Poet's voice series welcomes Philip Schultz
| Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz will give a poetry reading as part of the Poet’s Voice series at Greenwich Library on Sunday, Sept. 21, at 3:00 p.m. Mr. Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry, including his most recent, Failure, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. MORE INFORMATION: "Failure"Click here to listen to Philip Schultz read this poem.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. The rabbi who read a stock eulogy about a man who didn't belong to or believe in anything was both a failure and a nobody. He failed to imagine the son and wife of the dead man being shamed by each word. To understand that not believing in or belonging to anything demanded a kind of faith and buoyancy. An uncle, counting on his fingers my father's business failures— a parking lot that raised geese, a motel that raffled honeymoons, a bowling alley with roving mariachis— failed to love and honor his brother, who showed him how to whistle under covers, steal apples with his right or left hand. Indeed, my father was comical. His watches pinched, he tripped on his pant cuffs and snored loudly in movies, where his weariness overcame him finally. He didn't believe in: savings insurance newspapers vegetables good or evil human frailty history or God. Our family avoided us, fearing boils. I left town but failed to get away. ALSO: by Philip Schultzt’s a cold Sunday February morning and I’m one of eight men waiting for the doors of Toys R Us to open in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island. We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited three hours for a store in Manhattan to disappoint me. The first today, bundled in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid when the others came, stamping boots and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons will leap into my arms, remember this morning all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy, just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says from the back of the line. “He plays these games in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it, he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint. They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness. Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.” The others seem not to know what to do with their hands, tuck them under their arms, or let them hang, naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember what they held, the promises they made? I know exactly when my boys will be old enough for war. Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target, because it’s what men do for their sons. PLEASE ALSO SEE THE OTHER GREENWICH POST NEWS LINK: The following are today's released reports: POSSESSION
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