Failure™ Magazine

Philip Schultz: “Failure”

The Failure Interview.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Life

What is the difference between a “failure” and a “nobody”?
[Laughs]. Well, according to the title poem failures are unforgettable. The speaker [in “Failure”] says that his father was incredibly successful at failure. He was a genius at failure. And it’s true. At my father’s funeral people were talking about all the businesses my father had failed at. I heard about things I never knew about. I was hearing about a man I didn’t know. In that way these people were proud of him and proud of their association with him. I mean—the ones who weren’t bitter that he still owed them money [laughs].

Can you be both a failure and a nobody?
Yes…. You know there’s a wonderful Emily Dickinson poem about nobodies [“I’m nobody! Who are you?”]. Not all failures, I assume, are unforgettable. It’s almost an existential question: Is anybody ever really a nobody? On some level is there any life so petty and so worthless that that person is a nobody? I like to argue against that.

In the end, do you feel like you did justice to this material?
I’ve never been happier with a book of poems. There isn’t a lot of metaphor or simile because of the clarity I wanted and because of the large story I’m telling. Whatever the world makes of it I think I am ahead of the game. In writing this book I not only wrote about my father. I looked at the part of myself that feels like a failure. I think it’s impossible to go through the experience without feeling like you are [a failure] too.

In your mind, what would make this book a success?
It’s a book of poems so the success is almost always going to be a modest one. But one writes poetry for the satisfaction, for the sense that maybe some of the poems will last. Maybe some of these will be about something that is of interest to others.

Are you obsessed with failure? Or success?
Well, I don’t think I’m obsessed with success [laughs]. I think this was a very personal quest—to face down something in myself and to make myself not afraid of it anymore. Whenever you are obsessed with something it owns you, and I think the idea of writing a poem is to own it. You can’t make a poem out of a subject that owns you, so I feel pretty good about it.

Where do you go from here with your work?
My next book, which I’ve handed in [“The Amount of Us”/Fall ‘09], will be selections from all my other books and some new poems. I’m now very involved with politics and history—what’s going on with this country in the world. One of the subjects in the [upcoming] book is the failure in Iraq. But the next book will be much less personal. The subject [of failure] was an obsession but I feel I worked it through to the other end.

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