If you’re a poet, you’ve likely heard the one-liner: issuing a book of poetry in America is like throwing a rose petal into the Grand Canyon. As evidence of the sorry truth of this remark, let me offer an anecdote. My local Borders bookstore — remember Borders? — was having an everything-must-go sale. The chain had gone bankrupt, pushed out of business by Amazon and e-books. By the front door stood a sale cart of “hurt books.” Yet these books seemed not so much hurt as positively traumatized. They’d just been marked down yet again — all sales final, of course. The title that grabbed my attention was Philip Schultz’s then most-recent collection of poems, the baldly entitled Failure. The top of its spine and dust jacket had been crushed in, and the cover was festooned with stickers, one announcing—not that the buyer needed to be informed of this—that it was a hurt book. This particular sticker also featured a sour-faced emoji. Another sticker noted that the volume was going for a dollar, though that figure was crossed out and yet another sticker informed me that the book could now be had for fifty cents. And finally, there was that embossed silver seal that all serious American poets covet, though it was almost peeled off—Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. That august endorsement, inches away from the sticker with the icky-faced emoji, pretty much said it all. Although I already owned a copy of Failure, I bought the hurt book version anyway, and not because I had the intention of somehow repairing the mangled spine and peeling off the stickers so that I could pass the book on to a friend or a student. No, I thought of the book as grim found art: this was the rose petal after it had smacked into the canyon floor. And these ironies were compounded if you were familiar with the book—its title poem has one of the most militantly forlorn beginnings that I know of: “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.”
But I’ve recently had the occasion to read Philip Schultz’s poetry again, both his 2010 new and selected volume and his splendid new collection, Luxury.When I look at my beaten-up copy of Failure in light of this rereading, I’m reminded not of the marginalization of American poetry —for who needs to be reminded of this yet again? — but of Elizabeth Bishop’s storied fish, that consummate survivor, with his “five big hooks/grown firmly in his mouth …. / Like medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering …” The persona Schultz has formed over the decades is part Borscht Belt, part existential hero; he’s scrappy, a little bit battered, but decidedly unbowed. Schultz is in his seventies now and his new book is a notable addition to a body of work that is durable, compelling and instructive in the way that Horace hoped that poetry could be. He has had his portion of success — in addition to the Pulitzer, he can claim a good number of grants and awards. But Schultz has always seemed to fly under the radar, lumped into a loosely affiliated school of male Jewish poets born roughly between the 1920s and the 1940s, writers whose intentions are autobiographical and whose subjects are (in no particular order) class conflict, memory, dysfunctional families, the intricacies of assimilation, and what used to called the American Scene. Schultz’s writing sometimes recalls that of Gerald Stern (but without Stern’s Whitmanic shtick), sometimes that of Philip Levine (though without Levine’s rage and indignation), sometimes David Ignatow (though without Ignatow’s Tough-Old-Bird persona), and sometimes Robert Pinsky (though without Pinsky’s sometimes-dizzying pyrotechnics.) Schultz distinguishes himself from his peers thanks to an unaffected emotional directness, a kind of realism and common sense, and that rarest of things among poets of an autobiographical bent, something very like humility. And perhaps that latter quality explains why he is not as well-known as he should be: Luxury is a book of gentle self-reckonings, not of self-display.
And it is above all a bittersweet book, where, as one poem puts it, “the present remains uninhabitable/ the past unforgiving of the harm it’s seen.” Although Schultz guardedly celebrates the wisdom that comes with aging, and the gratifications of a life well-lived — his wife and children, beach walks with his dog, colorful characters encountered at the IGA–he remains a fundamentally elegiac poet. The new collection contains haunted threnodies for fellow poets Michael S. Harper and Robert Long, and his harried, overworked father and long-suffering mother, who have been the subjects of so many of Schultz’s poems, make their requisite (and rueful) appearances yet again. As he writes of them in the title poem,
The woman
from whom I ordered Dad’s stone
insisted Rest in Peace
was more fitting than In Last Relief.
Yes,
but neither mother nor I
believed
that either
really fit.
The title poem of Luxury is forty pages long, and it is the best thing Schultz has ever done. It’s a sprawling, multi-sectioned poetic diary, reminiscent of works such as MacNeice’s Autumn Journaland Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem. The spaciousness of a long sequence allows Schultz to range widely — there are childhood memories, an account of a visit to Cuba, and more of those dog walks. But the poem is ultimately a meditation on suicide, interweaving a narrative of the mental decline of a school friend who took his own life with troubled homages to the likes of Celan and Hemingway. And of course the poet’s father appears as well, who Schultz comes to see as a de facto suicide. Schultz calls upon the philosophers to find perspective on all of this, offering maxims from Kierkegaard, Montaigne, Camus, and Unamuno, among others. But they offer him only cold comfort. The spirit of the poem is querulous, and for the most part inconsolable:
Sometimes
nothing, not philosophy
or religon,
art or knowledge,
is prudent,
provocative,
or magnanimous enough
to provide illumination.
Sustenance.
Sometimes
bewilderment
is a lush, unsolvable labyrinth
leading deeper
into ambiguity.
But the sustenance Schultz so craves does indeed arrive, if only provisionally. It is grounded in the quotidian, but its consolations are no less resonant for that. The poem’s concluding section is quietly masterful, and deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
Now,
from across the house
the booming voice of my sixteen-year-old son
announces his belief
in the law and right of succession,
the beginning of his reign.
Already too big for this house,
it conspires with a future
that is his alone.
My wife,
a sculptor,
looks up from her porcelain cakes
arrayed over the living room table,
which, even
with dead birds and beetles
and tiny people writhing on top
are festive enough.
While I,
standing in the kitchen,
pondering questions about guilt,
satisfaction and lunch,
remember leaning against
the sycamore in our front yard
twenty-five years ago,
trying to imagine a family
inside the house I just bought,
a future prolific enough
to contain squawking blackbirds,
flying deer
and a notion
as mysterious and improbable,
as fragrant
and luxurious
as happiness.
Philip Larkin famously said that “happiness writes white.” Although Schultz’s poems are not without their Larkinesque moments — those opening lines of “Failure” are a perfect example — he has chosen to see Larkin’s remark for what it is: as flippant cant. But also, as the above passage attests, Schultz is no Pollyanna: happiness is a luxury that most of us pay dearly for, but over the years Schultz has amassed the poetic capital — or mortgage equity — to allow him afford it. And for this the reader can be grateful.
[Published January 2, 2018. 80 pages, $26.95 hardcover]