For Eric “Dr. Bones” Bohnenstiel and veteran headbangers everywhere, original barbarians all

Overture

For hours in flames we reached for speeds of darkness—
To walls of noise forced hard and white with light—
Fulfilled a fevered trance, rank, infernal:
Such gloom! Such hymns! Such quarrels! Such undead
Majesty . . . But in an age of irony,
You grew serious, my demon, and died.

1.

You were the chang . . . before our hard day’s night,
The din of every chorus sung at once,
Of hopes blackened by bad jobs, with no real love
Left, deranged and dizzy from the pit, your cross
A compass pointed at hell: Too stupid
To haul yourself from tar-black pits at last.

It’s hard to feel sorry for you. You died
Like a jammed chainsaw, stern Hessian god, darkness
Your only friend, mad-drunk, right eye runny
With salt scum, tight-crotched jeans, suburban blight:
Your songs were weapons, for those we wished dead,
Tons of ammunition aimed at them all,

Brutal shock of broken noses. One last
Time may you rise, wretched, from brooding night.
Sometimes I miss you, your lowly, stupid
Discord, your chipped collar-bone. Such things once
Seemed natural, like the lonely Styx I’d cross
To get home, where there would be no love.

They told you to grow up, get a job and all,
Leave the tombs to those who’ve really died,
So you hid in fjord and swamp, a brain-dead
Convict. History is always unkind, our arks nest-
Led in dark rooms far from the shaming light.
It felt good in the days before irony,

To go so fast, yes, yes, so fast the Sirens’ ee-
Some song could not lure our Viking ships, folderol
Beside smokehouse barbarian sweat, the light-
Ning we rode until dawn . . . and harmony died.
For years, an ache anchored my neck, then Dark Nes-
Ter turned me back on again like the undead.

2.

You changed and lost your lust to lead each night
Your lost legions to the liquor store. Once,
You knew nothing hurt so much as a love
Hurled away or held too long, but to cross
Such anger with such passion is truly stupid.
I knew that. I did, and I left you at last.

Cold beer in winter lots, last of daylight
On a humming Chevette hood, we could still raise the dead,
Every inch of us a fresh scar. We died
When you first hit the lights, before irony
Took it all away, the harsh glories, hot rush, all
Our lives lived for that strobing, smoky darkness.

Concrete thuds, mouthfuls of windshield, the dead
Of night bashed with black-fisted iron, E-
Vil as a botched tattoo, cold skeleton darkness
Called home, a moveable blood-feast for all,
And chains thrown in the wood-chipper; what died
Down your throat, what ruptured bulb of lost light?

You always assumed you were owed no love,
So you refused to love yourself and, at last,
Fell in love with death, so inverted your cross.
Again, I’ve fallen from your whiplash night
To Valhallan concussion, all hammers at once
Brought down on our enemies. Kinda stupid,

Yes, I’ve gone and said it, you were stupid,
But that never kept anyone from love.
Our East Germany of music, you were at once
Joyous and grim. Ah, mein teufel, where Gentians last
Bloomed, future and past are cast off to a single night.
What rivers in hell remain for us to cross?

3.

You attack but never advance, absorb more loss,
Obnoxious, but not really evil, drunk on the stoop, Id
Above all, egoless animal, venomous night-
Crawler, cut in three yet thriving, your love
Inhuman, in three hearts and no head. Last
Call never comes. You wrecked our necks, our Once

And Backward King. You wriggle up, all affronts
Taken personally. You’ve slipped from your cross.
You never aged, adapted, or evolved to last,
Unwashed warrior, unleashed brute, “LEGION, stoopid.”
Icy volts wreak war through your crooked love.
You gnaw on grave soil, seething in the burnt-out night.

Coda:

I once held you, shaking . . . angry and stupid,
At last, was plucked from you, like dawn from night.
The black songs will rule us all once we’ve died.

I can’t laugh or take flight, or hide from what I see.
We drank the darkness of ruthless teenage love.
So we go from death, what lives to seize us all.

Ernest Hilbert reads his metal sestina accompanied by composer Trevor Björklund’s “Deus Ex Machina,” for chamber orchestra and heavy metal trio. For more information on Björklund’s transmutation of metal into contemporary concert music, visit his website.

Trevor Christian Björklund (b. 1977) is an American composer and trombonist/tubist. He completed the Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo, where he studied with David Felder. From 2001–2004 he lived in Germany where he studied composition with Younghi Pagh- Paan at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, and privately with Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Frank Cox, and Mark Randall Osborn. Björklund has taught composition and theory at the University of Pittsburgh and the University at Buffalo.

His music has been performed in the USA, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, The Czech Republic, France, Italy, and South Korea.

Ernest Hilbert interviewed by Jessica Furiani

We go Behind the Sestina with Hilbert to uncover the metallic truth about his poem “Hel[l]ical Double Sestina: [Metal Number One]” featured in The Incredible Sestina Anthology.

When did you first discover the sestina?

