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“MADDENINGLY COMPLICATED RULES”: ERNEST HILBERT’S “HEL[L]ICAL DOUBLE SESTINA: [METAL NUMBER ONE]” IN THE INCREDIBLE SESTINA ANTHOLOGY 

HILBERT, Ernest (Daniel Nester, editor). The Incredible Sestina Anthology. Austin, TX: Write Bloody Publishing, 2013. Octavo, paper wrappers. $25. ISBN-10: 1938912365.

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“More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardists both love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Ernest Hilbert and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.” “By collecting an exemplary, representative, and diverse array of sestinas, The Incredible Sestina Anthology does just what an anthology should: it creates both an accurate snapshot of the form throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a sense of the form’s future: the dream of a common poetry” (American Book Review). The anthology includes examples of the form from Sherman Alexie, John Ashbery, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephen Burt, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Weldon Kees, James Merrill, Paul Muldoon, Ezra Pound, Mark Strand, Louis Zukofsky, and Ernest Hilbert. This comprehensive collection of classic and new sestinas includes Ernest Hilbert’s infamous “Hel[l]ical Double Sestina: [Metal Number One],” which first appeared in a different form on McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies. The volume also includes a short interview with Hilbert about the poem in which he remarks that “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.”

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“CAN SO MUCH PURE FORCE EVER KNOW REVERSE?”: ERNEST HILBERT’S POEM “DREDGE” IN TWO WEEKS

(ERNEST HILBERT) BOWEN, Ash, Johnathon Williams, Eds. Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. NP: Linebreak, 2011. Ebook. $2.99. ASIN: B004MYGCFM

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Ernest Hilbert’s poem “Dredge” appears in this groundbreaking anthology from the editors of Linebreak magazine. The volume also includes poems by Randall Mann, Jennifer Jean, Sandy Longhorn, Oliver de la Paz, Dorianne Laux, and Matthew Zapruder. “The first of its kind, Two Weeks is collection of 58 all-new poems by established and emerging voices in contemporary poetry. Released exclusively in ebook format, the anthology was completed in only 14 days—from the online call for submissions to the design and production of the book itself. The editors and designers took special care to ensure that line breaks and other critical formatting survived the transition to digital form.”

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“THE VOICES IN THIS VOLUME ARE BY TURNS PROVACATIVE, DEADPAN, HUMOROUS, AND INSPIRATIONAL”: QUOTE POET UNQUOTE

(ERNEST HILBERT) O’DRISCOLL, Dennis, ed. Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon, 2008. Stout octavo, trade paperback. $18. ISBN-10: 1556592701.

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This lively collection of meditations on contemporary poetry, by such contributors as Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, and Michael Donaghy, was assembled by Irish critic and poet Dennis O’Driscoll from his column “Pickings and Choosings” for Poetry Ireland Review. Ernest Hilbert is represented on several controversial topics in the form of long quotations drawn from his editorials and reviews at Contemporary Poetry Review. “’One of the best-read men in the Western world’ is how Poetry Review describes Irish poet-critic Dennis O’Driscoll. Quote Poet Unquote, his compilation of contemporary quotations on all things poetry-related, proves that judgment spot on. The book grew out of O’Driscoll’s column ‘Pickings and Choosings’ for Poetry Ireland Review, and contains nearly two thousand smart sayings obsessively gleaned from six hundred sources—including powerhouse critics, prize-winning poets, world leaders, and newspaper headlines. The voices in this volume are by turns provocative, deadpan, humorous, and inspirational.”

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“IT IS DIFFICULT TO EXAGGERATE THE EXULTATION, THE SHEER BLOODY RUSH”

(ERNEST HILBERT) COMPTON, Shanna, ed. Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004. Stout octavo, stiff pictorial wrappers. $14.95. ISBN-10: 1932360573

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Ernest Hilbert’s long essay “Flying Off the Screen: Observations from the Golden Age of the American Video Game Arcade” appears alongside others by “programmers, visual artists, cartoonists, game testers, and championship gamers” in this now-classic anthology of video game commentary. The publisher explains that “from the creation of ‘Spacewar!’ in 1962, through the golden age of the video game arcade in America, to the console-in-every household proliferation today, games have provided us with something books, music, the plastic arts, and even film have not. . . . In Gamers, editor Shanna Compton and twenty-three contributors . . . offer not only witty, widescreen views of how video games have become part of the cultural landscape, but also insight into where they may be headed next.” The Detroit Metro Times noted that “poet Ernest Hilbert offers the following existential observation: ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the exultation, the sheer bloody rush a 12 year-old boy can achieve by blasting Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flying High Again” through foam orange headphones while committing mass murder.’” Other contributors include Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers, Shelley Jackson, Aaron McCollough, and Daniel Nester. This edition has gone into several printings. The online reprint of Hilbert’s essay continues enjoy thousands of readers.

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“THERE IS NO GREATNESS WHERE SIMPLICITY, GOODNESS, AND TRUTH ARE ABSENT”

(ERNEST HILBERT) TOLSTOY, Leo. War and Peace, translated by Aylmer and Louise Maude. San Diego: Baker and Taylor/Canterbury Classics, 2011. Stout octavo, hardcover. $24.95. ISBN-10: 1607103109

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Ernest Hilbert provides a comprehensive introduction to this new popular edition of the classic Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel. (Click here to read his introduction.) From the publisher: “It was acclaimed author Leo Tolstoy’s finest literary achievement. War and Peace, the story of five wealthy families of the Russian aristocracy during and after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, is also considered to be one of the finest novels of all time—a book no home library should be without.” From Hilbert’s introduction: “War and Peace is one of the most famous novels of all time, and justly so. It is certainly one of the longest. Its title, emblematic of the grand sweep of the lives chronicled within, is recognizable even to those who will never read it. It is celebrated for its dizzying cast of characters, its shrewd examinations of the demands history places on individual human lives, and, of course, its exhilarating story lines. It features nearly 600 characters, some of them authentic historical figures, others invented by their author. It is known for its narrative sweep as well its length, more than 1,000 pages in most editions. It is unlikely that Tolstoy could have successfully forged his masterpiece in a less capacious form. It is not, however, a complex novel. In fact, its straightforward nature is part of its greatness. As the narrator of the book assures us, ‘There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.’” Hilbert also supplied the introduction to the Canterbury Classics edition of four Charles Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol.

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“HIS CREATIVE POWERS WERE MATCHED ONLY BY HIS AMBITION”

(ERNEST HILBERT) DICKENS, Charles. Four Novels: Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol. San Diego: Baker and Taylor/Canterbury Classics, 2011. Stout octavo, hardcover. $24.95. ISBN-10: 1607103125

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Ernest Hilbert provides a comprehensive introduction to this new popular edition of four classic Charles Dickens novels. (Click here to read his introduction.) From the publisher: “Oliver Twist. Pip. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. . . . . This Canterbury Classics edition of Charles Dickens collects some of his most famous and beloved works—The Adventures of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations . . . . For those who’ve never read Dickens, it’s the perfect opportunity to experience his unique and compelling writing. And for those who are already Dickens devotees, an introduction by a renowned scholar will provide additional context and food for thought.” From Hilbert’s introduction: “Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, and perhaps the most famous English novelist of all time. He once went so far as to describe himself as ‘an amazing man,’ and it is true that he was exceedingly gifted. In fact, his creative powers were matched only by his ambition. He is undoubtedly the most ‘English’ of authors after William Shakespeare, meticulously capturing the lives, locales, and affairs of his native land at a time of remarkable societal change. He invented characters that seem to leap off the page. They live on in our imaginations long after the last leaf is turned. His popularity and influence were not only unmatched in his day but absolutely groundbreaking, altering the very essence of the novel. Aside from amusing his readers—something he never failed to do—Dickens had a real impact on the world around him.” Hilbert also supplied the introduction to the Canterbury Classics edition of the Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace.

