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The Errancy
By Jorie Graham
Ecco Press
109 pp.; $22
From her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton University Press, 1980), to her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of a Unified Field: Selected Poems (Ecco, 1996), Jorie Graham has drawn the attention of the poetry establishment's opinion makers. (Her honors include being elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and directing the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.) A prophetess of postmodernism and a cult figure to thousands of young coffeehouse philosophers, she has also gained a degree of celebrity rarely attained by contemporary poets.
Graham's new book, The Errancy, will not, however, add to the luster of her reputation. What electrified the literary world 17 years ago as an inventive approach to the English language has turned into a dialect all Graham's own. Her poetry draws its form primarily from stuttering, dreamlike speech patterns, which she conveys with heavy use of parenthesis, quotation marks, hyphenated phrasal nouns, and "mysterious" pronouns ("thing," "it," etc.). Graham has always italicized words and phrases the reliability of which she doubted or the mystery of which she wished to enhance. But in The Errancy, her italics are cliches. They refer to the canon of Graham's own poetry more than anything else.
Here's an example of several of these effects at once: "the place of disappearance has disappeared, / it cannot be recovered, his eyes darting over the moving waters, / and how a life cannot be lived therefore, as there is no place, / in which the possibility of shapelessness begins to rave, / and the soldiers awakening, of course, to the blazing not-there."
There's not much story to follow in The Errancy. Judging from the title, one might expect reference to some epic mistake—say, the Fall. But Graham is referring instead to what she perceives as a lack of essence at the heart of our experience of the world, confounding the desire for certainty and closure. This intention is signified by an epigraph from Sir Thomas Wyatt ("Since in a net I seek to hold the wind") and allusions to such elements as "the Emperor's coat." In the notes at the end of the book, she identifies the meaning of the title with its etymological root errare, "to wander."
Much like her close friend John Ashbery, Graham depends on the flight and trajectory of thought to carry the reader through the poem. The reading of or listening to a poem should push one back upon the soft soil of consciousness, Graham wrote in her introduction to Best American Poetry 1990. There are specific events, objects, and people mentioned in this kind of poetry—even direct quotes from elsewhere in literature—but the reader comes upon them as one comes upon items for sale at a flea market: many very specific but miscellaneous items.
The fact that Graham is more unrelentingly serious than others who write in this vein also works against her. Part of the attraction of surrealism and its offshoots is a certain levity, a distrust of lofty pretensions. In poetry, Ashbery and James Tate use humor to great advantage. In art, there's Rene Magritte's C'est ne pas une pipe. Without such leavening, Graham's Errancy seems merely self-indulgent. It might be too late in the century to pass this off.
—Aaron Belz
Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen
By Jervis Anderson
HarperCollins
418 pp.; $30
Reading this engaging story of a pioneering civil-rights leader was like old home week for me. In the early 1940s, Bayard Rustin and I were field secretaries of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for), and we both plunged into civil rights because of our religious pacifist convictions, he a Quaker and I a Church of the Brethren theological student. From 1941 to 1945, he roved the country full-time; I did my FOR work along with my college and seminary studies. Rustin and I were also active in the War Registers League, the NAACP, and the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE), founded by him and James Farmer.
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