THE PULITZER PRIZES 2008 in POETRY
Philip Schultz is a prize-winner writer. In 2008 he awarded with Pulitzer for “Failure” (Harcourt). Schultz is a writing and teacher of fiction literature. He founded and direct The Writers Studio (go to:
http://www.writerstudio.com/pages/), a school for creative writing. I’m like very much his poems. See below for two picks on the Web publications.
Listen Philip Schultz read “Failure”: click here (
http://img.slate.com/media/73/Failure%20by%20Philip%20Schultz.wma)
“Failure”
To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
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.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn't belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.
Reference to “Failure”, Slate Magazine in:
http://www.slate.com/id/2164575/Why
by Philip Schultz
August 27, 2007 in The New Yorker
is this man sitting here weeping;
Why; Restaurants; Birthdays;
Age; Childhood; Baseball is this man sitting here weeping
in this swanky restaurant
on his sixty-first birthday, because
his fear grows stronger each year,
because he’s still the boy running
all out to first base, believing
getting there means everything,
because of the spiders climbing
the sycamore outside his house
this morning, the elegance of
a civilization free of delusion,
because of the boyish faces
of the five dead soldiers on TV,
the stoic curiosity in their eyes,
their belief in the righteousness
of sacrifice, because innocence
is the darkest place in the universe,
because of the Iraqis on their hands
and knees looking for a bloody button,
a bitten fingernail, evidence of
their stolen significance, because
of the primitive architecture
of his dreams, the brutal egoism
of his ignorance, because he believes
in deliverance, the purity of sorrow,
the sanctity of truth, because of
the original human faces of his wife
and two boys smiling at him across
this glittering table, because of
their passion for commemoration,
their certainty that goodness continues,
because of the spiders clinging to
the elegance of each moment, because
getting there still means everything?
Reference to “Why”: The New Yorker in:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/08/27/070827po_poem_schultzFor an interview with Philip Schultz (publish in Of(f) Course Journal in 2000 go to:
http://www.albany.edu/offcourse/winter00/schultzinterview.html 
In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician's spontaneous phrasing Sc harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses. It's all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot.
- Most famous of Kerouac Poems Book.
