The Necessity of Failure

Why this obsession with success,
which gives so brief a glow?
Fading already: won; done it;

past. Afterwards, what then? What next?
With failure, there’s so much
more to savour, so much more to feel.

Like a loose tooth, you can jiggle
it any time you like;
the true friend you can never brush off.

Failing is like having children:
you find out stuff about yourself
you’d never known nor dared to guess.

And think of the variety.
There are so many ways
to fail. Not just the smart disasters

like going bust or off your head,
betraying those you love
or knowingly blowing your talent –

only a few of us can be
that chic. Don’t be choosey.
Any flop will reward you with guilt,

remorse, embarrassment and shame,
whose every nuance
you can endlessly replay, retaste.

Even quite a tiny failure
can last you a lifetime:
that thing you said, that moment you missed,

will twist in time until you see
how it led to all that
and all of this. Some revelation.

So don’t begrudge your blunders,
screw-ups, A minor blues.
Nothing’s wasted; failure makes sense.

Harry Ricketts
from Your Secret Life (HeadworX, 2005)

Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Eurydice’, Bill Manhire’s ‘My Sunshine’: playing favourites with other poets’ poems is much easier than with one’s own. I’ve gone for ‘The Necessity of Failure’ (Pemmican Press, 2001). This was written in 2000 as a reaction to the way we were all being exhorted to say how successful we were, and I thought but what about our failures? That’s the one subject we’re all experts in. We’ve slid much further down the self-adulation PR track since then; which perhaps explains why this half-comic poem still seems to strike a chord in readings.

Harry Ricketts

Harry Ricketts has published 35 books, most recently his thirteenth collection of poems, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2025). He is working on volume 2 of his memoirs. He is an Emeritus Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where he continues to teach a course in creative nonfiction at the Institute of Modern Letters. He likes coffee, cafés and cricket.