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“OUR FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN—OF THOSE THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT—IS AS OLD AS TIME ITSELF”

(ERNEST HILBERT) LOVECRAFT, H.P., Franz Kafka, Edith Wharton, et al. Classic Tales of Horror. San Diego: Baker and Taylor/Canterbury Classics, 2015. Stout octavo, hardcover, pictorial boards. $24.95. ISBN-10: 1626864659

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Ernest Hilbert provides a comprehensive introduction to this new popular edition of the classic horror stories, spanning the century between Polydori’s groundbreaking 1819 short novel Vampyre and early twentieth-century classics by H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka. “We’ve all felt the rush of fear in the dead of night when we wake with a fright, chilled to the bone, feeling we are not alone. Our fear of the unknown—of those things that go bump in the night—is as old as time itself. Such primordial terrors take hold in the small hours, when the world sleeps, but they are captured, like génies in bottles, by the authors you will encounter in Classic Tales of Horror, authors who, above all, hope to remind us that all is not always well, that we are not always safe, nor do we fully understand the universe as much as we believe we do. In his pivotal essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature,’ H.P. Lovecraft, himself one of the undisputed masters of the field, began by affirming quite simply that ‘the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’ It is hard to improve upon this. A menace known, seen, and understood can never be as frightening as one that remains hidden, lurking in the shadows. This is the timeless element of these stories, and it contributes to their enduring appeal. They are as engaging today as they were when they first appeared. Stephen King, one of the most successful horror writers of all time, knows this and suggests that in horror fiction ‘we often experience that low sense of anxiety which we call “the creeps.”‘ He touches on an important point, which is that the fear of the unknown comes not only from outside phenomena but also, much more unsettlingly, sometimes from within. A recurring theme in these stories is the skeptic’s struggle to retain his faith in reason—to reassure himself that he is sane and that weird phenomena can be explained away—in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Even if he comes to accept the evidence as real, he may find himself unwilling or unable to talk about it with others. As Charles Dickens puts it, in ‘Trial for Murder,’ ‘I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort.’ The terror arises, in part, from a character’s inability to be certain that what he experiences with his five senses is, in fact, real, that some presentiment or ‘feeling’ is actually attached to a supernatural event. The horror story, from its genesis, has always relied on a strong psychological element: Ancient, primitive forces somehow persist into the present day; subterranean energies force their way to the surface; tragedies unfolded long ago are reenacted. Characters wrestle with their own psyches in a vain effort to cling to remnants of sanity” (Hilbert’s introduction). “This chilling collection of scary stories will keep you awake for hours! Psychological horrors, disturbing dramas, and gruesome ghosts compose this compendium of confessions made in the dead of night. From vampires and a monkey paw to an unstoppable heart and haunting apparitions, anecdotes of supernatural terror will have you turning pages long past the witching hour. Allow famous authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Washington Irving, and more to prey upon your emotions and peace of mind at slumber parties and camping trips, or anytime you want to end the night with a delightful fright!” (publisher’s announcement).

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“VERNE FORESAW A WORLD OBSESSED WITH TECHNOLOGY, WHERE EVEN THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO AVOID IT CANNOT ESCAPE ITS INFLUENCE”

(ERNEST HILBERT) VERNE, Jules. Four Novels: Five Weeks in a Balloon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days. San Diego: Baker and Taylor/Canterbury Classics, 2012. Stout octavo, hardcover. $16.95. ISBN-10: 1607103176.

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Ernest Hilbert provides a comprehensive introduction to this new popular edition of four classic Jules Verne novels in translations by William Lackland, Frederick Amadeus Malleson, and Lewis Mercier. (Click here to read his introduction.) From the publisher: “Legendary science fiction and adventure author Jules Verne is remembered for his fascinating stories of travel and excitement. With countless adaptations available, the titles of his works are familiar. But no joy can compare to reading the originals—and reading them in a deluxe classic edition is even better.” From Hilbert’s introduction: “Verne’s first novel imagined men floating almost helplessly across a largely unmapped Africa in search of the still-undiscovered sources of the Nile. By the time Around the World in Eighty Days was published, the planet had been crossed, demarcated, conquered, and exploited. The wonders Verne captured in Five Weeks in a Balloon were essentially gone by the end of his life. To this day, however, Verne challenges readers to explore new worlds while also mourning the passing of older, quieter ones, those immersed in mystery and ennobled by myth, which, like ours, are made up of stories. His novels may chart the disappearance of a world, but they also bring us the beginnings of a new one, the one we inherited from him.” Hilbert also supplied the introduction to the Canterbury Classics edition of the Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace and Four Novels by Charles Dickens.

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NEMEAN LION PRESS

Nemean Lion Press is Hilbert’s own small, private press. To date it has issued three books, designed and bound by Jennifer Mercer and Melissa Moffa, a novelty beer bottle, and a number of promotional posters, designed by Kara Mallon. Jennifer Mercer is a designer of considerable ingenuity and range. She designed all of the promotional products for E-Verse Radio, Hilbert’s blog, as well as its logo. Melissa Moffa is part of a movement toward hand-made books that currently flourishes in Philadelphia. She incorporates cut paper illustrations into her book design and experiments with a variety of unusual binding techniques.

The Nemean Lion was a powerful beast believed by the ancient Greeks to have fallen from the moon as the child of Zeus, king of the gods, and Selene, an archaic lunar deity born of the Titans Hyperion and Theia (though other myths suggest that the lion was the offspring of the Chimera, a creature made up of many, including a lioness, a snake, and a goat; hence our term “chimera,” something that is difficult to understand; its siblings were Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra). The Nemean Lion is named for the city of Nemea, which it terrorized. Heracles slayed the lion as one of his twelve labors and wore the lion’s pelt, which rendered him invincible.

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“EACH CLIMBER BRAND NEW IN HIS SKIN”: SIGNED LIMITED CONCERTINA EDITION OF THE THIRD COOPERATIVE FINE-ART BOOK BY DAVID YEZZI AND ERNEST HILBERT

YEZZI, David and HILBERT, Ernest [MOFFA, Melissa and MERCER, Jennifer]. Two Ranges [Vertical]. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, 2013. Squat oblong quarto, cobalt blue cloth boards [two specially bound author copies in heavier, darker cloth], concertina paper column. 14pp. Measures 7 by 5 ½ inches on shelf, 36 inches fully extended.

Signed limited-edition chapbook featuring two alpine poems, one each by David Yezzi and Ernest Hilbert, on opposite facings of the vertically extendable concertina paper column, one of only sixteen total copies signed by both authors, only twelve for sale (two authors’ and two artists’ proofs, hors série).

Two Ranges [Vertical] is the third book from Nemean Lion to feature contrasting poems by David Yezzi and Ernest Hilbert. The first in the series, A Fletching of Hackles, showcased spirited dueling by way of light verse between the mutually aggrieved authors. Their second collaboration, 3 X 5, bound in dark blue snakeskin, addressed themes of freedom and obsession. Two Ranges [Vertical] displays David Yezzi’s sonnet sequence “Flatirons,” which debuted in the pages of Poetry magazine, and Ernest Hilbert’s four-decker “Glacier,” which first appeared in the Oxonian Review (Yezzi’s poem later appeared in his collection Birds of the Air in 2013, Hilbert’s in his collection Last One Out in 2019). Yezzi’s poem details the spiritual effects of a hair-raising free-climb on the infamous Flatiron rock formations near Boulder, Colorado (geomorphologically speaking, a flatiron is a precipitously sloping wedge-shaped surface formed by differential erosion of a rock layer that inclines in the same direction as but at a steeper angle than an exposed slope). Hilbert’s poem describes a brutal though considerably more gradual ascent through a summer storm to the lip of the Arapaho Glacier at 12,000 feet, also in Colorado. The two other climbers alluded to in the poem are David Yezzi and Charles Doersch (who led both ascents). The book is designed in a delightful concertina, or accordion, style that extends vertically to a full 36-inch spread in the reader’s hands, thereby suggesting the dizzying heights of the summits described in the poems. The bookmaker wrapped the cloth-bound boards and glued the concertina columns entirely by hand. Books signed by both Yezzi and Hilbert are certain to become increasingly scarce. The book is currently unobtainable, having sold out in its first week of sale.

