Syllabus of Errors: Poems

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

by Troy Jollimore

. . . 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?”

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 29, 2015

About the author

Troy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013).

Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (Studies in Ethics, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."

His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.

Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Walrus, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.

Reviews

[C. Varn]

Jollimore's works are subtle--mostly lyric with bursts of humor or tragedy--and his formal concerns are mostly the kinds of poems you would expect, although often the contrast between his short lines being draped by lush language or his longer lines and more rigorous forms being paired with more direct language do keep the collection engaging. The high modernist themes about the disconnection between the signs and what they signify and this shows up most clearly in "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard" where the syntax gets complicated but the meaning is equally elusive. Emotional and engaging.

[elise amaryllis]

4.5/5
a pretty fantastic book of poetry. these past few days i've been in a mood where all i want to do is devour books. it isn’t very productive considering my overflowing to-do-lists, but when i’m reading stuff like this, how am i supposed to stop? i don’t want to sleep or eat or talk. just read. anyways. i digress. this book is wonderful. my description of poetry that i like is getting painfully redundant but i am not a (good) poet or wordsmith or whatever. so i’ll just say this book is beautiful. which it IS. i loved so much in here, and of those poems there were poems i loved so much that they just damn near tore me apart.

some favorites:
- Ache and Echo
- Cutting Room
- Going Viral
- Death by Landscape
- The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard
- Some Men (!!!)
- The Proselytizers (!!!)
- Universal
- Photograph
- Polaroid Model 1000 Onestep, circa 1978 (!!!)
- Tamara
- The Task (!!!)
- Not Enough (!!!)
- Vertigo (!!!)

quotes:

"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
places 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 least he looked up.
That might be. But know that I'm willing to go
barefoot at the end, if that's what it takes."
—Inventory

"Is there anything anywhere in this world
that is free from possession, that is not owned
by anyone? If there is, I want it.

I have cleared a space for it
in the corner of my bedroom. I will put it
there, and let everyone know that I have it,

and envy will fill them as poured tea fills
a cup. Why did I not think to make
it mine?they will ask themselves, and they

will receive no answer. So they will come
to admire it, bringing their envy with them
like an offering. and it will feel as if there

is light inside me, I will feel the way
the gods feel, for the envy of others makes us
divine. I just need to figure out what

this thing is and where I might find it. The things
I have found thus far are already labeled
and claimed. Tell me, where is the unattached thing?"
—Posession

"I'm not in very much pain these days
is a terrible way to start a poem
because the poet's pain is what puts the asses
in the seats, it's the half-nude neon
lady on the sign outside
the strip club, it's the guy with the big
yellow twirling arrow outside the furniture
store, and without the poet's pain,
what do you have? Some pretty words
about barn swallows and oleanders,
some standard verses re: lovely lakes
and the midnight water laps softly, peace
sneaking up behind you on tender cat pads,
etc., etc. . . . The poet's pain
is his bread and butter, his keys to the kingdom,
his ace in the hole. It's what you take away
from him when it's the last act and you really
want to grind his pathetic rhyme-spitting face
in the gravel. It's what the world has gifted
him, and damb him if he won't carry it
out of the kitchen on a big
precariously balanced silver platter, furiously
steaming. No one needs, or wants, or should even
be asked to tolerate a happy poet.
I'm feeling fine, the therapy is going well
are words that should never appear
in a poem. The game cannot be won
and will be called on account of darkness.
Our rhymes whack away at the world like hatchets
thrown into a dead wet stump. No wonder
so many people keep dying, what
with the elegies we keep writing.
Let's take a break, some suggest. Yes,
but poetry makes nothing happen, and so
can hardly be blamed for this. Would
that this were true. Would that people would stop
beginning sentences that aren't questions
with the world would.
You might as well just
wear a billboard around your neck that says
I'm a poet, come fondle my sensitive soul,
lick my barbaric yawp, for I know
what the songs have promised me. Actually,
I never found out what the songs had intended
to promise me. I only know
that I never received it. Was someone supposed
to take me aside at some point and whisper it
into my ear? Or write it on
the underside of a cup of coffee
tjat got served to me somewhere? Is there still
a chance that this might happen?
Tell the gods, tell the singers of songs,
tell the ghosts that I'm ready."
—Ars Poetica

[Margaryta]

