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    The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems
    The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems
    The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems
    Ebook246 pages2 hours

    The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems

    By Philip Schultz

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    About this ebook

    Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of failure and loss, in his previous book particularly, make him a poet for our times, a poet who can write “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair.” Yet he remains oddly undaunted: “sometimes, late at night / we, my happiness and I, reminisce / lifelong antagonists / enjoying each other’s company.”


    The God of Loneliness, a major collection of Schultz’s work, includes poems from his five books (Like Wings, Deep Within the Ravine, The Holy Worm of Praise, Living in the Past, Failure) and fourteen new poems. It is a volume to cherish, from “one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest” (Tony Hoagland), and it will be an essential addition to the history of American poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 8, 2010
    ISBN9780547487342
    The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems
    Author

    Philip Schultz

    PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.

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      Book preview

      The God of Loneliness - Philip Schultz

      [Image]

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Table of Contents

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      From Like Wings 1978

      For the Wandering Jews

      The Artist & His Mother: After Arshile Gorky

      The Stranger in Old Photos

      Letter from Jake: August 1964

      What I Don't Want

      The Elevator

      For the Moose

      San Francisco Remembered

      Onionskin: For the New Year

      The Gift

      Like Wings

      For My Father

      From Deep Within the Ravine 1984

      Ode to Desire

      The View

      I'm Not Complaining

      Mrs. Applebaum's Sunday Dance Class

      My Smile

      Pumpernickel

      For My Mother

      Balance

      Guide to the Perplexed

      Fifth Avenue in Early Spring

      The Music

      Lines to a Jewish Cossack: For Isaac Babel

      My Guardian Angel Stein

      In Exile

      Ode

      Personal History

      The Quality

      From The Holy Worm of Praise 2002

      The Holy Worm of Praise

      Courtship According to My Guardian Angel Stein

      Flying Dogs

      On First Hearing of Your Conception

      The Monologue

      Sick

      The Inside and The Outside

      The Answering Machine

      Ars Poetica

      Personally

      Prison Doctor

      The Dead

      The Displaced

      The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem

      I Remember

      Apartment Sale

      Nomads

      Stories

      Darwin, Sweeping

      The Eight-Mile Bike Ride

      The Silence

      The Dalai Lama

      To William Dickey

      Stein, Good-bye

      The dark between

      Mr. Parsky

      Souls Over Harlem

      From Living in the Past 2004

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

      16

      18

      20

      21

      23

      24

      27

      32

      33

      35

      36

      37

      38

      44

      50

      51

      53

      54

      64

      65

      66

      67

      68

      69

      70

      71

      73

      79

      From Failure 2007

      It's Sunday Morning in Early November

      Talking to Ourselves

      Specimen

      The Summer People

      The Magic Kingdom

      Grief

      The Garden

      Why

      My Wife

      What I Like and Don't Like

      Blunt

      The Adventures of 78 Charles Street

      The Truth

      The One Truth

      Failure

      New Poems

      Things I Have to Do Today

      The Reasonable Houses of Osborne Lane

      Attention

      The Opening

      Aging Egoists

      The Fourth of July

      Free Mercy

      Stein, in Produce

      The Joke

      Yom Kippur

      The Sweet Undertaste

      The God of Loneliness

      Bleecker Street

      The Big Sleep

      Acknowledgments

      Index of Titles and First Lines

      Copyright © 2010 by Philip Schultz

      All rights reserved

      For information about permission to reproduce

      selections from this book, write to Permissions,

      Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

      215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

      www.hmhbooks.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Schultz, Philip.

      The God of loneliness : selected and new poems / Philip Schultz.

      p. cm.

      Includes index.

      ISBN 978-0-547-24965-0

      I. Title.

      PS3569.C5533G63 2010

      811'.54—dc22 2009041895

      Book design by Melissa Lotfy

      Printed in the United States of America

      DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      To my wife, Monica,

      and my sons, Eli and Augie

      Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance,

      men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think

      about such things.

      —PASCAL

      From Like Wings 1978

      For the Wandering Jews

      This room is reserved for wandering Jews.

      Around me, in other rooms, suitcases whine

      like animals shut up for the night.

      My guardian angel, Stein, fears sleeping twice

      in the same bed. Constancy brings Cossacks in the dark, he thinks.

      You don't explain fear to fear. Despair has no ears, but teeth.

      In the next room I hear a woman's laughter

      & press my hand to the wall. Car lights burn

      my flesh to a glass transparency.

      My father was born in Novo-Nikolayevka, Ekaterinoslav Guberniya.

      Like him, I wear my forehead high, have quick eyes, a belly laugh.

      Miles unfold in the palm of my hand.

      Across some thousand backyards his stone

      roots him to the earth like a stake. Alone in bed,

      I feel his blood wander through my veins.