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“HILBERT, ERNIE, / SHOULD GET AN ATTORNEY . . .”: SIGNED LIMITED EDITION OF THE FIRST TROUBLED COLLABORATION BETWEEN DAVID YEZZI AND ERNEST HILBERT

YEZZI, David and HILBERT, Ernest [MOFFA, Melissa and MERCER, Jennifer]. A Fletching of Hackles, Fresh Verse by Ernest Hilbert and David Yezzi. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, 2009. Small folio, hand-sewn, paper title label, grey paper wrappers. 20pp. Measures 8 ½ by 5 ½ inches.

Signed limited edition of this delightful sequence of “dueling” clerihews and limericks, one of only 24 copies signed by designer, bookmaker, and both authors.

David Yezzi and Ernest Hilbert began trading insults as early as 2003, but it was only five years later that they began to hurl abuse at each other in poetic form (Sanders, 83). Employing comic verse forms of the clerihew and limerick, they fired broadsides at each other and were even known to time their violent verbal exchanges in the style of chess matches. Long known as ferocious enemies, each remained bent on burying the other with sheer odium, and they spent nearly a full month locked in a terrible and ceaseless mêlée that shocked and puzzled onlookers. In the summer of 2008, the two “poets” agreed to a brief and, as it turned out, fragile cease-fire, during which they compiled the inventions of their mutual loathing in what would later become A Fletching of Hackles, a collection inspired by Fescennine rituals, which contained a form of Latin occasional verse, “chiefly lascivious wedding songs, of great antiquity, which perhaps originated as ribald or abusive songs sung at harvest festivals” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth Edition.

A clerihew is a fanciful four-line poem first used by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, rhyming AABB, in irregular meter, addressing a famous historical figure. The first rhyme is traditionally given to the subject’s name, as in Bentley’s classic “John Stuart Mill, / By a mighty effort of will, / Overcame his natural bonhomie / And wrote Principles of Political Economy.” Notable clerihews have also been penned by G.K. Chesterton, Alger Hiss, and W.H. Auden, whose book Academic Graffiti is entirely devoted to the form. The limerick, a well-known comic verse form, consists of five lines rhyming AABBA in strict form, first popularized in English by Edward Lear. Because it has a long tradition of obscene subject matter, it is ideally suited for the pair’s ongoing “war of words.” By amplifying raw verbal hostility and personal abusiveness to levels “not encountered before,” Yezzi and Hilbert are thought to have “expanded the possibilities of both forms” (Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry, 532). William Logan referred to the resulting poetry as more “akin to untreated sewage” than “anything we would call civilized poetry or discourse” when reviewing it for the Washington Post Book World.

The book was computer typeset by figure skater Jennifer Mercer when she probably should have been working on something important and hand-sewn by Elven bookmaker Melissa Moffa when she would rather have been out having fun. The portraits of the authors Mercer created for the cover may actually be more physically attractive than the men themselves. The type is set in Bernhard Modern, a serif typeface produced by Lucian Bernhard for the American Type Founders in 1937 in return for a half bottle of whiskey. It is known for its wide serifs, elongated ascenders, and big bottoms (it is sometimes embarrassed by its short descenders). For those incapable of using a dictionary, a “fletching” is the arrangement of feathers on an arrow and “hackles” the long narrow feathers on the neck of a fowl that are “raised” when the bird is irritated or threatened. The two selected the title in part because Yezzi has reported that “Hilbert looks remarkably like a turkey vulture chewing a length of intestine” to which Hilbert replied “yeah, well, you look like a sick pigeon that stayed up all night drinking cheap vodka.” A Fletching of Hackles is twice cited in David Sanders’ Rare and Irrelevant (22a and 22aa) and also in the third and least-significant appendix to Adam Kirsch’s Why Did They Bother? Poetic Feuds, 1928-2009 (16d.II-iv). This series is preceded by four artists’ and authors’ proofs, not intended for distribution, which include hand-die-cut portraits on gray paper over maroon wrappers. The book is currently unobtainable, having sold out in its first week of sale.

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“SUCH ROOT SATISFACTION . . .”
SIGNED LIMITED TÊTE-BÊCHE EDITION
OF THE SECOND BOOK BY DAVID YEZZI AND ERNEST HILBERT

YEZZI, David and HILBERT, Ernest [MOFFA, Melissa and MERCER, Jennifer]. 3 X 5 [Three by David Yezzi, Five by Ernest Hilbert]. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, 2010. Small tête-bêche folio, hand-sewn, Prussian-blue, faux-snakeskin binding, cutaway title windows, stiff eggshell-blue wrappers. 16pp. Measures 8 ½ by 5 ½ inches.

Signed limited-edition chapbook featuring two sequences of poems, one each by David Yezzi and Ernest Hilbert, approaching from two directions as separate books, one of only 12 copies signed by designer, bookmaker, and both authors, only eight for sale (two authors’ and two artists’ proofs).

This sleek “snakeskin” tête-bêche (from the French “head-to-toe”) volume consists of two separate books, rotated 180° relative to each other, that may be read with equal satisfaction from either direction, as Yezzi’s “Three” or Hilbert’s “Five,” meeting at the book’s center, which features inverted mirror-facing limitation pages. Yezzi’s three contributions are the poems “Itchy,” “The Ballade of In-between,” and “Free Period.” Hilbert’s five are “Drift,” “Ashore,” “Panthera,” “4AM Cab Ride,” and “While You Were Out.” The poems originally appeared in Antioch Review, LineBreak, New Ohio Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Think Journal, Vocabula Review, and Yale Review. Both limitation pages are signed by bookmaker Melissa Moffa, designer Jennifer Mercer,  and authors David Yezzi and Ernest Hilbert, accompanied by the press’s official blue Nemean Lion chop stamp; thus all books in the series are double-signed by all four creators. Books signed by both Yezzi and Hilbert are destined to become increasingly scarce. All copies were sold two weeks before publication.

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“WE’LL HEAD OUT, YOU AND ME, HAVE A PINT, OR / MAYBE THREE, A COOL THIN ALE, LIKE SUNLIGHT”: SIX PACK POEMS BY ERNEST HILBERT

(HILBERT, Ernest) MERCER, Jennifer and MOFFA, Melissa. Six Pack Poems. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, 2009. Six brown glass 12 oz. beer bottles, original paper labels, aluminum caps, poems on hand-made paper scrolled and tied with blue silk, in white cardboard carrying container.        50¢ deposit CT, DE, HI, CA, IA, ME, MA, MI, NY, OR, VT

Signed editions of Hilbert’s promotional “six pack poems,” six beer bottles with custom labels, “brewed by Ernest Hilbert,” “contents: one sonnet,” containing six poems about beer, each signed by Hilbert, designer Jennifer Mercer, and bottler Melissa Moffa.

Jennifer Mercer’s custom beer label for Hilbert’s promotional six packs is based on her own design for Sixty Sonnets as well as vintage beer labels such as Ortlieb’s, Pabst, and Genesee. Each bottle contains a poem from Sixty Sonnets that references beer: “Church Street,” “A Few Drinks and We’re All Poets,” “Cautionary Tale; or, What Comes Up Must Come Down,” “Up Late on a Work Night: A Lament,” “Improprieties,” A Sad Last Number for the Gentlemen at the Tavern.” The six packs are periodically available at Hilbert’s readings in bars such as KGB and Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. The first six pack was numbered, though bottles were distributed to different recipients. Later editions are not limited, and there is no intention of limiting the series in the future.

