that has made "sacred" feel a bit watered down, especially with social media and comparison culture. it is not to say that poets are writing "cliche" poetry, because most aren't, but that because of the fact we are so focused on comparing ourselves to the next person, it can surely feel that way.
HOWEVER, the essay occasionally leans so hard into distinction that the distinction begins to feel over-stabilized. poetry is described as vulnerability, subtlety, density, secrecy, ideality, consecration, all of these super abstract nouns. the essay is described as argument, vulgarity, architecture, public risk, sharpness, control, so forth. these oppositions are beautiful, but they are also a little too obedient - they create a convincing symbolic economy, but maybe not a fully tested one as the essay stands now. ask yourself: so what? why should I care? the essay itself knows this, because its best moments are the ones where the categories contaminate each other. the essay smuggles poetry into the machinery of argument; poetry requires commentary. the binary is constantly being softened by your own density!
for example, when you write that poetry asks the reader to excavate while the essay brings a shovel and explains why the ground matters, the sentence is excellent. it is funny, memorable, and precise. buuut it also underestimates how much the essay can conceal, seduce, misdirect, ritualize, and mystify! name a noun and an essay can do that! they do not always come out and say things. to me, some of the best essays are constantly evading a solid answer. likewise, poetry does not always retreat into private symbolic difficulty - some poems are brutally direct, and that's just how it is. while the conceptual division is productive, I wonder if the essay would become sharper by letting the essay itself become a little more guilty? yknow, writing can also be the form of BEAUTIFULLY MANAGED avoidance.
that matters here because the narrator's self-identification as an essayist seems partly sincere and partly defensive - I mean, the essay admits this, but I think it could push the admission even further. you say the essay allows control, and that poetry requires a surrender you have not yet been willing to make. the REAL question underneath this, at least to me, is: what would be lost if the narrator surrendered? the ability to be misunderstood on one’s own terms, maybe. there is an entire drama waiting there, and the essay gestures toward it beautifully, but sometimes it retreats into aphoristic brilliance before letting the idea settle. ruminate a little more, cmon!
^ this is not to say you need to become more confessional in a blunt way. please do not add a paragraph like "when I was young, poetry hurt me" unless that is actually true and unavoidable. you say the poems embarrass you later, which is one of the most revealing sentences in the work, and then the essay almost runs away from it into grand aesthetic philosophy. I want more of THAT embarrassment.
there is also a totalizing move in the treatment of the reader? I noticed that early. the reader appears as someone who either has or lacks the proper initiation, the right ear, the right wound, the right symbolic key. this is very elegant, but honestly, it turns poetry into a kind of economy. those who can receive it, receive it; those who cannot, cannot. that is seductive, especially for an essay about esotericism, but it feels difficult for people who casually read this and don't understand the implications of esotericism and the ethics of philosophy. why do you have the right to decide what's a good poet, a good reader, a good poem, so on? obviously, the narrative voice critiques that sentiment, but it may be something to play around with deeper.
that said, I think this essay succeeds because it understands that form is never just form. to call oneself a poet or an essayist is not simply to name a preferred mode of composition because writing has always been tied to something deeper. if I had to condense the revision advice, I would say: complicate the binary, complicate the essay. your work is already stylish and intellectually serious! you clearly don't need more ornament or more abstraction, but maybe you could benefit from a slightly deeper willingness to expose the actual anxiety underneath the distinction your writing so beautifully constructs.
anyways, this is really strong work. it is plainly an essay. whether it is also a poem is, inconveniently for your argument, not entirely up to you. I'm always looking forward to your writing!
best,
cocteau