On the master of failure

Paul Perry, writing in the Irish Times, provides American poet Philip Schultz with a winning epithet:

He is held up as a laureate of failure—“If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair”— and many of his poems revolve around a sense of disappointment and loss.

But that’s not all. Schultz stands in, apparently, for a failed nation:

In this way he speaks, as championed by Tony Hoagland and, even more surprisingly, by the former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, for a people who have seen a notional sense of the American dream turned into a more realistic nightmare.

True? Maybe. Or maybe some Irish ire has infected this reviewer, who is more convincing when discussing Schultz’s poetry itself. Unlike Hemingway, who had technique but no subject, Schultz has subject but no technique, Perry writes:

His lines are slack and without music. Most of the poems are written in an open form, but unlike a poet such as CK Williams – also a Jewish writer with an urban sensibility – Schultz’s poems lack the cadence and pattern of the mesmerising Williams’s….This is poetry as speech rather than song.