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“SCARCEST OF ALL HILBERTIANA”

(RED HEN PRESS) HILBERT, Ernest. Sixty Sonnets Chocolate Bar. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2009. Chocolate bar (sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, cocoa processed with alkali, milk fat, lactose, soy lecithin, PGPR, vanilla, artificial flavor, milk) housed in beige pictorial paper wrapper over folded silver foil. Measures 7 by 2 1/2 inches, 1 inch thick.

One of an unknown quantity manufactured by Hilbert’s publisher Red Hen Press for promotional use at the launch and signing event for Hilbert’s first book Sixty Sonnets (Associated Writing Programs conference, Chicago, February 2009).

It is assumed most copies were consumed by book fair browsers over the three days of the conference. The only known remaining copy (pictured) resides in the personal collection of the author and is considered the scarcest of all Hilbertiana. A charming piece of publishing ephemera and a glimpse into the increasingly bizarre world of author promotion.

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“KEEPING WITH THE TRADITION”

(RED HEN PRESS) HILBERT, Ernest. AoYotGE [All of You on the Good Earth] Beer Coaster. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2013. Square Pulpboard Coaster, 3.375 inches square.

250 beer coasters manufactured as promotional giveaways with a design adapted by Jennifer Mercer from the cover of Ernest Hilbert’s second full-length commercial poetry collection, All of You on the Good Earth.

In keeping with the tradition of beer-related items (see Six Pack Sonnets) used to promote Ernest Hilbert’s books, the coasters were distributed by the publisher and at public readings given by the author, many of which occurred in drinking establishments, beginning with the publication party and record release [Elegies & Laments] upstairs at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia.  One of the more unusual items of Hilbert ephemera. Increasingly scarce.

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Publisher’s merchandise associated with Hilbert’s books and album includes (clockwise from top left) Sixty Sonnets refrigerator magnet, AOYOTGE post card, AOYOTGE vinyl sticker, AOYOTGE beer coaster, Elegies & Laments vinyl sticker, and Sixty Sonnets vinyl sticker. Collect all seven!

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Caligulan Beer Koozies. All of You on the Good Earth boasted its own shot glass. Caligulan continues the tradition with a series of 30 black Caligulan beer koozies. Beyond the 30 black copies issued is one out-of-series red koozie from a test run. The koozies were produced by DevilFish Ink Graphic Design, housed in the Philadelphia Brewery Building in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. The series sold out, and the single red test pressing resides in the private collection of Stephen Lang, the Lyons Keeper of Collections for the Asian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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“OB / Original Barbarian.” T-shirt, black, four sizes with one toddler size, limited to 24 silk-screened and one out of series. Designed by Jennifer Mercer after Hilbert’s idea for aging metal heads assuming a variant on “OG’s” or Original Gangsters. Shirts were distributed to regular attendees of Hilbert’s semi-annual “Metal Nights.”

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“CAL.” T-shirt, black, 100% cotton. This is a unique item, commissioned by Ernest Hilbert and designed by Jennifer Mercer. It depicts American poet Robert Lowell alongside his nickname “Cal,” which was given to him by classmates as a boy. His rough and imperious behavior earned him the epithet which refers either to Caliban, the wild man “not honour’d with a human shape” of William Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest, or the Julio-Claudian Roman emperor Caligula, infamous for his brutal and capricious reign (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus earned the nickname Caligula, which is the diminutive of caliga, or “small soldier’s boot,” while campaigning with his father in Germania). Diantha Parker recalls in an essay how her father remembered young Lowell as “someone other boys seemed instinctively to shun,” going on to add that her father believed that “there was a darkness wherever [Lowell] went.” There is only one shirt. No copies will be made.

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“I’VE KNOWN BEAUTY ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE / TO BELIEVE”:  LIMITED-EDITION SIGNED LETTERPRESS BROADSIDE OF ERNEST HILBERT’S POEM “LAST RITES” WITH ARTWORK BY HIS SON

HILBERT, Ernest (Ian Hilbert). “Last Rites.” Broadside signed. Essex County, MA: Tollund Press, 2021. Measures 12 by 18 inches. Letterpress printed in two colors on 12″ x 18″, 118-lb. 100%-cotton cover stock.

Limited edition letterpress broadside of Ernest Hilbert’s fatherhood poem “Last Rites,” including “Ian’s Arrow,” an artwork created by the poet’s son, Ian, 24 numbered and signed copies (four copies hors de commerce).

In 2020, Christian Schoenberg, the founder of Tollund Press, obtained a 5,950-pound Original Heidelberg Platen Press and refurbished it over the course of a year, having missing parts machined locally or sent from as far away as China. While visiting the press in Essex County, Massachusetts, the author’s son was asked by the publisher to “draw anything” that came to his mind. The resulting artwork, known as “Ian’s Arrow,” was first accomplished in pencil, then inked over with ballpoint pen and then further widened with marker by the young artist, who was 5 years old at the time. The image was then transferred to a photopolymer plate for printing.

The poem and artwork are printed on 12″ x 18″, 118-lb. 100%-cotton cover stock on an Original Heidelberg Platen Press manufactured in Germany by the fabled Heidelberger Druckmaschinen. The poem is set in Hoefler & Co’s Surveyor (designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in homage to the characteristic form of lettering on engraved maps) and Gotham (a sans-serif with geometric structure designed by Tobias Frere-Jones with Jesse Ragan and inspired by mid-twentieth-century architectural signs). The numbering in felt-tip pen was performed by Ann Drourr. The broadside features the official red-ink Nemean Lion chop stamp on the reverse, dated in Hilbert’s hand. The poem first appeared in The Hudson Review, Autumn 2019, Volume LXXII, No. 3.

It is the first broadside issued by the press.

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“I FACE AN OCEAN, ITS LURID RUSH AND PULL”: LIMITED-EDITION SIGNED BROADSIDE FROM TOLLUND PRESS

HILBERT, Ernest. Franco Salas-Borquez. “Pelagic.” Broadside signed. Essex County, MA: Tollund Press, 2022. Letterpress printed in two colors on 17” x 7” 100% cotton text stock (bottles) or 100% cotton 1-ply (unbottled).

Limited-edition letterpress broadside of Ernest Hilbert’s swimming poem “Pelagic,” including artwork created by Chilean artist Franco Salas-Borquez, signed by the poet, sixty total copies, six on smaller paper bottled—three released into the Gulf Stream in the spring of 2022—fifty-four larger format unbottled, six copies hors de commerce. Three sealed “poems in a bottle” were stowed aboard The Charlotte, a J120, 40-foot sloop, and borne along the course of the 2022 June Newport-Bermuda Race, known as the “Thrash to the Onion Patch,” which takes places largely in the Gulf Stream, where the bottles were set loose from the vessel.

The cresting wave art was created by Franco Salas-Borquez, a Paris-based Chilean painter and sculptor born into a seafaring family on the island of Chiloé. Borquez’s dramatic large-scale seascapes capture primordial sense of elemental terror in the chaos of storms and fierce currents. The line-drawing was commissioned and created for this broadside. It was digitized and then transferred to a photopolymer plate for printing.

The six broadsides in bottles are printed on 100% cotton text stock (118 gsm, 8 pt) and the fifty-four unbottled broadsides on 100% cotton 1-ply cover stock (318 gsm, 20 pt). All sheets printed on a 5,950-pound Original Heidelberg GT. The poem and its title are set in Mathew Butterick’s font Equity, an elegant variation of Times, originally designed for clarity and legal use. The colophon is set in Orpheus, designed by Kevin King and Patrick Griffin after “late 1920s designs by Walter Tiemann, who had an impressive talent for combining classic Roman proportions and Art Deco sensibilities.”

