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Failure: Poems
Failure: Poems
Failure: Poems
Ebook116 pages58 minutes

Failure: Poems

By Philip Schultz

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About this ebook

A Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection of “heartbreaking tenderness” (Gerald Stern).
 
A driven immigrant father; an old poet; Isaac Babel in the author’s dreams: Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too—family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, the terrors of 9/11, New York City in the 1970s (“when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything”)—and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb collection, “full of slashing language, good rhythms [and] surprises” (Norman Mailer).
 
“Philip Schultz’s poems have long since earned their own place in American poetry. His stylistic trademarks are his great emotional directness and his intelligent haranguing—of god, the reader, and himself. He is one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest.” —Tony Hoagland
LanguageEnglish
PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
Release dateApr 6, 2009
ISBN9780547539379
Failure: Poems
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Author

Philip Schultz

PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.

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  • 4/5
    This book is a mixed bag of poems that won the Pulitzer recently. The strongest poems are in the middle. The first several poems are formulaic, where a detail mentioned in the first few lines returns at the end with a twist. The last poem is long--nearly 1/2 the book--and is interesting but uneven. The narrator is a dog walker (someone that people hire to walk their dogs) who lives in post 9-11 New York. The poem explores his troubled relationship with his father, other people, dogs, and himself. The poems in between these are strong lyric poems that are enjoyable reading.

    1 person found this helpful

Book preview

Failure - Philip Schultz

ERASMUS

It’s Sunday Morning in Early November

and there are a lot of leaves already.

I could rake and get a head start.

The boys’ summer toys need to be put

in the basement. I could clean it out

or fix the broken storm window.

When Eli gets home from Sunday school,

I could take him fishing. I don’t fish

but I could learn to. I could show him

how much fun it is. We don’t do as much

as we used to do. And my wife, there’s

so much I haven’t told her lately,

about how quickly my soul is aging,

how it feels like a basement I keep filling

with everything I’m tired of surviving.

I could take a walk with my wife and try

to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to.

Or I could read all those books piling up

about the beginning of the end of understanding . . .

Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning,

the changing colors, the hypnotic light.

I could sit by the window watching the leaves,

which seem to know exactly how to fall

from one moment to the next. Or I could lose

everything and have to begin over again.

Talking to Ourselves

A woman in my doctor’s office last week

couldn’t stop talking about Niagara Falls,

the difference between dog and deer ticks,

how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie

with her at night in the summer grass, singing

Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only

the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,

stopped under our lopsided maple to explain

how his wife of sixty years died last month

of Alzheimer’s. I stood there, listening to

his longing reach across the darkness with

each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself

why he’d come into the kitchen. I understood

he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,

but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father’s vending business was failing,

he’d talk to himself while driving, his lips

silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.

He didn’t care that I was there, listening,

what he was saying was too important.

Too important, I hear myself saying

in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,

and my wife looks up from her reading

and asks, What’s that you said?

Specimen

I turned sixty in Paris last year.

We stayed at the Lutetia,

where the Gestapo headquartered

during the war, my wife, two boys, and me,

and several old Vietnamese ladies

carrying poodles with diamond collars.

Once my father caught a man

stealing cigarettes out of one

of his vending machines.

He didn’t stop choking him

until the pool hall stunk of excrement

and the body dropped to the floor

like a judgment.

When I was last in Paris

I was dirt poor, hiding

from the Vietnam War.

One night, in an old church,

I considered taking my life.

I didn’t know how to be so young

and not belong anywhere, stuck

among so many perplexing melodies.

I loved the low white buildings,

the ingratiating colors, the ancient light.

We couldn’t afford such luxury.

It was a matter of pride.

My father died bankrupt one week

before his sixtieth birthday.

I didn’t expect to have a family;

I didn’t expect happiness.

At the Lutetia everyone

dressed themselves like specimens

they’d loved all their lives.

Everyone floated down

red velvet hallways

like scintillating music

you hear only once or twice.

Driving home, my father said,

"Let anyone steal from you

and you’re not fit to live."

I sat there, sliced by traffic lights,

not belonging to what he said.

I belonged to a scintillating

and perplexing music

I didn’t

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