Failure-Philip Schultz

I decided to read Failure Poems by Philip Schultz, published in 2007. I chose it because I tend to be drawn to poems that are passionate and filled with emotion, ones that make a reader feel. Even if the emotions are those of intense failure, they still are about a feeling and I get a great deal from them. As it turned out, this book of poems was about a range of “failures”, every day failures that are entirely relatable to the regret of death to fear, even the fear of losing new found success.
Each poem reveals a little about Schultz’s life, both past and present. He is married, in his early sixties, and has two young sons. He has known sadness, depression, death, regret, but even in these failure poems, the reader understands that his sons and wife have, in a way, saved him from some of that.
The poem Talking to Ourselves (p. 2) is one that surprised me and made me think about the theme of the book because on its own it does not seem like a poem of failure. In two sentences per person Schultz tells the stories of four different people and himself talking to themselves or just saying a word or two out loud and what those utterances meant. The context of each is where the failure happens, but he writes the poem so that each word is heavy with regret or confusion. He obviously had a troubled relationship with his own father, and in the poem The One Truth (pp. 46-7) he says: “is this what failure is,/to end where he began,/no one but a deaf dumb God/to welcome him back,/his fists pounding at the gate” (47). It feels here like the whole book has been working up to that moment and from there everything is a bit clearer.
In terms of format, Schultz doesn’t do anything too formal in his poems. Most are written in full sentences; it is where he chooses to break the sentences into lines that emphasizes his voice. The poem My Dog (p. 17) is about the death of Schultz’s dog and it’s written in five stanzas of three lines each. Two of the stanzas end in the middle of a sentence and the sentence is continued on in the next one. I think this was done purposefully to illustrate his inability at first to let go of his dog and in that way he used the format of the poem to convey more than his words could.
The poems aren’t particularly long or complex, but they say a great deal about Schultz as a person. A young writer might look at his silences and his ability to say a lot and convey great emotion in just a few words.