Failure, Philip Schultz
by Floyd Collins

from The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2008

Philip Schultz writes a poetry of embattled celebration, avidly embracing an aesthetic composing equal portions of dross and ether. Who else among contemporary poets harbors a guardian angel named Stein, a shabbily pinioned seraph whose breath reeks of pickled herring, a self-proclaimed "flatulent Talmudist / seized with Solomonic wisdom"? Schultz's fifth volume, Living in the Past (2004), broods on his childhood spent in Rochester, New York, during the fifties. In a ramshackle two-story dwelling on Cuba Place, a street teeming with immigrants from Eastern Europe—Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Russians—Schultz weathers the year leading up to his bar mitzvah amid the foibles of his extended family, including a grandmother who conjures dybbuks and golems. Meanwhile, his eccentric uncle keeps a cache of girlie magazines and a rhyming dictionary in the attic; he squanders his long, sexless evenings sifting static for voices on a police radio.

Obviously, Schultz is not tender of the family pieties, especially with regard to the household in which he grew up. Indeed, a wry and sometimes raucous sense of humor prevents his poetry from lapsing into the solipsistic maunderings so characteristic of the Confessional mode. To write of one's personal obsessions and abiding passions, particularly in light of an irretrievable past, requires a measure of courage and dignity that Schultz possesses in abundance. An ineffable yearning, a desire for what Wordsworth described as "something ever about to be," lies at the heart of his latest volume, somewhat disingenuously entitled Failure (2007). The opening poem, "It's Sunday Morning in Early November," announces the collection's central argument in seemingly offhand yet compelling accents:

            It's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
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.

Inasmuch as each knows exactly "how to fall," the leaves gather to themselves a breathing sentience; however, it is the locution hypnotic that endows these decasyllabic lines with a cadenced luster. Falling things in a season of fall, the leaves flare and plummet to their dark address in a profusion of color, sure tokens of winter's slow encroachment on the living. Thus the poet in late middle age declares his willingness to divest himself of all beauties past and devote himself to an uncertain future.

The celebratory aspects of Schultz's aesthetic come to the fore in "The Magic Kingdom," a Sunday morning idyll wherein his young sons and aging dogs explore margins of sand washed by long combers: "my old dogs limp behind me up the beach / as my sons scour the ocher sand like archivists / seeking the day's quota of mystery." What only an hour before was a cold and passionate dawn acquires the organic richness of "ripening light," and "shy jewels of sea glass" peer like benign embers never to be extinguished by any tide. In line after line, Schultz earnestly engages the poet's work, which involves the hierarchies of naming:

I never thought I'd have so much to give up;
that the view from this side of my life
would be so precious. Bless
these filaments of sea grass,
this chorus of piping plovers
and bickering wrens, each mile
these arthritic animals tag behind,
sniffing tire ruts, frothy craters of rotting driftwood,
lacy seaweed and scuttling crabs,
after something deliciously foul. . .

Here Schultz skillfully exploits rhythm, syntax, and diction to telling effect. He enlivens select images both visual and aural through assonance and consonance; moreover, the repetition of plosives in "piping plovers" proves singularly evocative as his language accumulates a density of surface and texture commensurate to this marvelous seascape. Nevertheless, Schultz remains ever mindful of "the soul that expects to be despised / and cast out, the unforgiving ghosts / I visit late at night when only God is awake." Even as the boys revel in the "chill light," a tone oddly plangent enters the speaker's voice. Aware that his sons are hostages to fate, an unbidden joy prompts him to conclude with a benediction of sorts:

Most of all bless these boys
shivering in the chill light,
their fragile smallness and strange intransigence,
so curious and shining. Bless
their believing happiness will make them happy;
that the ocean is magical, a kingdom
where we go to be human,
and gratefu1.

Some critics deem Schultz an essentially elegiac poet, a mode that often includes elements genuinely celebratory. In "My Wife," a poem about the death of his youthful brother-in-law, Schultz begins with a disarmingly simple anecdote: "My wife's younger brother took heroin and died / in the bed he slept in as a boy across / the hall from the one she slept in as a girl." Rhetorically speaking, these unadorned lines seem to have few designs on the reader. Schultz proceeds to relate how the brother kept a truck garden of marijuana in his childhood home in order to support his heroin habit: "He sold the pot he grew in their basement. / She'd leave work to take him to the clinic / but she understood she had to save herself." Once again, the lines savor pure narrative, a strategy that sets up the reader for an abrupt counterstroke. In the sixth stanza, the poet reveals more about the estranged addict than would seem possible to convey in so short a passage:

He was a sweet young man who looked,
when we took him on his thirtieth birthday
to a restaurant filled with beautiful women,
as if he wanted to live forever.

