The Errancy

by Jorie Graham

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book

Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots—and builds a rich musical meditation on desire.

In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire—desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. 

Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one’s way—a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body’s strictest longing, here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs.

Provocative in its spirited merging of the sacred and the skeptical, the celestial and the earthly, The Errancy confirms Graham as “one of our best, most important” poets (Library Journal) and “one of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language” (Times Literary Supplement). 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780880015295
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/01/1998
Edition description:	1 PBK ED
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Read an Excerpt

The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia

Shall I move the flowers again?
Shall I put them further to the left
into the light?
Win that fix it, will that arrange the
thing?
Yellow sky.
Faint cricket in the dried-out bush.
As I approach, my footfall in the leaves
drowns out the cricket-chirping I was
coming close to hear
Yellow sky with black leaves rearranging it.
Wind rearranging the black leaves in it.
But anyway I am indoors, of course, and this is a pane, here,
and I have arranged the flowers for you
again. Have taken the dead cordless ones, the yellow bits past apogee,
the faded cloth, the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn
back out, leaving the few crisp blooms to swagger, winglets, limpid

debris

Shall I arrange these few remaining flowers?
Shall I rearrange these gossamer efficiencies?
Please don't touch me with your skin.
Please let the thing evaporate.
Please tell me clearly what it is.
The party is so loud downstairs, bristling with souvenirs.
It's a philosophy of life, of course,
drinks fluorescent, whips of syntax in the air
above the heads -- how small they seem from here,
the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence,
and also tiny merciless darts
of truth. It's pulled on tight, the air they breathe and rip.
It's like a prize the way it's stretched on tight
over the voices, keeping them intermingling, forcing the breaths to

marry, marry,

cunning little hermeneutic cupola,
dome of occasion in which the thoughts re-
group, the footprints stall and gnaw in tiny ruts,
the napkins wave, arewaved , the honeycombing
thoughts are felt to dialogue, a form of self-
congratulation, no?, or is it suffering? I'm a bit
dizzy up here rearranging things,
they will come up here soon, and need a setting for their fears,
and loves, an architecture for their evolutionary
morphic needs -- what will they need if I don't make the place? --
what will they know to miss?, what cry out for, what feel the bitter

restless irritations

for? A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness,
the tireless altitudes of the created place,
in which to make a life -- a liberty -- the hollow, fetishized, and starry

place,

a bit gossamer with dream, a vortex of evaporations,
oh little dream, invisible city, invisible hill
I make here on the upper floors for you --
down there, where you are entertained, where you are passing
time, there's glass and moss on air,
there's the feeling of being numerous, mouths submitting to air, lips

to protocol,

and dreams of sense, tongues, hinges, forceps clicking
in anticipation ofas if the moment, freeze-burned by accuracies--of
could be thawed open into life again
by gladnesses, by rectitude -- no, no -- by the sinewy efforts at
sincerity -- can't you feel it gliding round you,
mutating, yielding the effort-filled phrases of your talk to air,
compounding, stemming them, honeying-open the sheerest

innuendoes till

the rightness seems to root, in the air, in the compact indoor sky,
and the rest, all round, feels like desert, falls away,
and you have the sensation of muscular timeliness,and you feel the calligraphic in you reach out like a soul
into the midst of others, in conversation,
gloved by desire, into the tiny carnage
of opinionsSo dizzy. Life buzzing beneath me
though my feeling says the hive is gone, queen gone,
the continuum continuing beneath, busy, earnest, in con-
versation. Shall I prepare. Shall I put this further
to the left, shall I move the light, the point-of-view, the shades are
drawn, to cast a glow resembling disappearance, slightly red,
will that fix it, will that make clear the task, the trellised ongoingness
and all these tiny purposes, these parables, this marketplace
of tightening truths?
Oh knit me that am crumpled dust,
the heap is all dispersed. Knit me that am. Say therefore. Say
philosophy and mean by that the pane.
Let us look out again. The yellow sky.
With black leaves rearranging it
The Errancy. Copyright © by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