The broadside features the official blue-ink Nemean Lion chop stamp on the reverse, dated in Hilbert’s hand. The numbering in felt-tip pen on the limitation was accomplished by Ann Drourr. The poem first appeared in The Hopkins Review, Volume 13, Number 2, Spring 2020 and again in the book Storm Swimmer, UNT Press, 2023. The broadside includes a description card printed on the Heidelberg. Grains of sand collected by the poet in the Florida Keys was added by the printer to the six bottles. Grains of Himalayan salt were also added in order to absorb humidity and moisture from the corks. The bottles were corked using a Grifo Italian Floor Corker. The bottles were sealed with navy blue sealing wax manufactured by Blended Waxes, Inc. Vice Commodore Richard L. West of the Stamford Yacht Club released the bottled poems into the gulf stream during the June 2022 Newport-Bermuda Yacht Race. Two earlier strikes of the broadside on different paper were destroyed as the inking was deemed insufficiently even.

It is the second broadside issued by the press.

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“BEEHIVES AND BELLBOTTOMS ALWAYS STAY IN STYLE”: FINE LIMITED EDITION LETTERPRESS BROADSIDE

HILBERT, Ernest and ALGEO, Robert James. “All of You on the Good Earth.” Upper Montclair, NJ: Printed by Wolfe Editions for Temporary Culture, 2008. Oblong broadside. Measures 15 by 11 inches.

Signed limited edition broadside featuring the sonnet “All of You on the Good Earth” by Ernest Hilbert illustrated with a punch-card created by artist Robert James Algeo, and printed by David Wolfe at Wolfe Editions, Portland, Maine, in an edition of 50 numbered copies signed by the author with a smaller number additionally signed by the artist (2 copies, hors série, signed by publisher and author).

Science fiction publisher Temporary Culture commissioned poet Ernest Hilbert to compose a sonnet for its 2008/2009 New Year’s greeting. “All of You on the Good Earth” pays tribute to the heroic far-sightedness of the best science fiction writers, while also serving as a useful reminder of the short-sightedness that limits all human endeavor. Hilbert jokingly refers to “3-D videophones” operated with the now obsolete “rotary dial” once common to telephones in the last century. Bellbottoms and beehives, fads and fashions, are assumed to be permanent while science carries humanity forward. Clerks in the furthest reaches of the galaxy continue to file reports using now ancient typewriters. Milk is no longer delivered to our doorsteps, but a science fiction novelist might have once imagined clones on their appointed rounds. The poem is both homage and cautionary reminder, issued at a time of year when readers are urged to take stock of the past while cautiously planning for the future.

The title of the poem is drawn from the historic broadcast of the Apollo 8 space mission. At the end of the annus horribilis 1968, a year that saw many tragedies and civil unrest around the globe, Apollo 8 successfully circumnavigated earth’s moon, “the first human voyage to another world” according to the Boston Globe. On Christmas Eve, the crew observed the earth rising for the first time over the moon’s horizon. Commander Frank Borman later described the earth-rise as “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.” He then signed off: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

The punch-card provided by Algeo was created with online software and delivered as a digital file to the printer, David Wolfe, who used it to create a photopolymer plate for the press. This ironic technological regression—from contemporary software to digital image of early computer punch-card to plate for inking—intrigued and delighted both printer and publisher. The card printed here is characteristic of those used with IBM card processing equipment from the 1930’s onward. If processed, this punch-card will reveal a line from the Bob Dylan song “Abandoned Love”: “Won’t you let me in your room one time ’fore I finally disappear?” The song was originally penned for the 1976 album Desire but was only released to the public in 1985 on the compilation album Biograph. The type is set in the rare font Jenson Eusebius, designed by Richard Beatty and Nicolas Jenson. A lovely example of the letterpress print-maker’s art, on fine paper, bottom edge untrimmed.

Copies are now in the collections of singer Patti Smith, David G. Hartwell (editor, New York Review of Science Fiction), Michael Swanwick, Don Webb, John Crowley, the Lilly Library, the science fiction collection of Texas A&M, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Jonathan Galassi, Poetry Society of America, The Academy of American Poets, Poets House New York, Joe Haldeman, Concord Poetry Center, and the libraries of several private collectors. The last copy on the market sold before the end of 2009, and the broadside is currently unobtainable.

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“AS IF WE’RE BORN FOR WAR AND IT FOR US”: FINE PRESS LIMITED EDITION OF “AGAINST THE ART OF WAR”

HILBERT, Ernest, Henry Wessells (contributor), Judith Clute (artist). Against the Art of War. San Francisco, London, Upper Montclair: Temporary Culture, 2013. Tall octavo, hand-made paste-paper boards, 16pp.

Fine press limited edition of Ernest Hilbert’s poem “Against the Art of War” and Henry Wessell’s poem “Wars End,” with three tipped-in aquatint etchings created and printed by London-based Canadian artist Judith Clute, letterpress printed by David Wolfe of Portland, Maine, hand-bound in paste paper boards, in an edition of 26 lettered copies, signed by the authors and the artist, and five numbered copies reserved for artist, authors, and printer.

Purchase directly from the press.

In the summer of 2012, author and fine-press impresario Henry Wessells commissioned Ernest Hilbert to write an anti-war poem for a still-untitled fine-press art book to be issued as the second in a series by Temporary Culture, Wessell’s own press, which specializes in collectible science fiction and art books. The resulting poem, “Against the Art of War,” appeared first in this limited edition and was later included in Hilbert’s 2019 collection, Last One Out. The artwork for the edition was provided by Judith Clute, a Canadian artist resident in London. In 2008, Temporary Culture published Clute’s etchings along with the poem “Forever Peace. To Stop War” by Joe Haldeman, author of the science-fiction classic The Forever War (1974). Clute apprenticed to Francoise Andre and Charles Stegeman in the early 1960s, and her work has been shown internationally. David Wolfe has worked as a master letterpress printer since 1979 and renowned printmaker since 1998. He teaches at Harvard, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and elsewhere. Text and etchings are printed on 300 fsm Somerset, 100% cotton, pH neutral, mouldmade in England by St. Cuthberts Mill, internal and surface sized, 2 natural deckles. Somerset is known for its excellent quality for printmaking. The aquatint etchings are tipped to supports of Fabriano Ingres laid paper. Temporary Culture Press derives its name from a phrase that came to founder Henry Wessells in a dream while an undergraduate at Princeton. He has remarked that “upon examination, it contains a critique of the marble academy and any pretensions to cultural permanence.” Within a month of the book’s publication, all 26 lettered copies sold to private collectors as well as special collections libraries at Duke University, Yale University, the Lily Library, and Poets House in New York City. The series is sold out.

“THERE’S ONLY ONE OF ME / (IT’S NOT THE ONE YOU SEE)”
NFT OF ERNEST HILBERT’S POEM “RIDDLE ME”

HILBERT, Ernest. “Riddle Me.” New York: Opensea, 2021. Non-fungible token.

NFT edition of Ernest Hilbert’s NFT-themed poem “Riddle Me,” the first poem using rhyme and meter to be minted and sold in an encrypted digital form.

Ernest Hilbert’s poem “Riddle Me,” written specifically for use as NFT art (non-fungible token art, a form of financial security made up of digital data deposited in a blockchain, a distributed ledger), was made available for sale using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin through OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for rare digital items and crypto-collectibles housed at the Hunter College MFA program in New York City. It was posted for sale March 18, 2021 with the aid of Alexander Szymanik. Although “Riddle Me” cannot lay claim to being the first poem (or item described as a poem) issued on the crypto market as an NFT, it is the first to use meter, rhyme, and repetition, which are ancient techniques essential to many uses of the art form throughout history. While it may be charitably classed as a novelty or occasional poem, it signals the dawn of a new range of possibilities for poets and collectors of poetry first editions.

The New York Times explains that “An NFT is a piece of artwork stamped with a unique string of code and stored on a virtual ledger called a blockchain . . . when an artist uploads a piece of art and clicks a button to ‘mint’ it [it] starts a process known as mining, which involves complex puzzles, awesome computing power and a huge load of energy. That’s because Ethereum, the platform of choice for NFTs, uses a method called proof of work to create digital assets like nonfungible tokens. To successfully add an asset to the blockchain’s master ledger, miners must compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle, their computers rapidly generating numbers in a frenzied race of trial and error . . . The miner who arrives at the right answer first is the winner, and gets . . . his asset added to the blockchain.”

