Come to St. Agnes on Tuesday, May 10 to discuss Poetry and Failure and Success.
Date: Tuesday, May 10
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Avenue (near 81st Street), 3rd Floor
Theme: Poetry and Failure and Success
In the lyrics of a famous Bob Dylan song, “there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all,” we contemplate the attraction between the two words. Do some fail and through failure make a name for themselves, as Philip Schultz writes of his father in the beginning lines of “Failure”?:
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.
(read Schultz’s entire poem http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/12/05)
On the flip side of the question is the 1914 poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” by William Butler Yeats:
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Yeats doesn’t advise his friend to buck up after a failure, but to do the thing “most difficult”: accept, and by doing so, succeed as a human being.
Can anyone be labeled a success when the person is living and could fail in the future? What is success anyway? Robert William Service begins the old favorite “Success” with the words:
You ask me what I call Success –
It is, I wonder, Happiness?
It is not wealth, it is not fame,
Nor rank, nor power nor honoured name.
It is not triumph in the Arts –
Best-selling books or leading parts.
It is not plaudits of the crowd,
The flame of flags, processions proud.
The panegyrics of the Press
are but the mirage of Success.
You may have all of them, my friend,
Yet be a failure in the end.
What do these or other poems say to you about success and failure?
—Abigail and AnnaLee
One Page Poetry Circle 
The following is a poem about a type of failure (although the word ‘failure’ isn’t mentioned), that is at least partially redeemed by a kind of devoted love.
The Writer’s Wife
by Lucien Stryk
Deep in your northwood’s fastness,
snowbound half the year, you complain,
he tells me, of problems with the stove,
dirt, loneliness, yet says he’s proud
of your tenacity, your faith in him.
Meanwhile he writes what only you will read.
No one else would do this for him,
he whose work has come to nothing.*
*I have to assume that Stryk is purposely echoing the title of the Yeats poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”
Thanks for posting. I think you are right about Stryk’s reference to Yeats’ title! I googled briefly to see what I might find to explain the connection and see that Northwood which Stryk references, is a section of Dublin. I think this is where Yeats lived when he died.
So I have to assume that this poem is about Yeats!
The narrator is strangely distant in this poem. The narrator’s relationship is with the writer/husband but the narrator is writing about the wife or rather the writer’s feelings about his wife. Yet the last two lines are the comment of the narrator elevating the wife and putting down the poet.
Did Yeats’ work come to nothing?
Success is counted sweetest (112)
By Emily Dickinson
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory
As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
AnnaLee and Abigail, I’ve done some searching, but I can’t find any commentary online about the genesis of Stryk’s poem. Virtually all of the commentary online is about his work as a translator, not his own poetry. If I ever come across a ‘biographical’ explanation of “The Writer’s Wife,” I’ll try to come back here and post it.
I did find one interesting thing though, in my searching. Stryk had a student, Thomas James, who published one book of poetry, which was barely reviewed, and what review(s) it got were “withering”. James committed suicide at age 27. I don’t think he was married. Maybe Stryk cobbled together some things to make his poem. The wife’s complaints remind me for some reason of the complaints the poet Lorine Niedecker had about her llving conditions.
James has been somewhat ‘rediscovered’. Here is a link to just one of the articles about him:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69134
[…] uploaded two poems to our blog, “The Writer’s Wife” by Lucien Stryk and “Success is counted sweetest” by Emily […]