E-Verse Radio

“Let’s be naughty and save Santa the trip.” – Gary Allan

“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy [...]

“If I have a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” – Erasmus

“May I help you find suspenders to match the piano? A tie to go with your tea? Some Mozart for your handbag? If the modern art of selling depends upon creating associations, today’s sales mavericks owe a lot to the history of the department store, the original lifestyle marketers. [...]

“Television has raised writing to a new low.” – Samuel Goldwyn

“It began as a solution to that All-American holiday problem — what to do with the leftover turkey. But executives at C.A. Swanson & Sons weren’t talking about just the remainders of the family meal. They were talking 520,000 pounds of poultry. The Omaha, Neb., frozen food company had [...]

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” – Samuel Johnson

“If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we [...]

“How much deeper would oceans be if sponges didn’t live there?” – Stephen Wright

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way [...]

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Throwing away the alarm clock my father always said, ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ It was lights out at 8PM in our house and we were up at dawn to the smell of coffee, frying bacon, and scrambled eggs. My father [...]

Iris Murdoch

“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”    - Albert Camus     The Seven Deadly VirtuesX.J. Kennedy   Constancy           Strict [...]

“Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.” – Steve Almond

“A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night.”    - J.M. Barrie   [...]

“In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.” – W.B. Prescott

“In 1939, the story goes, F Scott Fitzgerald earned $33 from royalties on all his books. Those included This Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, and The Great Gatsby. The great writer of recent times was only 43 but he was ‘washed up,‘ very ill, horribly reliant [...]

Radio Show

Welcome to E-Verse Radio’s podcast page, where you can listen to MP3 recordings of each week’s episode. Just right click on the image for a program and “save as” to download the MP3, which you may then play on iTunes or move to your iPod as you please. I hope you enjoy listening.
If you can’t [...]

“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.” – Rod Serling

“‘Here’s to the winners,’ Frank Sinatra used to sing, belting out Joe Raposo’s lyrics as only a winner can. ‘Here’s to the winners all of us can be.’ Right, and if you believe that, have I got a bridge for you. One of the truths of human existence is that, to one degree or another, [...]

“I’m all for liberalism and social justice, but I draw the line at bad poetry.” – Preston Merchant

“The Rich Boy was written in 1925, as Fitzgerald waited for The Great Gatsby to be published. With the explosion of modernism, the 1920s were a watershed for storytelling. Behind this decade were Austen, Dickens, and James; in front, Joyce and Borges. Yet far from showing [...]

“On the whole the modern poet leads the same kind of quietly exasperated, uneventful life that is the lot of most contemporary citizens.” – David Herd

“In recent years, memoir has consistently been among the bestselling genres in American publishing. Readers devour tales of drug abuse, incest, depression, and sundry other personal challenges – often too credulously, as the recent rehab fabulations of author James Frey attest. Many of these books tell stories [...]

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“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Einstein’s great work was over well before he was 40. Photos from that time show him as a nattily dressed young professor, though we’re more familiar with the image of the old Einstein — the benign and unkempt sage of poster and T-shirt. But Einstein didn’t rest [...]

The Visionaries Behind E-Verse Radio

Host Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. His poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poet, The New Criterion, American Literary Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, LIT, McSweeney’s, American Scholar, Verse, Volt, and Fence.
His collection Sixty Sonnets will be issued by Red Hen Press in autumn 2008. He writes [...]

“The cynics are right nine times out of ten.” – Henry Louis Mencken

“The injustice of it all. ‘I’ve seen the Stones many times,’ complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. ‘I don’t feel they play as good as we do. You’ve got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing.’ He could be speaking for members [...]

“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” – Ingrid Bergman

“The study of social mobility is finally coming in from the cold (or at least from the Frigidaire of university sociology departments). A couple of years ago three of America’s leading newspapers – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times – all published, almost simultaneously, multi-part series [...]

“I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.” – Steven Wright

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises in [...]

“The mistakes are all waiting to be made.” – Chess master Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower

“When taking my fledgling steps toward literacy, I lived in a neighborhood with no library. Luckily, there was a bookmobile that came around every week. Each Tuesday night, I would borrow as many books as permitted, devour them and come back next week for more. I would [...]