"A recent profile of Graham in The New Yorker places her in the lineage of Eliot, Bishop, and Ashbery rather than William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley, but it might be posited that her capacious talent now draws on all these examples: the bodiless virtuosity of formal mastery has met the flexibility and passion of the mind and eye at liberty. The Errancy is what might be called, among the Quakers, a leading: Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place." — Harvard Review

"Few poets address the predicament of the postmodern soul as rigorously or as intelligently as Graham .. ..'an icy thing, even in its fluency,' this masterful collection takes risks in naming 'the small hole inside I'm supposed to love' and coldly, bleakly and dazzlingly succeeds." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"For two decades now, Graham's poems have been exercising the major muscles in the throat of our language. If you haven't been listening, I'm telling you there's a new music out there, and this book, The Errancy, is its finest performance." — The Boston Book Review

From the Publisher

For two decades now, graham's poems have been exercising the major muscles in the throat of our language. If you haven't been listening, I'm telling you there's a new music out there, and this book, The Errancy, is its finest performance.

Boston Book Review

A recent profile of Graham in The New Yorker places her in the lineage of Eliot, Bishop, and Ashbery rather than William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley, but it might be posited that her capacious talent now draws on all these examples: the bodiless virtuosity of formal mastery has met the flexibility and passion of the mind and eye at liberty. The Errancy is what might be called, among the quakers, a leading: Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place.

Harvard Review

Few poets address the predicament of the postmodern soul as rigorously or as intelligently as Graham. Without a dominant (or at least coherently integrated) set of cultural beliefs to unpack, rebel against or discard, Graham is forced into "errancy," a condition that finds her wandering "the path without the crumbs" as she attempts to fashion a language capable of speaking truth amid "the cadaverous swallowings of the dream of reason gone." It is a complicated project that has evolved over five previous volumes (culled in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dream of the Unified Field, 1995) and requires an often oblique approach. Substituting cascading syntax for worn-out metaphors, Graham piles phrase upon phrase, describing not so much our world but our turns of mind as we proceed without a theory of what we're doing. "The Guardian Angel of Not Feeling" concludes: "bring hand to liptheredo it again, again,/ blazon the mouth, rub in, exaggerate/ the little halo forms, around the teeth,/ the mirror on that wall shows you the thing,/ furious, votive/ oh look, the tiny heart/ mouthing and mouthing its crisp inaudible black zeros out." This and other poems named for guardian angelse.g., "The Guardian Angel of Point-of-View," "The Guardian Angel of Private Life"reclaim a viable space for private experience from a world obsessed with spectacle. The "I," which has all but disappeared from experimental poetry, resurfaces in nearly all of these 38 poems but cannot be fully identified with their speaker, becoming "merely a specimen/ incomplete as such, overendowed," and not an occasion for religious or personal reflection. "An icy thing, even in its fluency," this masterful collection takes risks in naming "the small hole inside I'm supposed to love" and coldly, bleakly and dazzlingly succeeds. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This collection, Graham's seventh (including 1995's retrospective Dream of the Unified Field, LJ 10/15/95), continues this prominent poet's exploration of the very limits of language and meaning. Her style is as bewitching as ever, but these are perhaps her most difficult poems to date; no longer satisfied with nature or myth or love as her subject, she reinterprets them as the veils of an ever-elusive super-reality: "we are far into the cave of seem," as she says in "Flood." The titles of these poems, with their many occurrences of angels and aubades, almost lead us to expect verses in the manner of Robert Bly, but they are instances of Graham's sleight-of-hand; these poems are a unified journey into the most terrifying conundrums of ontology. Despite the relative accessibility of some poemse.g., "Willow in Spring Wind," "In the Pasture," "Recovered from the Storm"Graham's work is apt to be quite challenging for all but the most dedicated readers of poetry; still, Graham is one of the most important living poets, and her control of her craft is undisputed. Recommended.Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.

Library Journal