E-Verse Radio

“Poem” by Antonio Machado, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

It is not true, sorrow, that I have known you.
You are the nostalgia of a good life,
The solitude of a somber heart,
A boat without shipwreck and without star.
Like a lost dog, wandering,
Sniffing and hunting aimlessly
For his road, without a road, ilke
A child on a holiday night.
Lost among the crowds,
The dusty air, the flickering
Candles, stunned, his [...]

“Autumn Remonstration” by Amy Lemmon

Couple-hungry, full-grown but still in your teens,
off limits and thus irresistible,
you tweak my demon urge. Rusty at first,
then all too lubricated, my sexed brain
banters with itself, is finally convinced
it is not you I want to fuck to quivering.
Myself? My own desire?
Lust, lust, love’s my snare, the lure of the mind,
the wit of you, your words [...]

Visit Mad-Scientist Jason Nelson’s Inter-Dimensional, Multi-Planar Machine Poems

Born from the computerless land of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives. Currently he researches Net Art and Electronic Literature at Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory lands. Aside from coaxing code and creatures into breaking, playing, and morphing [...]

Ernest Hilbert, with Caleb Barber and novelist Dave King, at the Bowery Poetry Club

Hey, stop by the Bowery Poetry Club on Wednesday, March 31st, for an evening of new American writers.
Click here for the Academy of American Poets listing.
Ernest Hilbert with poet Caleb Barber and Dave King, author of the best-selling The Ha-Ha, soon to be a major motion picture starring Josh Brolin.
March 31, 2010, 6 PM
Bowery Poetry [...]

Ernest Hilbert and Jericho Brown at Frequency North

Thursday, March 18th, 2010, 7:30PM
College of St. Rose and Frequency North Present:
An evening of poetry with Ernest Hilbert and Jericho Brown
Events and Athletics Center, Second Floor
420 Western Ave. Albany, NY 12203

“Your Body Made Heavy with Gin” by Jericho Brown
I can relax. I smell liquor on your breath.
Soon your arms will be too heavy to lift,
And [...]

“Dread” by J.M. Synge

Beside a chapel I’d a room looked down,
Where all the women from the farms and town,
On Holy-days, and Sundays used to pass
To marriages, and Christenings and to Mass.
Then I sat lonely watching score and score,
Till I turned jealous of the Lord next door . . .
Now by this window, where there’s none can see,
The Lord [...]

Ernest Hilbert Reads “Two Portraits” from Aim Your Arrows at the Sun

 
Love Among the Ruins, or LATR, is a small press named after the unfinished Evelyn Waugh novel and based in New York City. It was founded in Summer 2009 by editors Daniel Lin and Margaret Monaghan.
Click here for more information or to purchase Aim Your Arrows at the Sun by Ernest Hilbert.
“Two Portraits” by Ernest [...]

“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27″ by Charles Olson

I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it [...]

“Difficult Body” by Mark Wunderlich

A story: There was a cow in the road, struck by a semi—
half-moon of carcass and jutting legs, eyes
already milky with dust and snow, rolled upward
as if tired of this world tilted on its side.
We drove through the pink light of the police cruiser,
her broken flank blowing steam in the air.
Minutes later, a deer sprang [...]

“Recitativo” by C. Dale Young

As an arrow flies through the air, some
will say it swims because it bends and flexes
from side to side, like a fish does, like a fish swims.
But is that true? True, but not exact.
It isn’t enough to say the arrow swims.
It isn’t enough to say the arrow quivers.
Remember the spine of the arrow is wood.
It [...]

“It’s a Horror Poem”: Comment on “While You Were Out”

Over at his blog, Noise for Its Own Sake, Justin Hamm commented on my poem “While You Were Out“:
There’s so much quality poetry out there these days that it’s impossible to keep up with everything, but I’d like to link to a handful of poems that’ve really resonated for me lately.
The first, “While You Were [...]

“Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or [...]

“Bees in the Attic” by Erica Dawson

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past
– William Shakespeare
As if I’d move enough to make a noise
As loud as theirs, those bees, I circled around
My whirring bedroom, hurdling children’s toys.
I thought my lungs would buzz the attic’s sound,
Crescendo, shh and hum; went round until
I lost my breath, lay [...]

Ernest Hilbert’s Poem “While You Were Out” Read by X.J. Kennedy in the New Issue of LineBreak Magazine

Click here to head over to Ashley Anna McHugh’s indispensable online audio poetry magazine LineBreak to hear elder statesman Mr. X.J. Kennedy deliver a reading of my poem “While You Were Out,” from my forthcoming collection All of You on the Good Earth. You may stream directly from the site. This recording will also turn [...]