Here a life, ostensibly cynical and even hopeless, is momentarily revived by the heat, light, and conviviality of its surroundings. Schultz captures the numinous moment with a clarity that belies the austere contours of the poem's plot and structure. But this birthday celebration leads inevitably to the grave:

                                      The kids and I
wandered around in a city of the dead
and I could see her down the long avenues,
pulling weeds and staring at the ground.

The speaker and his children roam the "long avenues" of the necropolis but see no ledger stones, crosses, six-pointed stars, obelisks, or hand-carved angels along the way. The narrator focuses instead on the woman who is sister, wife, and mother, weeding a grave as sedulously as one might tend a bed of poppies. Indeed, Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, is the genius loci of all cemeteries. But at the close of the poem, the speaker's wife reasserts her place as the presiding, albeit restless, spirit of the household:

At night she walks in the dark downstairs.
I know what she wants, to go to him the way
she goes to our boys when they're frightened,
to place herself between him and the pain.

"My Wife" emerges as an allegory of childhood wish fulfillment, a time when the dead were merely sleeping.

An unequivocal joie de vivre animates "Uncle Sigmund," as Schultz relates the ordeals of a relative who survived the upheavals of Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War. Uncle Sigmund bursts upon the poem with his signature gait:

hops down the hall and up the stairs
on his one leg and crutches,
boisterous blue eyes
and wild gray beard, a character
out of Chekhov, or better yet, Gogol—
"The streets are crazy with Russians!"
he laughs, "quick, get me a scotch!"
collapsing into our armchair.

Notwithstanding the lumber in his stride, the old Jew steps nimbly into the trochaic inversion that begins line one, then follows Schultz's taut iambs "up the stairs." His "boisterous" blue eyes seem to brim a rare water, an image confirming the poet's facility with color motifs. And what better way to quell one's trepidation about Russians than a healthy dollop of scotch? His largesse undiminished despite years as a fugitive and eventual detainee in a Soviet gulag, Uncle Sigmund regales his family with tales that both harrow and astonish:

                                         Gifts
for the boys, kisses for his niece,
my wife, more stories of
freezing boxcars rattling
from Poland to Uzbekistan,
his feverish first taste of chocolate
in a Russian work camp—Cossacks,
Nazis, Polish guerillas, everyone
looking for Jews in the quivering
entrails of train compartments. . . .

In this deftly enjambed passage, one listens for rails singing down to the last spike-riveted section, steel wheels groaning to an inevitable halt in the tortuous syllables of "Uzbekistan." Despite the fact that each boxcar disgorges human misery, the reader readily gleans Uncle Sigmund's lust to partake of life in the midst of suffering through the fricatives and aspirates of "feverish first taste of chocolate." The ultimate survivor, Schultz's protagonist is a man equally intimate with the "currency of sorrow / and fetid black bread." A solemn covenant with the human lot enables Uncle Sigmund to strike a tenuous balance between joy and grief, opting always for a delight in living:

the ecstasy of his ferocious lullaby
to all the motherless souls
wandering the wilderness
of his fiery dreams, yes,
the eloquent indomitable
momentum of his one-legged
cavalcade of prodigal visions.

Schultz invests "Uncle Sigmund" with his own untrammeled capacity for celebration.

Still, Schultz is a poet who, by his own reckoning, actively seeks "the voluptuousness of grief." Indeed, Failure derives its title from the spectral presence of Schultz's father, a Russian immigrant who literally worked himself to death before the age of sixty. An elliptical narrative manipulating a continual parallel between past and present, "The Summer People" likens the plight of a Guatemalan carpenter to that of the poet's father. As the poem begins, a seemingly unaccountable rift has occurred between Schultz and his former employee:

Santos, a strong, friendly man,
who built my wife's sculpture studio,
fixed everything I couldn't,
looked angry in town last week.

The speaker is a poet pursuing his craft ever closer to mastery; moreover, he can afford to build a studio so that his wife can indulge her zeal for the plastic arts. On the other hand, Santos has yet to achieve his goals:

In Guatemala, after working all day,
Santos studied to be an architect.
He suffered big dreams, his wife said.

