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    Failure: Poems
    Failure: Poems
    Failure: Poems
    Ebook118 pages57 minutes

    Failure: Poems

    By Philip Schultz

    4/5

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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
    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

    title page

    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

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