Syllabus of Errors

Poems

Troy Jollimore

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780691167688
  9780691167589
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400873449
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A new collection of poetry from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

. . . we are fixed to perpetrate the species—

I meant perpetuate—as if our duty


were coupled with our terror. As if beauty

itself were but a syllabus of errors.

Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book," and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore's first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal.

Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo," is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet's favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?"

II ON BEAUTY

the Airs which belong to Birds have
led our lives to be these things instead of Kings

—CHARLES OLSON

ON BEAUTY

Beauty, some have ventured, is proportional:

the right relative ratio of the actual

against the actual. Others hypothesize

that beauty’s roots lie buried in the sexual,

insisting that aesthetics are relational:

the eye of the beholder is the noumenal

perceiving core, where spores of the phenomenal

sprout into lit-screen images. The visual

is permeated, down to the foundational,

with lust, with longing. Say it: we are animals,

which does not mean that we must all be criminals,

but only that desire is constitutional,

that we are fixed to perpetrate the species—

I meant perpetuate—as if our duty

were coupled with our terror. As if beauty

itself were but a syllabus of errors.

SYLLABUS OF ERRORS

You will first treat of the restricted light,

then, having achieved full adequacy

in this, of the free light, and finally, after

many exercises and much

disciplined contemplation, you will treat

of the light of luminous bodies.

Only then will you be ready

to make a study of love, of the void

that precipitates longing, of the soft tissues

that compose the kissing organs in humans,

the slow, cold fire these organs encompass.

Young women, their hearts. Passion, the diverse

expressions of and the obstructions thereto.

Whence comes the construction of children, then children,

the neglect and abandonment of. Having mastered

this, you will next turn to the pursuit

of competence in the fields of cartography,

of argumentation, of the imitation of beasts,

and of archery. As it comes to the arrow

in midair that the bow is the only

home it will ever really know,

and that it does not love the target at all,

so the seeds of delayed understanding

will come to you, drifting softly from some

high branch or low cloud to lodge in your hair,

on a Tuesday morning, perhaps. Whence come tears.

Whence comes the tuning of faint melodies

voiced by devices of ancient assembly.

Whence the correction of orbits, the rotation

of the eyes or of songbirds when the one

draws the other after. Why a prick

to the syrinx may still the heart of a man.

Whence frenzy by virtue of illness. Whence envy.

Whence shame. Whence trembling. Whence sleep. A figure

to show whence comes the semen. Whence urine.

Whence milk. Thunderbolts, their fatal capacity.

Joy, the diverse simulacra of.

Of the habits of men. Of ceaseless sobbing.

CUTTING ROOM

Sooner or later everyone needs a haircut.

—THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE (JOEL AND ETHAN COEN, 2001)

The note of longing that creeps into the voice

of the woman who cuts my hair when she says

“Oh, it was amazing”—she is speaking of the time

she was twenty-one and went for a weeklong cruise

around the Virgin Islands on a friend’s sailboat—

is so heartfelt, so hushed,

so purely human that it makes me wonder

what parts of the story she is leaving out,

what she isn’t saying, which suspends itself,

as the unsaid always does, like a shadow or aura

over the words she has allowed herself to say.

Meanwhile her scissors sing the snip snip snip

of revision, and small seed-packets of my hair

are drifting to the floor as if through humid forest

air. As always I have let it grow too long

and have come in looking like a middle-aged professor

of philosophy who is trying to look a little

like Roger Daltrey, or, if he’s lucky, Robert Plant;

a gesture, perhaps, toward the life I get to live

in the alternative plotline, the deleted scenes

hidden in my life’s Special Edition DVD.

■

Desire is always a hazardous thing

to reveal. That bold, slightly unfed look

you direct without intending to toward a stranger

you suddenly want—does she remind you of your mother,

or your first girlfriend, or does she represent

the possibility of an alternate life,

one very much like this one in all the ways that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• I On Birdsong
• II On Beauty
• III On Blindness
• IV When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth
• V Vertigo
• VI Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Notes and Acknowledgments