While crypto art may confuse some readers and pose aesthetic difficulties for others, possibly some older users, it is likely that younger ones will feel increasingly comfortable with the basic concept, as they tend to be with crypto currencies. When Walter Benjamin, in his important 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” envisioned an original painting possessing an aura—”its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”—that cannot be communicated by copies, could he have imagined an NFT, and what would he have thought of it? Where would one locate the “aura” of a poem, in the handwritten manuscript, a recording of the poet reading it aloud, a first printed edition, a first appearance on social media? Can or should poetry be assigned monetary value? Do poets deserve to be paid for their poems? If so, how?

Hilbert’s fascination with the subject of currency and workings of monetary systems began while he was enrolled at Oxford University in the 1990s working on his doctorate in the department of English Language and Literature (completed in 2000). On a whim, he acquired US dollar bills from the Royal Bank of Scotland and used a laser printer in the Middle Common Room computer facility at St. Catherine’s College to print his poem “Dollar”—a short meditation on the nature of money—directly onto the bills. The bills were then released into circulation in the United States through payment at stores and in machines that accept paper money. His more recent effort, “Riddle Me,” is a poem in the ancient tradition of the riddle, essentially a playful attempt to describe NFT art. The title hints at the solution (“Riddle Me” rhymes with “NFT”) while also working as a gruesome double entendre, as when one is “riddled” with bullets (itself a play on the sarcastic idiomatic phrase “great, just shoot me,” a sardonic quality exhibited in his poems beginning with his first commercially published books, Sixty Sonnets, 2009).

Since the sale of a single NFT work of art for nearly $70 million at Christie’s in early 2021—a digital collage titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” created by artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, over 13-and-a-half years—interest in the possibilities of crypto art has quickened, leading many aspiring artists, and now a poet, to contribute to the field. This revolution in artistic production and distribution raises many questions, some as old as art itself, and opens many new opportunities for artists and, perhaps, with poets as well. “Riddle Me” may be remembered as an early foray into the realm of NFT poetry. It is the only example of Hilbert working in this medium.

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 LIMITED EDITION POSTERS

Kara Mallon and Jennifer Mercer are part of an emerging group of exciting young designers in Philadelphia. They work in various media and have served as the exclusive designers of promotional posters for Ernest Hilbert’s appearances since 2008. Posters are issued from Hilbert’s own Nemean Lion Press for sale at specific readings. They are all currently unobtainable.

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Posters of various kinds have existed for hundreds of years, but the modern poster dates to 1870, when color lithography made mass production possible. “In little more than a hundred years,” writes poster expert John Barnicoat, “it has come to be recognized as a vital art form, attracting artists at every level, from painters like Toulouse-Lautrec and [Alphonse] Mucha to theatrical and commercial designers.” Concert posters have ranged in styles from Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Cubism, and Art Deco to the more formal Bauhaus and the often garish hippie posters of the 1960s. Posters advertising poetry readings have become popular collectors’ items on the rare book market, the most famous among them being the “Six Poets at Six Gallery,” a poster for an evening organized by Kenneth Rexroth for poets Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Kenneth Rexroth, and Jack Kerouac—“[a] remarkable collection of angels on one stage”—on October 7, 1955 in San Francisco, though it should be noted that the poster is memorable more for the event it advertised than its impromptu design. With the advent of digital production and printing technology, a new generation of poster artists has begun to expand the field of the concert poster while building upon earlier traditions. Kara and Jennifer stand out as two of the most interesting graphic artists working in this field today.

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“STRONG GRAPHIC NON-STOP LANGUAGE [SIC]”: LIMITED EDITION POSTER ADVERTISING RED HEN IN NYC, AUTUMN 2013

MERCER, Jennifer. “NC-17 ON FRIDAY THE 13TH.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, September 2013. Measures 11 by 14 inches.

Limited edition poster for the Friday September 13th Red Hen reading at KGB Bar in New York City, featuring poets Ernest Hilbert, Matthea Harvey, and Brenda Shaughnessy, hosted by Kate Gale, one of 12 numbered copies, some possibly signed by authors (and two proof copies, hors série), featuring the official Nemean Lion chop stamp on reverse.

The Motion Picture Association of America first used the rating “NC-17” (“No Children Under 17 Admitted”) in 1990 for the literary biopic Henry & June, which had initially been given an “X” rating. The “NC-17” rating has since been used to designate films of artist merit that contain “extreme emotional intensity, strong graphic non-stop language [sic], disturbing/startling images, and/or aberrational behavior” inappropriate for younger viewers but which do not necessarily constitute pornography. In addition to Helvetica Neue 65 Medium, Mercer deployed 55 Roman for variety. It is the eighth poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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 “(TO US HILARIOUS)”: LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ANNOUNCING ERNEST HILBERT, DAVID YEZZI, ELIZABETH GOLD, AND DANIEL NESTER’S READING AT ROBIN’S BOOKS, PHILADELPHIA, SEPTEMBER 2011

MERCER, Jennifer. “DEEMED TRULY NEFARIOUS (TO US HILARIOUS)”. Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, September 2011. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Limited edition poster for the September 27th, 2011, reading at Robin’s Books/Moonstone Arts Center, featuring authors Ernest Hilbert, Elizabeth Gold, Daniel Nester, and David Yezzi, one of 12 numbered copies, signed by the designer, all four authors, and host Lynn Levin (as well as two proof copies, hors série), featuring the official Nemean Lion chop stamp on reverse.

Designer Jennifer Mercer printed “DEEMED TRULY NEFARIOUS (TO US HILARIOUS)” using the unusual Hamlet Handtooled typeface on 60lb polar matte paper. “DEEMED TRULY NEFARIOUS (TO US HILARIOUS)” is taken from Ernest Hilbert’s poem “In-School Suspension” and was selected by David Yezzi for the event’s name. The poem originally appeared in The New Criterion, which Yezzi edits. The illustration, by French engraver Gustave Doré, depicts twelfth-century Occitan troubadour Bertran de Born as consigned by Dante Alighieri to the eighth circle of Hell (Canto XXVIII, Inferno), where he was punished as a sower of discord (Henry II of England believed Bertran instigated the uprising of his son Henry the Young King). In Longfellow’s translation, de Born explains: “Because I parted persons so united, / Parted do I now bear my brain, alas!” Doré’s are among the most celebrated of illustrations for Dante; they won him the cross of the Legion of Honor (see Malan, 57-58). “The varied torments of the dwellers in Hell are shown [by Doré] with minute and sometimes shocking fidelity” (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 327-28).  L’Enfer de Dante Alighieri avec les Dessins de Gustave Dore, Traduction Française de Pier-Angelo Fiorentino Accompagné du Texte Italien first appeared in Paris, published by Hachette, 1860. The plate was selected because Dante appears to be doing a “face-palm” in exasperation at the sight of de Born parading, nude, with his head held above his torso, a scene that harmonizes agreeably with the substance of the poem “In-School Suspension.” It is the seventh poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ANNOUNCING ERNEST HILBERT, TIMOTHY DONNELLY, AND MATTHEW ZAPRUDER’S READING AT ROBIN’S BOOKS, PHILADELPHIA, APRIL 2011

MERCER, Jennifer. “YOU WERE BORN TO FEEL A WAY YOU DON’T HAVE A WORD FOR.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, March 2011. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Limited edition poster for the April 12th, 2011, reading at Robin’s Books/Moonstone Arts Center to celebrate National Poetry Month, featuring poets Ernest Hilbert, Timothy Donnelly, and Matthew Zapruder, one of 12 numbered copies, signed by the designer, all three authors, and emcee, Quincy Lehr (and two proof copies, hors série), featuring the official Nemean Lion chop stamp on reverse.

