Poetic structuration in lyric essay and literary nonfiction often re-imagines autobiographical detail. Much essayistic work since the 1960s represents the specifics of socio-cultural positioning and biography within affective paradigms, using symbolic poetic framing. The result is Barthes’s ‘consideration of effects’ and the ‘resignifying’ of autobiography attributed to Lyn Hejinian. In my book-length poetic essay, Among Love’s Apartments, subjective experience acts as structural engine, poetic allegory as organising method, biography and research as content or substance. The result is the lessening of authorial control, as extensive intertextual play takes place within the notional six ‘apartments’. This is the structural ‘game’ Caroline Bergvall identifies in conceptual writing, and the ‘pattern-bounded unpredictability’ of Joan Retallack. I suggest a new term to illuminate the method. ‘Autopoetic essay’ attempts to recreate a complex life situation in an open-form text, using poetic structuring. I draw an analogy with biological ‘autopoiesis’ – self-production within a relational matrix.
Máighréad Medbh (2025) studied this question.