By: centraljersey.com
That’s something the poet Philip Schultz tries to instill in his students. Good poetry may start with a flash of inspiration, but the flash only goes so far, says the Pulitzer Prize-winner, who will be the headlining poet at the 13th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival on Friday, Sept. 24, in Stockton. The poet has to write and rewrite until he knows what he wants to say, he says, and then write and rewrite some more.
"It is endless revision," he says. "You would think that if I was doing something so long I’d know how to do it. But there is a shorter poem I’m going to read, I have 130 to 135 drafts of it. I just assume that when I write that I don’t really have any idea of what I want to talk about, so I give myself the time I need and sometimes it is months.
"Lightning is struck, but it is very seldom. Writing poetry is a longprocess of discovery."
Mr. Schultz was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1945, the son of a Russian immigrant father whose failures formed the center of the poet’sPulitzer-winning collection Failure. It is a book in which the joys anddifficulties of life are written about "with greater conversational sweetness than any other American poet one can readily call to mind," according to Booklist.
His latest book, The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems, issued in April, was described by the poet Carol Muske-Dukes as "Whitmanesque, great in spirit, alive with chutzpah, talky, darkly funny," a collection that "provide(s) a history of an utterly engaging original American voice."
Mr. Schultz says he comes from "humble stock, from the mean-streets of Rochester." Those modest beginnings inform the language used in the poems.
"I want to be understood," he says. "I don’t want readers to have to have a Latin or Greek dictionary by their side. I don’t write for critics or even for other poets. Of course, nothing is more flattering than beingappreciated for my work by my colleagues, but I don’t care what the critics make of it."
He says he has a "handful of concerns or obsessions and I write about them in as clear a way as I can, in the way I understood Hemingway, that I understood Salinger and William Carlos Williams and Frost."
That doesn’t mean, however, that the poems should be complex and nuanced.
"I don’t want the language to be a barrier to understanding," he says. "If I am going to struggle to work this hard I want to be understandable."
He described his poem, "Failure" – in which he describes his father’s repeated shortcomings with something resembling pride – as one of the most gratifying in his long career.
"I was 60 before I could say it or understand it in those terms, and with the simplicity in the language that I wanted," he says. "It was not easy to say, not for me, and when I finally said it in a way that people could understand, the biggest reward was that people related to it."
"Failure" is a touchstone poem for another reason, he says. He didn’t know how to read until he was 11 or 12, because he was dyslexic (he is working on a memoir about it). At the same time, he was creative and needed an artistic outlet, especially after his father died when the poet was 18. At first he drew and painted "as a way not to be dumb." He eventually started writing to help cope.
"Artists are people who feel that, whether it is music art or writing, they have a need to understand themselves, to release the pressure," he says.
That’s one reason he believes he can accept failure as part of life.
"I can accept failure – I expect it – which is why I can write 100 drafts," he says with a laugh. "It is all failure. Life is failure and then you die. The idea of success is such an empty one. It is so sensational, the one you see in the magazines. But when you look at the understory of that – we are all works in progress."
Mr. Schultz, who founded and teaches at The Writer’s Studio, said that students often have difficulty with the idea that failure is a part of thewriting process.
"It is hard to get them to work very hard on poems," he says. "They feel a sense of defeat – everything else in life is designed to be immediate – art isn’t."
The poet – or the musician or the painter – has to take his or her work the "extra mile or 20."
"A lot of it goes into finding the right way to phrase what you want to say," he says. "You go in to see if there are generalities, awkwardness in phrasing or syntax, and sometimes I find an underlying idea that I haven’t thought through.