      As a boy I would spend whole nights at the fair

      running up the fun house's spinning barrel toward its magical top,

      where I believed I would be beyond harm, at last.

      How I would break my body to be free of it,

      night after night, all summer long, this boy climbing

      the sky's turning side, against all odds,

      as though to be one with time,

      going always somewhere where no one had been before,

      my arms banging at my sides like wings.

      The Artist & His Mother: After Arshile Gorky

      Such statuesque immobility; here we have it:

      the world of form. Colors muted, a quality

      of masks with fine high brows. Light & its absence.

      Alchemy. The hands are unfinished. But what

      could they hold? The transitory bliss

      of enduring wonder? Mother, Mother & Son;

      here we have it: consanguinity. The darkness

      inside color. Space. In the beginning there was space.

      It held nothing. What could it hold? Time?

      The continuum? Mother & Son, forms suspended

      in color. Silence. Her apron a cloud

      of stillness swallowing her whole. Her eyes

      roots of a darker dimension. Absence. Here we have it:

      the world of absence. Light holds them in place.

      The pulse of time is felt under the flesh,

      the flesh of color. Continuum. You feel

      such immensity. The anger of form. The woman

      locked in the Mother; the man in the Son; the Son

      in the Mother. Their hands do not touch. What

      could they touch? Here we have it: the world

      of gift. The gift too terrible to return. But

      how could it be returned? In the beginning

      there was anger. Mother & Son. The islands of time.

      The passion to continue. Such statuesque immobility.

      The hands, the hands cannot be finished.

      The Stranger in Old Photos

      You see him over my uncle Al's left shoulder

      eating corn at a Sunday picnic & that's him

      behind my parents on a boardwalk in Atlantic City

      smiling out of focus like a rejected suitor

      & he's the milkman slouched frozen crossing our old street

      ten years before color & his is the face above mine in Times Square

      blurring into the crowd like a movie extra's

      & a darkness in his eyes as if he knew his face would outlast him

      & he's tired of living on the periphery of our occasions.

      These strangers at bus stops, sleepwalkers

      caught forever turning a corner—I always wondered who they were

      between photos when they weren't posing & if they mattered.

      It's three this morning, a traffic light blinks yellow yellow

      & in my window my face slips into the emptiness between glares.

      We are strangers in our own photos. Our strangeness has no source.

      Letter from Jake: August 1964

      Never mind that uncle business my name is Jake.

      In college they try every thing there is this girl

      at Wegmans supermarket who is to busy to join

      protests who is right takes more than me

      to figure out. Cohen died last Monday. He owned

      the deli on Joseph Ave. The democrat running

      for supervisor is a Puerto Rican. Don't ask me why.

      You are young and have to take things

      as they come. Some day you will find your

      real niche. I wrote poetry to but this July

      I'm a stagehand 40 years. I've seen every movie

      Paramount made believe me. Now theres a union

      but I remember when you was happy just to work.

      Meantime have a ball. Yrs truly now has kidney

      trouble plus diabetic condition, heart murmur,

      cataract in rt eye. Yr mother Lillian is well to.

      Cohen was just 58. We went to school together. Loews

      is closing in October. If you ask me the last

      five rows was no good for cinemascope.

      Yrs truly,

      Jake

      What I Don't Want

      Die slouched & undecided in a girlie show

      watching the lambs eat the wolves.

      Sit talking Kafka this Kafka that

      (that bugfaced sword-swallower!).

      Play deaf & dumb in Chicago.

      Chew the fat of the land while looking

      up somebody's leg for the right word, ever again.

      Cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a bus

      listening to the guy ahead say: Doesn't it look

      like a G-string all lit up, Fran!

      Die in the house where I was born,

      a happy man.

      I want, Lord, to die with Neruda & Chaplin

      naked & sinful

      eating cheese so old it sings on my tongue.

      The Elevator

      This elevator lugged Teddy Roosevelt

      when they both were new. Now I count stars

      in the skylight as it jerks into the sudden light

      down hallways & hug groceries like a thief his loot

      when it stops in the dark between floors. Often

      it howls climbing, sings falling. Someone

      on the fifth floor loves chicken fat & Brahms;

      the worst soprano in Cambridge lives on the third.

      The man above me taps goodnight on his floor but

      doesn't know me in the street. The girl down the hall

      drops her head if I smile in the elevator; she knows

      I watch her run to work each morning from my window.

      After dinner I stand there with my hands folded behind

      as I imagine Mr. Roosevelt stood, watching the lights

      come on along the spine that is Massachusetts Avenue at night.

      For the Moose

      Tania must place her hands on my skull,

      one above the other, to better hear the truth.

      We are discussing the art of poetry. Eight

      years old, she chews her lip & squints. Who's

      my moose? she

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