Designer Jennifer Mercer printed “YOU WERE BORN TO FEEL A WAY YOU DON’T HAVE A WORD FOR” on 60lb polar matte paper. She selected the unusual GF Ordner Inverted typeface because it reminded her of plastic labels produced by portable handheld labelers produced by Dymo and other small manufacturers, common in the early 1980s before the widespread use of computer printers and the late-model Brother P-touch^®. The event borrows its name from the last two lines of Matthew Zapruder’s poem “For Hannah,” which first appeared on March 31st, 2009, in the online magazine Slate and later in his collection Come on All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010). Based on studies of chrome and body construction, automobile aficionados have identified the car parked in front of the bookstore in the background image as a 1975 Chevy Camaro, inspiration for the song “Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen (though some have insisted it is a Pontiac Firebird 1973-74). It is the sixth poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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“RAGING PASSIONS AND CLASHING SWORDS!” LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING ERNEST HILBERT AND TIM GREEN’S READING AT THE RUSKIN ARTS CLUB, APRIL 2010

MALLON, Kara. “HOLLYWOOD BABYLON.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, 2010. Measures 10 ¼ by 12 ¾ inches.

Limited edition poster for the April 11th, 2010 Red Hen Press reading at the Ruskin Arts Club in Los Angeles, featuring poets Ernest Hilbert and Tim Green, introduced by Kate Gale, one 12 numbered copies, signed by both authors (and two proof copies, hors série), featuring the Nemean Lion chop stamp on reverse.

Designer Kara Mallon’s poster makes use of several sources relating to golden-age Hollywood. A film still from D.W. Griffith’s monumental 1916 film Intolerance—which called for over 3,000 extras and covered 2,500 years of history—serves as the background for the poster. “Hollywood Babylon” refers to avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s classic account of scandal and misbehavior in pre-WWII Hollywood. Banned ten days after its first publication in 1965, the book remained unavailable until its second issue in 1975. “Raging passions and clashing swords / in the pitiless desert wastes” is the tag line for the fictitious 1951 movie (really a movie-within-a-movie) Sand Pirates of the Sahara, which appeared in 2001’s The Majestic. This event was supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it received from The James Irvine Foundation. The Ruskin Art Club, founded in 1888, is Los Angeles’ oldest cultural association. Its 1922 clubhouse was declared a Los Angeles Historical Monument in 1997. It is the fifth poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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 “I WOULDN’T WORRY ABOUT IT . . . IT’S NOT A BIG COLLEGE TOWN”: LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING ERNEST HILBERT AND MARK SCHORR’S READING AT PIERRE MENARD GALLERY,  NOVEMBER 2009

MALLON, Kara. “BOSTON POETRY UNION READING.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, March 2009. Measures 11 by 14 inches.

Limited edition poster for the November 12th, 2009 Boston Poetry Union reading at Pierre Menard Gallery on Harvard Square to celebrate the release of the second issue of 66: A Journal of the Sonnet, featuring poets Ernest Hilbert and Mark Shorr, one 12 numbered copies, signed by the designer, both authors, and three promoters (and two proof copies, hors série), featuring the official Nemean Lion chop stamp on reverse.

Cutting-edge designer Kara Mallon’s poster is part of the recent wave of minimalist, sans-serif designs that follow in the wake of the popular documentary Helvetica (2007). Helvetica, among the most common of sans-serif typefaces, was developed in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger. Advertising columnist Leslie Savan has remarked that “Helvetica has almost . . . a perfect balance of push and pull in its letters.” Mallon additionally used the Ariel font for the PO/ET/RY column design. The headline quote is taken from the rockumentary Spinal Tap. It is band manager Ian’s cagey response to the news that the Boston concert has been canceled due to lack of interest. It is the fourth poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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“UNREAL AS A SONG”: LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH READING AT HEAD HOUSE BOOKS, APRIL 2009

MALLON, Kara. “Unreal as a Song.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, April 2009. Measures 8 ½ by 11 inches on cougar uncoated white card stock.

Limited edition poster for the April 16th, 2009 “National Poetry Month” reading at Head House Books in Philadelphia, featuring Ernest Hilbert, Lynn Levin, and Paul Siegell, one 24 numbered copies, signed by all three authors and designer (an additional two proof copies, hors série, are unsigned).

“Unreal as a Song” was inspired in part by the title cards of Wes Anderson’s movies. The type is set in Futura Bold, a font preferred by Anderson both in his movies and their supporting materials. A geometric sans-serif type developed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, Futura owes much to geometric elements associated with Bauhaus design style. The type is arranged over a photograph taken by Mallon in Temple University’s Paley Library in 2007. Mallon has also designed posters for a September 2008 Bowery Poetry Club reading and an April 2009 KGB Red Room reading. This is the third in her ongoing series. “Unreal as a Song” references Hilbert’s poem “Mirage,” from his collection Sixty Sonnets. It is the third poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and  is currently unobtainable.

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“BOOKS MATTER!”: LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING RED HEN READING AT KGB BAR, APRIL 2009

MALLON, Kara. “KGB BAR.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, March 2009. Measures 11 by 14 inches.

Limited edition poster for the April 3rd, 2009 “Red Hen in New York” Reading Series at KGB Bar in Manhattan, featuring Ernest Hilbert, Elise Paschen, Timothy Green, and Greg Sanders, one 24 numbered copies, signed by all four authors and designer (and two proof copies, hors série).

Kara Mallon’s poster is part of the recent wave of minimalist, sans-serif designs that follow in the wake of the popular documentary Helvetica (2007). Helvetica, among the most common of sans-serif typefaces, was developed in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger. Advertising columnist Leslie Savan has remarked that “Helvetica has almost . . . a perfect balance of push and pull in its letters.” “Books Matter!” is the slogan for Red Hen Press and appears on their promotional merchandise. An unspecified number of copies were additionally signed by Kate Gale, publisher of Red Hen Press. It is the second poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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“THREE ON THE BOWERY”: LIMITED EDITION SIGNED POSTER ADVERTISING RED HEN READING AT BOWERY POETRY CLUB, SEPTEMBER 2008

MALLON, Kara. “POETRY & PROSE.” Poster Signed. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, September 2008. Measures 10 by 14 inches.

Limited edition poster designed to promote the September 14th, 2008 Red Hen Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, featuring Ernest Hilbert, Michael Quadland, and Adam Kirsch, limited to 10 copies signed by all three authors and host Kate Gale.

Kara Mallon’s poster is an example of appropriation or recycling of popular images in an attempt to not only repurpose their practical elements but also to breathe new life into the art form. “These days, the few non-video visuals that remain part of the music experience usually get shrunk down to fit on an iPod screen, if they show up at all. One holdout that’s not only still alive, but thriving, however, is the custom designed concert poster” (Billboard). Based on an early concert poster for the popular British band The Police, Mallon’s poster honors the DIY elements of rock music, as well as both the collage techniques of Richard Hamilton and the parody icons of British graffiti artist Bansky. Three copies of the ten printed for the event were signed by the three authors, host, and designer. The remaining seven in the series were signed by the three authors and host only. It is the first poster issued by Nemean Lion Press and is currently unobtainable.

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LIMITED-EDITION POSTER ADVERTISING
RELEASE OF THE ALBUM ELEGIES & LAMENTS
ON THE IDES OF MARCH, 2013

MERCER, Jennifer (designer) and Matthew Wright (photographer). “Ernest Hilbert with Legendary Misbehavior Record Release.” Poster. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, March 2013. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Limited-edition poster for the March 15^th (“Ides of March”) release of Ernest Hilbert’s avant-garde spoken-word album Elegies & Laments, limited to twelve unnumbered copies (and one reduced proof copy).