Like Schultz's father, whose vending-machine enterprise failed, the Latino lives out a legacy of loss in a land reputedly abounding with opportunity: "every day now, men from Guatemala, Ecuador, / and Mexico line up at the railroad station. / They know that they're despised." Here the poet presents a shrewd ambiguity: have Santos's dreams failed to come to fruition because he strives to assimilate at the expense of his labor, or does the daily round of toil prevent the carpenter from learning the language that would facilitate success? A resonant image reveals that Schultz has not forgotten his own origins: "When I'm tired, / my father's accent scrapes my tongue / like a scythe." Earlier on, he affirms his empathy with the downtrodden, citing the demeanor of a prosperous uncle:

When my uncle Joe showed me the shotgun
he kept by the cash register
to scare the black migrants
who bought his overpriced beer and cold cuts
in his grocery outside of Rochester, N.Y.,
his eyes blazed like emerald suns.
It's impossible to forget those eyes.

Ringing up a purchase or loading a red-jacketed, brass-gleaming shotgun shell seems the same to Uncle Joe. The poet closes by portraying Santos as the living embodiment of embattled celebration:

My wife's studio is magnificent.
We'd hear him up there in the dark,
hammering and singing, as if
he were the happiest man alive.

Perhaps Schultz is at his irrepressible finest in "The Adventures of 78 Charles Street," a gala rant about living and writing in a building in the West Village of New York City from the mid-seventies to the present. Expansive in both tone and content, the poem begins with an image of quiescent illumination: "For thirty-two years Patricia Parmelee's yellow light / has burned all night / in her kitchen down the hall in 2E." Indeed, the speaker lingers over his fellow tenant's name, rolling each syllable like a berry on his tongue: "Patricia—I love to say her name—Par-me-lee! / knows where, across the street, / Hart Crane wrote 'The Bridge.'" However, 78 Charles Street is not exclusively a writers' enclave, and Schultz launches into a reminiscence about the various zanies who have shared his place of residence:

       Archie McGee in 5W, one silver-cross earring,
a tidal wave of dyed black hair,
jingling motorcycle boots, Jesus boogying
on each enraged oiled bicep, screaming
four flights down at me for asking
the opera singer across the courtyard to pack it in,
"This is N.Y.C., shithead, where fat people sing while fucking!"

The Whitmanesque catalogue of Archie McGee's attributes offers dazzlements of the eye and delectations of the ear at once memorable and fulsome. From the half chime of "earring" and "jingling" to the repetition oflong and short u sounds in "boots" and "boogying," Schultz manipulates vowels with an unerring panache. Furthermore, the liquid nasals in "oiled bicep" intimate that the chain-bedecked biker could benefit from a bath. No less volatile is the elderly Millie Kelterborn, who "dropped dead face first / into her gin-spiked oatmeal" after shouting obscenities out her fifth-floor window. But for sheer ebullience, nothing surpasses these lines celebrating the ephemeral quality of life in a vast metropolis:

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,
and hangovers, stoned and insanely sober,
arm in arm and solo, under the big skyline,
traffic whizzing by, through
indefatigable sunshine, snow and rain,
listening to The Stones, Monk, Springsteen, and Beethoven. . . .

The unrelenting ferment of Schultz's passing street scene casts individuals and objects into sharp relief, endowing all and each with a singular liveliness. Transience inheres in the human condition, but the poet indulges in no ubi sunt sniveling. Rather, he is "overcome with love for everything so quickly fading," an everything that coalesces into the orbed radiance of a solitary bulb:

dear Patricia's light,
night after night,
burning with all the others,
on 78 Charles Street.

A long poem divided into four main parts, each with a variable number of subsections, "The Wandering Wingless" comprises almost half of Failure. Schultz utilizes a spare line throughout, and thematically the whole resembles colorful threads braided together to form an intricate narrative pattern that defies strict chronology. The speaker walks dogs in New York City's Washington Square Park for a living:

I carry keys, multicolored,
versatile, and revelatory,
to my clients' apartments,
where I wander around
their enormous rooms,
sit at their elongated tables,
read in their book-lined studies
under the peachy glow
of their scalloped sconces. . . .

