Philip Schultz
Philip Schultz
Philip Schultzis an American poet, and the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including The God of Loneliness, Selected and New Poems; Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Living in the Past; and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine Viking Penguin, 1984), which was the Lamont Poetry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
careful fast great love painfully selective slow
I'm a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I'm very careful - very selective about what I read because I don't read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.
knows
When a child knows that he or she is dyslexic, that it's the way their brain is programmed, and it's not their fault, that makes all the difference in the world.
anxiety art escape great imagination life
My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life... I had to live in my head... art was a way of making myself feel better.
assume clarity safely
If I get the idea, and I get some clarity on how I feel about that idea, then I can safely assume I'll find the right words. I do have that confidence.
accustomed grown
I'd grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who, if fallible and unworthy, had nevertheless managed to do one thing well enough to get recognition for it.
dream art mind
Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.
father struggle long
My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.
mean thinking secret
I wrote poetry in a secretive way, I think, a secret from myself, I mean. I wrote it because it gave me great pleasure to do so and because it relieved the ever-building pressure of the demanding world around me. It's always served me as a way of appraising, and controlling overwhelming experiences. But this need, and desire, was always in conflict with my need to "survive."
powerful wanted
Happiness is a powerful thing. It freed me to do what I always wanted to do.
revenge father may
I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.
emotional artist passionate
My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.
revenge real two
There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.
inspiration ideas kind
My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.
art powerful struggle
Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.