“Skinhead” by Patricia Smith

They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty.
It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters,
it’s in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious.
I sit in my dim matchbox,
on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell,
slide razors across my hair,
count how many ways
I can bring blood closer [...]

“Times Literary Supplement” by Ernest Hilbert

Poem published recently in The Oxonian Review.

“The Crossroads” by Joshua Mehigan

This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not [...]

“miss rosie” by Lucille Clifton

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be [...]

“Some, too fragile for winter winds” by Emily Dickinson

Some, too fragile for winter winds
The thoughtful grave encloses—
Tenderly tucking them in from frost
Before their feet are cold.
Never the treasures in her nest
The cautious grave exposes,
Building where schoolboy dare not look,
And sportsman is not bold.
This covert have all the children
Early aged, and often cold,
Sparrow, unnoticed by the Father—
Lambs for whom time had not a fold.

Ernest Hilbert Reads “Coil” from Sixty Sonnets

Click To Play

Recorded at Widget Studios, Philadelphia, PA, engineered and produced by Dave Young for Pub Can Records. ©2009

For Valentine’s Day, a Poem by Luke Stromberg, “Squirrel Luck”

I can’t sleep.
The squirrels are fucking
Again. In my wall.
I can hear them:
Nails across wood,
Excited chatter,
Then finally a sound I imagine
As the female’s sigh of satisfaction—
Over and over.
They fuck
All night long.
The whole world is fucking.
I picture the young couple next door—
The husband
Steely-eyed, square-jawed,
His thin, blond wife,
Clothes always clinging
To her jogger’s frame— writhing
On bed sheets, their tanned [...]

“Rowing in the Dawn” by Ernest Hilbert in The Oxonian Review

I rowed for one of St. Catherine’s “beer” eights, or social eights, at Oxford. We would haul the big wooden boat out before sun rose in the winter so we could be out of the water by the time the Blues, the serious rowers, needed the river. The Isis is what the Thames becomes when [...]

“The Fluffer Talks of Eternity” by D.A. Powell

I can only give you back what you imagine.
I am a soulless man. When I take you
into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is
an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough
in the pinhole camera to capture the shade.
I have caused you to rise up to me, and I
have watched as you rose and [...]

“Academic” by Theodore Roethke

The stethoscope tells what everyone fears:
You’re likely to go on living for years,
With a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper,
And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.

“Here” by Joshua Mehigan

Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign,
a hill with cows and a white house on top,
a mall and grocery store where people shop,
a diner where some people go to dine.
It is the same no matter where you go,
and downtown you will find no big surprises.
Each fall the dew point falls until it rises.
White snow, [...]

“The Saint and the Crab” by William Logan

Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled
among the tanned intruders, licking their hands.
Pools of iridescent shellfish
lay open in the restaurant window,
a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen
the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs,
their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements.
The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled
in its [...]

“First date” by Callie Siskel

How could I forget
that hour in the corner,
behind the pool table,
under the cues?
The chairs were just there,
brown leather, waiting
against a wood wall
where pairs of names
were firmly etched.
The players kept reaching
over our heads—
I don’t remember what you said,
or I said, just the scene,
the way we were tucked in
and when a player leaned,
another layer. Does this seem
like [...]

“Speculation and Conjecture” by Katy Evans-Bush

Katy Evans-Bush’s new chapbook, Oscar & Henry, is available from Rack Press, limited to 150 copies, the first fifty numbered and signed by the author. Oscar is the inimitable Oscar Wilde, and Henry is, of course, Mr. James. Below is “Speculation and Conjecture”, the first poem from this splendid little book, which you may purchase [...]

“Enemies and Co.” by Ernest Hilbert, in The Oxonian Review

After Cyril Connolly

So many, the enemies of promise.
They’re everywhere. Larkin imagined a toad,
Squatting on the back, weighing us down, called work.
You’re smothered half to death by false kindness.
The temp job stinks. They increased your workload.
Lunch talk is dry and spiteful. You grip your fork
While they jaw about the next vacation.
They couldn’t care less about your [...]

“Wild Turkeys” by John Foy

They hump like grunts in a long line
down out of the woods, all black
against the snow, and go behind
the house to a rally point out back
to eat from piles of corn feed
we put out there to ease their lot,
hoping that tonight at least
they won’t starve. Some get shot
as a matter of course, others freeze
before the [...]