These opening lines evoke a mood that permeates "The Wandering Wingless," a sense of alienation in the midst of a familiar yet unobtainable plenitude. Only in the presence of dogs does Schultz relinquish all cynicism regarding the gap between the haves and have-nots of an affluent society. In a brief vignette, the speaker hearkens back to his eighth birthday:

I awoke to see
tied to our front gate,
my first teacher, a Collie mix,
blue-amethyst eyes,
powdery caramel mane,
all golden and delirious,
and Dad, beside her,
beaming.

Schultz fixes the canine's blue gaze with a lapidary cut; eschewing aureate dictions, he nevertheless resorts to the richly synaesthetic adjective "caramel" in describing the collie's mane. But the juxtaposition of the smiling father on this morning of celebration is more important than any linguistic artistry. Throughout the poem, the unhappy patriarch moves from one entrepreneurial scheme to the next, until his heart fails due to excessive strain:

I understood Dad
was sick of working
fourteen hours a day,
of selling himself
one lie at a time. . . .

Remembering his father's unwonted jocularity in proximity to the beautiful pet, the poet conceives an extravagant affection for dogs:

Find thyself a teacher,
the Talmud says.

I have. A kingdom
of benign,
furry teachers.

But much that remains of "The Wandering Wingless" might be more aptly called embattled than celebratory. After his father's untimely death, the speaker secures employment replacing the roof on the DuPont building

                     along
with twelve black men,
not one of whom
had ever worked with
a white boy before.

The labor involves hefting one-hundred-pound bags of gravel shingles and mucking about with pails of boiling hot pitch. Still in high school, the poet spends his lunch breaks reading about the European revolutions of 1848. His only friend on the job is both curious and mystified:

On the roof, Little,
who was big and carried a
l00-lb. bag of gravel shingles
on each shoulder, asked
why I gave a shit
about what went on
in eighteen-fucking-forty-fucking-eight.
I wanted, I said,
to understand why
fifty revolutions failed
around the world
all at the same time,
to understand something
about perfect absolute incompatible failure.

The ultimate triumph of the bourgeoisie over the working class proves a dominant leitmotif throughout the volume. Although Schultz's ear for black dialect is a bit suspect at times, Little nevertheless emerges as the most memorable African-American character in a lengthy poetic narrative since Henry David in Galway Kinnell's "The Last River":

                       Yo got pimple
dreams and pimple ideeas.
Also, yo got black pain.
It aint kilt yo yet
but it will. Black pain
an pimple ideeas
kilt yo every time.

The most compelling yet disturbing segments of "The Wandering Wingless" involve the events of the present decade. The speaker recalls waking in the psychiatric ward of St. Vincent's Hospital, where a nickel's worth of electricity has just been shot through his brain:

Exactly one year ago,
last September 11,
a brilliant burst
of electroshock waves
zinged through
the surprised ether
of my brain's pink elasticity.

Terse and vibrant, these lines correspond to the phenomenon so vividly depicted. Because of the extraordinary emergency, the physician turns the speaker out into the streets almost immediately. He wanders about benumbed in the apocalyptic aftermath of 9/11:

a rat looked up
contemptuously
as if to mock
human misery,
as a man holding
a burning briefcase,
like a souvenir of
my hallucination
ran past screaming.

Eventually the speaker comes to gaze on the pit of concrete rubble and heat-twisted alloy and wonder at the ineluctable sadness that grips all parts of the city. By the end of "The Wandering Wingless," Schultz derives solace only from the company of the disenfranchised, specifically a homeless chemistry PhD named Joey and his dog, Niagara. As a disdainful jogger hurries past the threesome, every canine in the park gives throat to a barbaric yawp more primordial than Whitman's:

                   And, yes,
I must join this song of the tribe,
this great song of loneliness,
sing at the top of my voice,
my head lifted toward the heavens,
beyond which swirls
the New York night,
each of us, alone and together,
singing ever louder,
until there is nothing left
but the sound of our voices
and the eloquent silence of the stars.

Plaintive and jubilant, the melody dissolves everything between itself and the firmament, underscoring Schultz's remarkable capacity for empathy with his fellow creatures. Here as elsewhere, his resolve to exult, even in the face of desolation and adversity, makes Failure seem an inappropriate title for this splendid book.

About the Author
Floyd Collins has recently published a critical study, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity, with the University of Delaware Press. His poem "Santa Anna's Spurs" won the 2007 Allen Tate Award from the Sewanee Review and will be leading off the fall issue. Other poems of his appear in the Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and West Branch.

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