Failure [Hardcover]

Philip Schultz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2007

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, 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 new collection from one of America’s great poets.

One called him a nobody.

No, I said, he was a failure.

You can’t remember

a nobody’s name, that’s why

they’re called nobodies.

Failures are unforgettable.

—from "FAILURE"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The careful, compassionate sixth outing from Schultz (Living in the Past) reverses the plot many poetry books imply. Rather than show an emotional problem (in the first poems) followed by its gradual solution, Schultz begins with warm, even heartwarming, short depictions of love, marriage, fatherhood, and mourning, in which even the elegies find reasons to love life. Schultz addresses the deceased poet David Ignatow: "I didn't go/ to your funeral, but, late at night, I/ bathe in the beautiful ashes of your words." As a reader moves through the volume, and especially in "The Wandering Wingless"- the sequence whose 58 segments and 54 pages conclude the book\-Schultz's gladness gives way to regret and grim fear. Devoted (like several of Schultz's short poems) to the virtues of dogs and of dog-ownership, and to the horrors of September 11, "Wingless" meanders through the poet's own depression and his young adult life before settling on his continuing grief for his unstable, suicidal father. "Why/ did Dad own, believe in,/ admit to, understand/ and love nothing?" It is a question no poet could answer, though Schultz sounds brave, and invites sympathy, as he tries. The clear, even flat, free verse suggests Philip Booth, though Schultz's Jewish immigrant heritage, and his attachment to New York City, place him far from Booth's usual rural terrain. Few readers will find his language especially varied or inventive; many, however, could see their own travails in his plainly framed, consistently articulated sorrows and joys.
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Review

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FAILURE

 

"Philip Schultz’s language reminds me of such modern masters as Isaac Rosenberg and Hart Crane. It’s one thing I’ve always admired in his poetry; that and a heartbreaking tenderness that goes beyond mere pity and that is so present in Failure. It’s as if he bears our pain." --Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award

"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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (November 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151015260
• ISBN-13: 978-0151015269
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Failure: a Smashing Success, November 7, 2007

By 

Jaime Reyes (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Failure (Hardcover)

Let me say from the get-go that the risky title of this book works better than I could ever have expected. Rather than being a failure, Philip Schultz's fifth book-length collection - his sixth if you count his superb chapbook, "My Guardian Angel Stein" (1986) - illuminates the dim recesses of what it means to be a failure. But this new book does so in a brilliantly successful way. Take Schultz's poems about his hapless father.

In previous collections Schultz's portraits of his dad abound with plenty of pathos. In the title poem of his new book, Schultz makes the distinction between a nobody - "You can't remember / a nobody's name, that's why / they're called nobodies" - and a true failure: "Failures are unforgettable." Schultz then proceeds to catalogue and commemorate his father's business failures: "a parking lot that raised geese, / a motel that raffled honeymoons, / a bowling alley with roving mariachis." I find Samuel Schultz's business schemes as hilarious as anything I've heard in the annals of down-and-outers. More than ever before, Schultz's remembrance of things past takes on epic perspective. The poems in "Failure" will hardly ever fail to succeed in bringing you to tears, or such gales of laughter you might as well be listening to one of the greatest stand-up tragi-comic artists of our time.

The book's cover photo of a bent nail that's been hammered into wood badly - unsuccessfully - suggests the offbeat - bent out of shape? - funny-sad Eastern European sensibility of someone like Isaac Babel, who stated, "We're all failed sentences. . . / one big lopsided family of relative clauses / who agree on nothing, whose only subject is / how we came to be us, despite our passion for / knowledge, especially while we were still alive." That last zinger of a line crackles with dark humor. The only other American writer alive who can approach Schultz in terms of his sheer wizened wisdom is Philip Roth, who in "Exit Ghost," might just as well be addressing his guardian angel and saying, like his namesake Schultz, "Stein, goodbye."

I won't take time to list my faves here; to do so would take another two hundred words. Suffice it to say that the three-pager, "The Adventures of Charles Street," is what Yeats might call a "monument of the soul's magnificence." Like Yeats, Schultz has gotten better and better with every book. Now, in his early 60s, in "Charles Street" he looks back at his salad days in Greenwich Village. Living next door to a cast of characters at least as vivid, with names as wondrous as any in "The Adventures of Augie March," Schultz is "overcome with love for everything so quickly fading." If this line sounds sentimental, Schultz is unafraid of risking sentiment, of speaking out plainly, boldly describing his feelings. In this way he flies in the face of much current poetry that tries to "keep a stiff upper lip" formalistically or to play language games experimentally.

Previous books by Schultz have included long poems: In "Like Wings" (1978) there was the Mid-American tapestry, "Main Streets." In "Deep within the Ravine" (1984) there was the title poem, a dozen meditations inspired by Hans Hofmann. In "The Holy Worm of Praise" (2003) there was the 20-plus page elegy about Ralph Dickey. "Living in the Past" (2004) was essentially one 81-part poem about growing up in Rochester, NY.

Only in this spanking new book, "Failure," does Schultz completely outdo himself with a final long poem. To be sure, Schultz, like Whitman and Stevens - like any major writer - keeps coming back to what he knows and does best, his poetic storehouse. But slightly more than half of "Failure" is devoted to a 54-page tour de force, truly a new thing, "The Wandering Wingless." Steeped as I am in Schultz's work, I've never been wrapped up in anything quite like this python of a poem. Somewhere between Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and Lowell's accounts of "Waking in the Blue" in Payne Whitney, "The Wandering Wingless" is about a dog walker who has lost his leash, his connection to life, after September 11th. Unlike most of his "personal" poems, "The Wandering Wingless" uses 9/11, a gaggle of dog owners, and a downtrodden African-American in Washington Square Park to dive into politics, the great revolutionary year of 1848, characters like Count Joseph Radetsky, Pope Pius IX, and Adolphe Blanqui. Schultz's "Dad" resurfaces, but "Wingless" wanders on paths Schultz hasn't explored, much less with a pack of ever-loving canines. Overall, "Wingless" is a brand-new, timeless triumph that confirms Schultz's stature as a major poet at the peak of his powers, one of the very best of his generation.

I might as well borrow some of the dust-jacket copy from his publisher to call Schultz "one of America's great poets." This is not puffery. "Failure" deserves a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and/or a National Book Critics Circle Award this year.

To use Pound's spelling: Philip Schultz is grrrreat!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Failure, December 21, 2008

By 

Gary W. Melhart - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Failure (Hardcover)

My determination for liking a poem is whether it makes me see or feel a subject in a new or unique way. Philip Shultz succeeds in doing this in the majority of his offerings for this collection--the ironic title not withstanding. There is also a coziness in many of the pieces that settles nicely over one as the poems are read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fail Faster, October 11, 2009

By 

Reader and Writer "Chris" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Failure (Hardcover)

Ok, how not to start with the end of the line from Beckett. Failure is a beautiful collection of poems. The first ones sneak up on you, like the flakes of a season's first snow, dislked but then stunning in their magic. Failure creeps into all aspects of Schultz's life, in his relationships, in his thoughts, in his actions. Nothing is good enough it seems, but can that in itself be beauty? Can that be good enough? "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." Schultz plays with simple words and simple phrases, striving for straight emotions but ending up peripherally skirting them -- but this gives the poems strength by way of the contrast of phraseology and semantic content. The final poem is a long meditation on dog walking and life and death. "I don't know how to proceed,/ I said, I never knew/ because/ it hurts so bad.//Yes it does, he said,/ Yes, indeed." Tinged by melancholy and loss, the poems are shining gems. Don't fail to get a copy.