Failure: a Smashing Success

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	• Failure Philip Schultz Harcourt, 2007 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Failure: a Smashing Success

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 all 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!

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Welcome back Carver

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.

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"

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