For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us. – John Winthrop

It’s true. If you glance at America
You’ll glimpse whatever you most wish to hate.
Countless facets open and you will see
Society too free, flaunting the law
Or despotic regime and repressive state,
Godless laxity, porn, shitty TV
Or Susan B., Bernstein, and Jefferson,
Lazy suburbanites, afraid of war
Or belligerent empire owned by brutes,
A bright future that can only worsen,
Breadbasket, badlands, constantly craving more,
Conformists, mavericks, and their vain pursuits—
All visions of cities on a far hill:
Results vary, as visions always will.

Read more at Praxilla.

From the forthcoming collection All of You on the Good Earth (2013).

Publisher’s announcement:

Ernest Hilbert’s newest collection, All of You on the Good Earth, continues to explore the bizarre worlds of 21st-century America first glimpsed in his debut, Sixty Sonnets, which X.J. Kennedy hailed as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America” and “whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell’s,” according to Adam Kirsch. Critics have called Hilbert’s poems “at once ironic, dark, and witty,” containing the “full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do,” “showy and spectacular,” “both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding,” concluding that “the only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.” Poet and critic David Yezzi salutes Hilbert as “a twenty-first-century beatnik in Elizabethan ruff.”

At the end of the tumultuous year 1968, Apollo 8’s Commander Frank Borman described the earth-rise as sending “a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.” He signed off: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” All of You on the Good Earth guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers, spaced-out movie stars and pugnacious comic book characters come to life, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, zoned-out denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the amusing and heartbreaking debris of life on this world, all the while recalling Seneca’s dictum, non est ad astra mollis e terris via (“the road from the earth to the stars is not easy”).

“Hilbert is one of our best rhymers since Robert Frost, and his poems have been compared by superb poets to those of John Berryman and Robert Lowell. We haven’t had a poetry like his—both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding—to enjoy and mull over for a long time.” –  Alice Quinn, editor of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments