Philip Schultz on Unavoidable Mortality

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Philip Schultz about his new poetry collection, Enormous Morning.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Some of the things in your collection have to do with these really specific memories of childhood, with philosophers, with our eventual mortality and also our ignorance of it when we’re young, or looking at the mortality of stars on TV, or what we’re doing in the moment feels so important. And then you move back to present day with your family sleeping upstairs, and then this ephemeral sense. And you mentioned there’s material in this collection you didn’t want to touch. So, what about this did you not really want to touch?

Philip Schultz: Well, my mortality. I mean, I’m writing about how death isn’t something you just see in movies and on TV. It’s real. And as you get to a certain age, it becomes very real, super real. It becomes a reality. You get ailments. I just came back from a physical therapy session because my balance is off, and I guess I’m dealing to a certain extent with all of that. I had written a couple years ago a memoir that also deals with my writing school and my writing method and how that evolved. And once that was done and I was finished going around and giving readings and talking about it, I really enjoyed more than I can remember previously taking some time off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t writing poetry, because every now and then I was but I wasn’t putting a book together. It was almost the first time that I can remember that I wasn’t slavishly working on a book with an idea of a book, and I was enjoying it, and my editor just reminded me that we hadn’t published in a while. The last poetry book came out in 2018 – Luxury – and that maybe I should start thinking about giving her another one. So, until that moment, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, and I realized it, and it’s one of the reasons that I went back to that drawer where I had a number of poems in various drafts that I avoided religiously. And I found this one poem and some others, and I started to put a book together. But it was so interesting. It’s really the first time that I wasn’t working on a manuscript. Sometimes when you work on poems, you work on poems with the idea of a manuscript. Does it fit into a manuscript? And I seem to have always a long poem at the end, I was going to say whether I like to or not.

***

Philip Schultz is the author of nine poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. Some of his other works include Like Wings, winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature; Deep within the Ravine awarded the Academy of American Poets Lamont prize; The Holy Worm of Praise Living in the Past and The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems. He is the founder and director of The Writers Studio and has been teaching creative writing since 1971. His new collection is Enormous Morning.