Customer Reviews

Failure

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

This work is very touching, deep, serious, human and beautiful.
The stories and characters are greatly depicted.
We all have failures. This book is a success in taking them up.
I am very impressed by it!!

Philip Schultz, Failure (Harcourt, 2007)

I got about a third of the way through Failure then misplaced the book. Once I found it and started again, I found I liked it better, thus adding more evidence to my hypothesis that the current emotions of the reader affect what s/he feels about any given book. Which sounds like an optimistic beginning to this review, but I didn't like it that much better.

Narrative poetry is a tricky thing, especially given that poetry is where that old chestnut "show, don't tell" does the majority of its heavy lifting. Sometimes the line gets blurry enough that you can read a passage either way. The poets who tread this particular line tend to be more inconsistent than most, for obvious reasons; I can't think of anyone who always manages to stay on the "show" side. Then again, such things may be judgment calls. I'll leave it to you:

"Patricia says, the Righteous Brothers and I
moved in Thanksgiving, 1977,
and immediately began looking for
that ever-loving feeling, rejoicing
at being a citizen of the ever-clanging future,
all of us walking up Perry Street,
down West Tenth, around Bleecker,
along the Hudson, with dogs, girlfriends..."
("The Adventures of 78 Charles Street")

It looks like a pretty clear-cut example of "tell" to me. But, as usual, one can find a just-about-equal number of examples of "show", most of which are in the back half of the book (which can also be used as evidence that the emotions of the reader have nothing to do with his or her feelings about the book), which is comprised of the long poem "The Wandering Wingless". It's worth reading, but it probably won't be the best book you pick up this year. ***

Apart from Les Murray's works (see, "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow") I haven't felt so moved by poetry since I read Carver's collected works.

In the late 1970's I lived in Manhattan as astruggling actress and went to a poetry reading done by the (then) struggling poet. I fell in love with his first work, 'Like Wings.' I think I have memorized every single one of the poems in that book! Schultz was then teaching at NYU, and I was fortunate enough to sit in with some of his students in their class, and even got to meet such poets as Galway Kinnel and others. I eventually left New York and went on to become a licensed mental health counselor, and I always wondered what had happened to him. So, my Google search turned up not only his newest book, 'failure' but the fact that he had just won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I am not surprised. I got to watch him work, slaving over a typewriter with a stubby cigar in his mouth, and when he laughed it was so hard and so contagious that he would send me into gales of hysterical laughter myself. Thanks to my love of poetry and thanks to Schultz, I started to write poetry years later and have had three of my poems published. I am no poet, though, compared to Schultz. I hold him in the highest regard, and I defy anyone to read his work and not come away with a sense of joy and sadness that intermingle and twine around the heart and stay there forever. Rennie Manning

I was disappointed in this book. Because it won the pulitzer with Robert Hass, who is an excellent poet, I thought this book would similarly be good. It isn't. Far from it. If you read some sample poems inside the book here in amazon and like it, I assure you those are the best ones; the rest are middling. Let me explain why I think so: Schultz is cliche; he says nothing new and says it in ways that do not only border on cloying but inhabit cloyingness. He isn't as "honest" as people would have you believe; the poems come off to me as very contrived, it's as if he wants the poems to "appear honest" or "truthful" or "evoking emotions from the reader" but ultimately he fails. There are books whose honesty feels natural, and so we say, "wow, that book made me cry," or "what a harrowing story." Schultz tries to get that effect, but it turns out affected. I realize now that the reason this is so is, Schultz just doesn't have the skill. When I think of skill, I think of Robert Hass, Mary Oliver, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart, Carolyn Forche. When you read those poets, you're in the room of the poem and you're so sure of the existence of the room you don't question it. With Schultz, you always question the room; it's almost always falling down on you. The long poem in this book, "The Wandering Wingless" is the most badly executed long poem I have ever read. And this is no exaggeration. Schultz doesn't know how to write a long poem; the order is unconvincing, the juxtapositions are weak; just bad. I truly wanted to enjoy this book, but it is just so egregiously inept I just want to warn others.

still reading it but it's so accessible to a general reader and so full of life.

Failure: poems, by Philip Schultz is definitely a good read. It's more autobiographical than what I thought it would be. I had thought it would be simply more abstract about the subject of failure, but instead it reads largely as a narrative. It's extremely good; I highly recommend it.