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    Syllabus of Errors: Poems
    Syllabus of Errors: Poems
    Syllabus of Errors: Poems
    Ebook103 pages42 minutes

    Syllabus of Errors: Poems

    By Troy Jollimore

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    About this ebook

    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?"

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2015
    ISBN9781400873449
    Syllabus of Errors: Poems
    Author

    Troy Jollimore

    Troy Jollimore is the author of two previous collections of poetry, At Lake Scugog (Princeton) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, the Believer, and other publications. He is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico.

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      Book preview

      Syllabus of Errors - Troy Jollimore

      I    ON BIRDSONG

      If my readers wish to understand bird-music, they must assume that birds are not automatic musical boxes, but sound-lovers, who cultivate the pursuit of sound-combinations as an art, as truly as we have cultivated our arts of a similarly aesthetic character. This art becomes to many of them a real object of life, no less real than the pursuit of food or the maintenance of a family.

      —WALTER GARSTANG, SONGS OF THE BIRDS (1922)

      ON BIRDSONG

      Poison, in proportion, is medicinal.

      Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal.

      Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical.

      An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance.

      The conjuror entrances a vast audience.

      The hymn that’s resurrected from the hymnal

      aspires, as we wish to, to the spiritual,

      but is slow to disentangle from the sensual.

      The evening light, refracted, terminates the day.

      (A faction is a fraction of an integral.)

      What would we say to the cardinal or jay,

      given wings that could mimic their velocities?

      How many wintery ferocities

      are encompassed in their shrill inhuman canticles?

      INVENTORY

      Take inventory. Invent a story

      about the people you have hurt.

      Begin with yourself. The harm I’ve done

      comes on this journey with me. He walks

      ahead on the trail, or follows a dozen

      paces behind. At night we stop

      together. I try not to feel ashamed

      of him, his decaying robes, his loathsome,

      unwashed feet, so much like mine.

      We don’t talk much. But two nights ago,

      the campfire dying between us, I found

      I could no longer stifle my rage, I wanted

      to be rid of him so badly, and so

      I mustered my anger and said, You only

      get seven pairs of shoes to carry you

      through this life, and you’ve already used up

      four. Silence. The call of a whippoorwill

      in the fields. At last he looked up.

      That might be. But know that I’m willing to go

      barefoot at the end, if that’s what it takes.

      ACHE AND ECHO

      1

      Anything can be beautiful: a discarded

      Taco Bell wrapper, an industrial park,

      a strip mall, a bloodstain, a bruise, a corpse:

      you just need to see it from the right angle,

      in the right light, and in a spirit

      of equanimity, open-mindedness,

      and receptivity. Isn’t this

      what twentieth-century artists were trying

      to tell us? No, they were trying to tell us

      that anything could be art. As for beauty,

      they held it in contempt, they thought beauty

      made us bad people, blind to the plight

      of the poor, to the possibility of change.

      That wasn’t their nuttiest notion, either.

      Not by a longshot. But me, I can’t

      give up my beauty, I’m an addict, a beauty

      fiend; if you want to take it away

      you’re going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

      2

      Give back the ache that echoed in

      my heart. Return to me the ache

      and the echo of the ache I felt

      in Orchid Park. Send back to me

      the loose-strung ache that echoed in

      the ark that is my heart. Retrace

      the arc a happy heart might make.

      Sing back to me the song we sang

      in the outer dark, the art we make

      of the ache we felt when we traced the arc

      of the last falling star to fall.

      And stir me, stir me with the spoon

      you used to hide the moon. Then stir

      the echo of my ache. My melody

      has fallen out of tune.

      3

      One: what pleases, what disgusts,

      is only

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