I’ve always known of it in much the way one knows what a soup tureen is, which is to say I was aware of what it is but never had much use for one. This is due in part to the fact that, until recently, there have so few successful modern examples of the form in English—Kipling, Auden, Bishop are exceptions. I much prefer the sonnet, a compact form long ago conveyed from Mediterranean climes and which took sturdy root in English. I suspect that the long, complex, repetitive form of the sestina proved a more suitable custom to a troubadour of 12th-century Provence than it does for poets today. It strikes me as a lyric form for musical performance, like common (or ballad) meter in English, but it’s quite a struggle to get one to work convincingly on the written page.

This is all to say that I imagine its repetitive qualities may benefit a song, but could appear to lack forward motion when read as an unaccompanied poem. It is therefore something of a dangerous proposition, not to be entered into lightly or often. I also suspect that it may be more suited to the Lengad’òc of Arnaut Daniel than to English, but Mr. Nester’s anthology proves that we now have a rich and living tradition of the sestina in our own language.

Have you written sestinas before this one or since?

I never felt a call to write sestinas, perhaps because I’ve never found myself in a creative writing workshop, where I’m told they flourish. I welcomed Mr. Nester’s invitation to compose one, when he served as sestinas editor for McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies. Were it not for his persuasions and ministrations, I’m certain I never would have composed one at all, much less seen it in print. I am grateful for the occasion.

In the midst of the ludic acrobatics I divided an end-stop word—“darkness” into “Dark Nes- / Ter”—in tribute to this volume’s esteemed editor.

Can you describe writing this sestina?

I happen to love heavy metal music. Since I am a poet and opera librettist, the outrageousness of the style continues to appeal well into adulthood. As a greasy-haired warehouse worker and dishwasher in southern New Jersey, heavy metal appeared to be the only unpretentious option for me, not only in terms of how I listened to music but how chose to present myself to a hostile world. The harshness and sheer volume of the music creates a protective shell. The metal-head image was like armor donned each day. One stalks about in tight jeans with long hair and a scowl and hopes to be left alone. The cops failed to get the message, but “being metal” helps one survive day-to-day when options are few and opportunities thin on the ground. It was our way of signaling our refusal to submit, our open rebellion against everything we could think of, businesses, governments, systems of education and discipline, against what we viewed as the obvious hypocrisies of society.

Stephen Burt has remarked that the sestina “served, historically, as a complaint,” its demands understood as “signs for deprivation or duress.” In that regard, it is ideally suited to my aims.

Did the subject matter of the sestina have an impact on the form used, or did the form have an impact on what you were writing about?

On this occasion, the sestina appealed to me as an almost heroic mold into which I could pour the molten memories of my metal experiences. The language in the poem is purposefully loud, like a heavy metal song, clanging consonants, big vowels, thrown at a very high pitch, a kind of romantic agony, which would seem out of place in most sophisticated or “art” writing. This mimetic approach permitted me to really dive into the subject matter as if into a mosh pit. I cast it as an ode, addressing “Heavy Metal” as if it were a monstrous ancient god and I a lone chronicler alongside the phantom brotherhood of metal-heads, acknowledging the strange communal experience that the music delivers, the grim “us” and “we” of the hordes.

We stand strong. We conquer. We will not surrender. You get the picture.

I do get the picture. It’s also a double sestina, which is very heavy metal.

“Hel[l]ical Double Sestina: [Metal Number One]” begins with an overture in iambic pentameter, in honor of Thomas Gabriel Warrior’s tetrameter lyrics for Celtic Frost songs like “The Usurper” and “Jewel Throne” (“Lend me your steel, rearing hand, / So I may reign the Jewel Throne. / My soul feels the gods’ demand”), which in turn owe much to the fantasy verse and fiction of Robert E. Howard (I have lately entered into his Conan saga). I sought to quote the style of lyrics used by 1980s extreme metal bands like Venom and Slayer. The poem then grows increasingly ragged—metrically bumpy and rhetorically tangled—in a nod to Ezra Pound’s 1920 modernist masterwork “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in which whole rhymes and identifiable meter in earlier stanzas gradually give way to free verse in order to instill a sense of cultural dislocation and personal disillusionment inaugurated by the modern age. My modest contribution to this anthology consists of two sestinas, helically twined. I hauled out my OED and magnifying glass to find one word, “eesome,” which I misuse slightly, as it is intended to refer to an object that appears to be beautiful, though I apply it to describe the beautiful sirens’ song, which fails, of course, to lure the Viking ship, so we have an example of synesthesia. I want the sound of the poem to pound the reader’s eardrums like a long heavy-metal tour-de-force like “Master of Puppets” by Metallica (Metallica song titles are buried throughout the poem, along with one by Exodus). The result is a kind of mock-epic, with unapologetic word play and grand gestures, yet I hope the humble honesty and sadness that underlie the poem remain in evidence.

According to the internet, Eric Bohnenstiel is a “pathetic metal expert” on VH1. Is that why you dedicated your poem to him?

Not at all. Shows what the internet knows. He’s a good friend of mine, and if you remove “pathetic,” the epithet sticks just fine. He knows more about heavy metal than anyone I’ve ever known, which is really saying something. I dedicated it to him because the theme of the poem is one I thought he might admire. The “pathetic” bit was surely posted some envious jackass. Love live metal. Horns up!