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
father names people
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.
emotional expression order
Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".
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.
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 father may
I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.
powerful wanted
Happiness is a powerful thing. It freed me to do what I always wanted to do.
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.
dream art mind
Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.
along chapters deeper examining focused overall poetry sign word
With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
family fiction gap married poetry school starting stopped work
There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.