Failure: Poems
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About this ebook
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
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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Reviews for Failure
25 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This 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.
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Book preview
Failure - Philip Schultz
Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
It’s Sunday Morning in Early November
Talking to Ourselves
Specimen
The Summer People
The Magic Kingdom
Louse Point
The Idea of California
Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954
Grief
The Absent
My Dog
The Garden
Exquisite with Agony
Bronze Crowd: After Magdalena Abakanowicz
Why
My Wife
Husband
Uncle Sigmund
The Amount of Us
What I Like and Don’t Like
Blunt
Shellac
The Adventures of 78 Charles Street
Isaac Babel Visits My Dreams
Dance Performance
The Traffic
The Truth
The One Truth
Failure
The Wandering Wingless
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2007 by Philip Schultz
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Selection from Leaving the Door Open
in New and Collected Poems, 1970-1985 by David Ignatow, © and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Selection from Cap Ferrat
in Area Code 212 by Frederick Seidel, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Schultz, Philip.
Failure: poems/Philip Schultz.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.C5533F35 2007
811'.54—dc22 2007009165
ISBN 978-0-15-101526-9 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-15-60312-88 paperback
eISBN 978-0-547-53937-9
v2.0518
For my son Augie,
a success story.
One madman laughs at another,
and they each give enjoyment to one another.
If you watch closely, you will see
that the maddest gets the biggest laugh.
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