Susan M. Schultz

Susan M. Schultz Poems

Susan M. Schultz Biography

Poet Susan Schultz was born in 1958 in Belleville, Illinois and earned degrees from Yale University and the University of Virginia. Schultz’s innovative poetry frequently utilizes documentary techniques. Her books of poetry include Aleatory Allegories (2000); And Then Something Happened (2004); Dementia Blog (2008), a book about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s; Memory Cards: 2010-2011 (2011); and She’s Welcome to Her Disease (2013), the second part of her cycle on her mother’s illness. Her works of criticism include A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2005). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (1995) and co-edited, with Annie Finch, Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form (2008). Since 2005 she has edited the journal Tinfish, which focuses on experimental writing from the Pacific. Schultz is a professor at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, where she teaches courses focusing on 20th century American literature, creative writing, and hybrid forms.)

The Best Poem Of Susan M. Schultz

Monday, September 25, 2006

- The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect. Why did you yell in my mom's house? Radhika asks our neighbor.

- She sounded like she does when her hands shake. She does not want to be there. Bryant calls to ask about her things. A tape on osteoperosis. No. Foundations of Economics (from the 1930s). No. The Soviet shelf. No. The Nazi shelf. No. The Greeks, the Moslems. No. The speech and drama shelf. No. Encyclopedias, no. Check reigsters back to 1964. No. Harry Truman, no. Mrs. Ike, no.

- Was her reading too intense?

- Grief is excess of sound. Anger is excess of form. Sadness can lack, or still exceed. Excess is overtone, the note beyond the note you sound. Without the tone, there is no object. Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried.

- My task is to inventory sentences, place them in order, box them up and ship them in a container. They are a sturdy furniture, haphazard art. They are boxes of papers, bills, pieces of a dissertation. A computer shopper magazine (discard). Titles whose aura was a life, or two, or three. The house is now full of light. A girl wanders through the rooms, trying keys at the windows. My mother knows none of this.

- My father might be in the garden, or the scarecrow that wears his hat. Let him wander the house this last, inspect the plumbing, lights, air conditioning, the rows of beans, sort through medals, papers, release them as excess.

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