The first half of "Syllabus of Errors" felt stronger than the second. The second half is also where there were some passages where I didn't feel too comfortable with Jollimore's imagery as it slipped into a very classical male gaze, like in "Charlie Brown," with the lines "if only/ I could embrace a woman without inspiring/ in her the sudden desire to get/ a restraining order or move to Cleveland," or the very subject of the poem "The Fourteen-Hour Orgasm." At their height, Jollimore's poems are philosophical with none of the jargon, direct and smooth like glass, but it was hard to overlook the uncomfortable instances of male sexuality that occur as well, uncomfortable because of how they are slipped in almost as if the reader should just take them in stride and share the speaker's desire for women when it is unclear whether this desire is reciprocated or being enforced.

[timothy]

“𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳’𝘴
𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘴. 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦
𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘴.

𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨
𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩
𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥

𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘥. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦
𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨,
𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘵, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦

𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰
𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥
𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦

𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥
𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘥𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦
𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦.”

wasn’t necessarily my thing, i don’t know if i’m just not smart enough or have a good enough attention span but i kept finding myself confused at what was trying to be said in a handful of these poems.

i appreciate this book as it is however as this copy i read and was lent belonged to my lovely girlfriend’s uncle who is unfortunately no longer with us. i can tell he had a good sense of literature, despite whatever i can and can’t understand with it.

𝟮.𝟳𝟱/𝟱

[Tamara]

indescribably lovely, and not just because it f/ a poem entitled with my name.

[Maj.]

There is so much I
would like to tell you.
Instead, I carry and reread your letters,

your small handwriting
plaintive, increasingly
poignant in the gathering dark.

[Nuri]

VERTIGO
We are each other’s
privacies. We are
each other’s solitudes.

We are the living
forms in which
beauty can be encountered and

pursued. And we are
made for looking,
made to be looked at, and made

to fall and to
remember and
to fall again. And we are made

for loving, and
for dying. We are
made to be unmade.
(excerpt)

The book is divided into 6 sections and contains 41 poems. This book found me rather serendipitously. The ones about love and forgiveness are really nice. One feels the strangely liberating ache that these short gems carry in them. Poems on consciousness, life and death, seems to have been written from an inner clarity — which almost convinces me, that every artist, has a glimpse of the transcendental.

Some of the lines resonated with me so much, it felt as if part of my experience was encapsulated in them.

While the poem 'Tamara' is fully reproduced below, others are excerpts from longer poems. Among the short ones — 'Photograph,' 'The Small Rain,' 'Poem for the Abandoned Titan Missile Silos, Just North of Chico, California,' are deep and beautiful. Among the slightly longer ones, Charlie Brown is a good read. Vertigo, as it concludes the book, I'd say that Troy saved the best for the last. The words are dancing to the music of soul, when it is strummed by the different facets of consciousness.

TAMARA
Years from now he’ll remember the months he spent
trying to unlock a lock of her hair
and how, when she kissed him, he felt like a poem
being translated from one language into another.

GOING VIRAL
Were you two close?
someone asked,
and I replied yes,
I was too close.

SECOND WIND
These things,
however they might terrify, are nonetheless
true. I will hold you through the shivers
and terrors. I will kiss the unholy curve
of your neck. I will try to take your mind
off the shadow.

THE BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEES OF MARTHA’S VINEYARD
[...] First you learn to cause pain, then the task is to learn
to live with having caused pain.

[...] You can talk about love all you like, you’re a poet.
You’d rather sing about it than live through it.

[...] What I know is this: when you are done learning
how to cause pain, which you never are,
you learn how not to, which you never do.

ON BLINDNESS
I realize that to see is also to be blind
to what the seen conceals, the world that lurks behind
the well-lit screen on which the scene we see is seen.

UNIVERSAL
“Why is there something
rather than nothing?”
Sidney Morgenbesser
was asked to explain.
He is said to have said,
in response, “Even if
there was nothing,
you’d still complain.”

VERTIGO
life exists
“between the deaths”—a spark, a moment
of brightness strung tight
like a thread, an interregnum
between eternities,
during each of which
the projector sits inert,
and the screen is blank.

[Andrew]

I felt as if a number of the poems could have used a few more drafts, but a smart, pleasingly fluent collection overall.

[Emily]

Real rating is 3 and a half stars. I really enjoyed "Fireworks", "Lament", "Universal", and the one about the empty shell in Chico California (the name slipped my mind).