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
doubted
I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.
held until
I didn't learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.
failure great life theme
Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.
bigger family immigrant jews russian stories top
I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.
automated boarding easier harder home online passes people schedules sounds ticket traveling
I know it sounds strange to say, but the very technologies that have made traveling easier for most people - GPS, automated ticket machines, online schedules and ticketing, boarding passes you can print out at home - have actually made things harder for me.
poet teacher time
As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.
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.
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.
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.