Failure
by Philip Schultz
Summary
Failure is Philip Schultz's sixth collection, published by Harcourt in 2007: thirty poems in 106 pages, most of them short, followed by one long sequence that takes up half the book. Schultz, born in Rochester, New York, in 1945, writes here about his father, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, who tried one unsuccessful business after another while Schultz was growing up and died early, leaving his wife and son with nothing.
The collection opens warmly rather than in grief. Poems such as "My Wife," "Husband," "My Dog," "The Summer People," and "Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954" give short, direct accounts of marriage, fatherhood, dogs, beaches, and a Rochester boyhood, and even the elegies find reasons to be glad. Other titles reach further: "Isaac Babel Visits My Dreams" summons the Russian Jewish writer into the poet's sleep, and "Grief," "The Absent," and the title poem "Failure" begin to turn the book toward its real weight. Then comes "The Wandering Wingless," fifty eight numbered segments over fifty four pages, which wanders through the virtues of dogs and dog walking, the terror of September 11 in New York City, the poet's own depression and his young adulthood in the 1970s, and settles at last on his unstable, suicidal father and the question of why he believed in and loved nothing. Publishers Weekly noted that this reverses the usual shape of a poetry book: Schultz starts glad and ends in regret and fear.
The verse is plain free verse, clear to the point of flatness, and nobody reads Schultz for verbal fireworks. The comparison Publishers Weekly reached for was Philip Booth, though Schultz's immigrant Jewish background and his attachment to New York set him far from Booth's rural Maine. What the plainness buys is trust: these are sorrows and joys a reader recognizes from their own life, framed without decoration. The book's tenderness, extended to a father who failed at everything, is what it is for. Anyone who has had to forgive a parent will find it a short book that stays.
Historical Context & Significance
The 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry went to two books at once. The board named Failure joint winner with Robert Hass's Time and Materials, which had already taken the 2007 National Book Award for Poetry, and the single finalist was Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976 to 2006. Schultz had been publishing for three decades, since Like Wings (1978) was a National Book Award nominee, but by 2008 he was better known as a teacher, the founder and director of The Writers Studio in New York, a private school for fiction and poetry writing.
The prize gave Schultz a wider public, and he used it to tell a story he had kept quiet. My Dyslexia (Norton, 2011) is his memoir of a condition he learned he had only when his own son was diagnosed, and of a childhood spent in what he calls the Dummy Class. Later books include The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems (2010). He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, the sculptor Monica Banks.