Failure Book

A Killer and Authoritative Review, or "Our Current Dystopia"


First: thoughts on poetry criticisms:

After I read a book, and after I've written the review, I often go read the reviews of others who have read the book I just finished. I am surprised by the number of people who say, "I don't know how to critique poetry," or some such nonsense. They say it to devalue their own thoughts, ideas, and opinions and that troubles me. Who am I to critique poetry? A human being. And it's true, everybody's a critic.


I understand the problems with my argument, and I will address that later.


How do I judge poetry? The criteria:


I. If a poem inspires me to write poetry

II. If a poem makes me want to go back and reread the poem again right away, then later, then again even later to my wife

III. If a poem makes me want to write down a line or add it the goodreads quote database, Then THEN the poem is truly good.


Maybe the intelligentsia in their ivory towers disagree with me. (Where are these ivory towers anyway? And how can I apply to get in? Also, why hasn't PETA destroyed them yet, being made out of ivory and all?...)


In truth, I understand this. We live in an age where people with no knowledge of a topic can pawn themselves off as experts. This is not new. What's new is the accessibility to propagate these views. And maybe my criteria for judging poetry adds to that accessibility, but a poet who has failed to connect with his audience has failed as a poet.


My criteria cannot be too horrific since a one Pulitzer Prize Board agreed with me...


This book:Failure, was fantastic. Ninety-five percent of the pages matched up with all three of my criteria. More than that, it was not meaningless rambling. For every poem I reminded myself of the title of the book, then the title of the poem. I LOVE poems that connect to their titles. (See Marie Ponsot's "Bliss and Grief" or Billy Collins' "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House.")


I've asked myself, what if I cast off my individualistic criteria in favor of an ivory tower/ authoritative review? I'm sure the book didn't win the Pulitzer because members of the board liked to quote it to their spouses... though it probably didn't hurt.


The Killer Authoritative Review of Failure by Philip Shultz


Though the world is in constant flux, each generation can only see a few frames of the changes encompassed. Society does not see the world as it changes. Society sees the realization of those changes, but has already distanced itself from the society it was. Humans have grown up acclimated to a new world unknowingly living out the fears of their fore-fathers to the extent that they don't even recognize the fears ever existed - this new dystopia being the new normal.


Every new generation has a new set of justifiable fears that do not even matter. Why? We are the change, and we are all failures. We live in a fallen world, there's no getting around that. Even if a functional society does not believe in a literal forbidden fruit being tasted by a literal human, surely that society sees the need for rule of law. A lifetime of good decisions can be undone by one bad one, trust can be lost in an instant, and we all have evil thoughts we would hate to be public knowledge.


Would Orwell be shocked and saddened at how language is used and manipulated? Would he be surprised that in his home country the surveillance camera to human ratio is roughly one camera for every fourteen people - and much higher in London? (see: this article) How would Aldous Huxley feel about the many drugs we pass out today? Would they say their dystopias are already here? What freedoms did we have then that we have so willingly given up now, whatever the reason or pretext? The real question is, would people 50-100 years before Orwell and Huxley say that their world was dystopic? My reading of Philip Shultz's Failure inclined me to think, yes they would. They would because each successive generation views the younger one as corrupt and falling away - when in truth the fall happened much earlier. Because of this - or human nature - it's just been the blind leading the blind while tied to chains feeling along the shadows of a cave looking for a way out. Whether the failures in Shultz's book are his own or others, I don't know. They are the gut wrenching failures of a society looking to improve.