Despite the dismal history of attempts by rock artists and poets from the 1950s to the present to make a legitimately entertaining spoken word album, local Philadelphia rock veterans Marc Hildenberger and Dave Young remained optimistic and recorded poet Ernest Hilbert reading sixteen poems they selected from his first book, Sixty Sonnets. They then composed and performed music around the recorded poems as a “score,” as one would for a film. It soon became an untitled Pub Can Records project, with no release date and an ambiguous budget and remained that way for several years. The album that would eventually be titled Elegies & Laments grew over time to include a string orchestra (scored by young composer Christopher LaRosa), a battery of vintage instruments and electronics, mad-scientist rewirings, experimental technologies, session musicians, guest readers, and a harp.

Hilbert’s record release poster is modeled on a similar poster for lo-fi-Psychedelic rock musician Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, his fourth studio album, which was released on March 8, 2011 on Matador Records. Hilbert encountered and photographed the poster during a visit to famous Philadelphia record shop A.K.A. Records on 2^nd Street. For Hilbert’s poster, Jennifer Mercer used Helvetica Neue (T1) 77 Bold Condensed and 67 Medium Condensed fonts. The band and author photographs in the lower left and upper right of the poster were taken by photographer Matthew Wright in an abandoned warehouse in southwest Philadelphia, several blocks from Hilbert’s home, in the first week of December 2012. The album cover on the upper right was designed by Jennifer Mercer as a complement to the cover of Hilbert’s first commercially-published book, Sixty Sonnets (which also benefited from a cover designed by Mercer). The final image, of the compact disc itself, in the lower right, was designed in-house by Furnace Records, who manufactured both the compact disc (domestically) and the 180-gram white and black vinyl records (in Holland). Because Hilbert’s record release party on March 16th, 2013 (the Saturday evening before St. Patrick’s Day) was so rowdy and oversubscribed, relatively few copies of the poster were issued to the public that night (the label neglected to offer them until the end of the night, long after the live performance of the album by Ernest Hilbert with his five-piece electric band Legendary Misbehavior). Remaining copies were retained by the record label, which issued them piecemeal to members of the project and musicians who performed either on the album or live with Hilbert. The poster is now unobtainable by members of the public.

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MERCER, Jennifer. “E-VERSE EQUINOX READING SERIES.” Poster. Philadelphia: Nemean Lion Press, March 2012. Measures 14.5 by 18 inches.    

Poster designed by Jennifer Mercer to promote the new E-Verse Equinox Reading Series, inaugurated in March 2012 and hosted by Ernest Hilbert at Robin’s Books, Philadelphia, on the spring and autumn equinoxes annually, featuring both local and national poets.

The poster’s background image is the Cetus constellation as it appeared in the celestial map plate from Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia by Johannes Hevelius, 1690. “In ancient Greek, the word ketos (Ancient Greek: Κῆτος, Kētos, plural cetea Ancient Greek: κήτεα), Latinized as cetus, denotes a large fish, a whale, a shark, or a sea monster (Liddell, Henry and Robert Scott. 19406. A Greek-English Lexicon, revised by H.S. Jones and R. McKenzie, Oxford: Clarendon Press). The sea monsters slain by Perseus and Heracles were each referred to as a cetus by ancient sources. The term cetacean originates from cetus. In Greek art, cetea were depicted as serpentine fish. The name of the mythological figure Ceto is derived from ketos. The name of the constellation Cetus also derives from this word” (WP). “The Hevelius Firmamentum was the first star atlas to rival Bayer’s Uranometria in accuracy, utility, innovation, and influence. Hevelius was perhaps the most active observational astronomer of the last half of the seventeenth century. His star atlas is notable for many reasons. It contains fifty-six large, exquisite, double-page engraved star maps, each based upon drawings by the famous Polish artist Andreas Stech, who was also living and working in Dantzig at the end of the 17th century. The star positions for the charts were derived from Hevelius’s own star catalog, based on his own observations, which was first published along with the atlas. It is unique among the Grand Atlases in choosing to depict the constellations as they would appear on a globe, that is, from the outside looking in, rather than from a geocentric point of view, as Bayer and most others adopted. So Aquila and Antinous swoop down to the right, rather than to the left as in Bayer” (Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology). Readers for the series include Matthew Zapruder, Timothy Donnelly, Elizabeth Gold, Daniel Nester, Afaa Michael Weaver, George Green, Bojan Louis, Michael Dickman, Jehanne Dubrow, Catie Rosemurgy, Thomas Devaney, and David Yezzi.

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Jennifer Mercer also designs a selection of products for the E-Verse website, including key chain bottle openers, coffee mugs, shot glasses, pens, temporary tattoos, vinyl stickers, magnets, and guitar picks.

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Ernest Hilbert performance with Mercury Radio Theater

Poster designed by Greg Lytle for Ernest Hilbert’s guest appearance with conceptual post-punk band Mercury Radio Theater at the legendary Khyber Pass rock club in Philadelphia on May 8th, 2009. Lytle is a celebrated illustrator and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. The strutting robot depicted on the poster alludes to those described by H.G. Wells in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds: “I did not dare to go back towards the pit, but I felt a passionate longing to peer into it. I began walking, therefore, in a big curve, seeking some point of vantage and continually looking at the sand heaps that hid these newcomers to our earth. Once a leash of thin black whips, like the arms of an octopus, flashed across the sunset and was immediately withdrawn, and afterwards a thin rod rose up, joint by joint, bearing at its apex a circular disk that spun with a wobbling motion. What could be going on there?” The radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ adaptation by his Mercury Radio Theater players (as part of “The Mercury Theatre on the Air”) October 30th, 1938 was so convincing that it caused widespread panic among listeners. Welles’s theater company lends its name to the band Mercury Radio Theater. Ernest Hilbert performed live spoken segments of a short sequence called the “Lewis” episodes about a young boy who befriends a monster that avenges him upon his bullies. Learn more about Lytle’s work at www.gregorylytle.com.

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“SOLEMN CERMONY OF PRESIDENT,
EXECUTIVE, AND, AFTER ALL, THE POET”: FINE LIMITED-EDITION BROADSIDE

(HILBERT, Ernest) TANNY, Jessica. “Martini.” Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Public Library, 2014. Broadside. Measures 9 by 11 inches.

Signed limited edition broadside featuring the poem “Martini” by Ernest Hilbert, designed by artist Jessica Tanny and published by the Cambridge Public Library on the occasion of Ernest Hilbert’s reading there on November 13th, 2014, in an edition of 60 numbered copies, 1-10 signed by author, artist, and promoter Daniel Wuenschel, 11-25 signed by Hilbert only, and 41-50 signed by Hilbert for subscribers, including the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. All signed copies in the series include Hilbert’s Nemean Lion chop stamp.

After reading Barnaby Conrad III’s 1995 book The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic in 2010, Ernest Hilbert, a known aficionado of the martini, was inspired to compose a poem bringing together the ceremonial, historical, and what might be termed alchemical properties of the cocktail. Artist Jessica Tanny described her creative process, explaining “I initially explored various ways to express some of the themes I saw in the poem, especially the martini as a link to a different era. In the end, it was Hilbert’s explanation [in correspondence] of ‘the martini as inoculation against the disease of modernity, an embalming after a day’s battle, and, of course, a form of ritual communion’ that struck the balance for me in the chosen design. The day’s battle: the monotony of the office as represented by repeating institutional green desks. The disease of modernity: man as industry as represented by the Charles Anderson illustration. The martini as inoculation: the martinis on the desk look like permanent fixtures as they are the only thing on those desks other than the telephones.” Bluecoat is an American dry gin, introduced in 2006 by Philadelphia Distilling, described as an “‘American-style’ gin that emphasizes citrus over juniper berries.” The poem first appeared in Poetry Northeast, issue 2, fall 2012, a publication of the Boston Poetry Union, and later reprinted in the summer 2014 issue of Modern Drunkard magazine. The text is set in Futura and Bebas and printed with ink jet printer on French Smart White 100lb cover paper, hand numbered in silver pencil by Tanny.

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“REACHES FOR, AND FINDS, THE SUBLIME”: POSTER FOR ERNEST HILBERT AND DAVID BLAIR’S HASTINGS ROOM READING

(HILBERT, Ernest) FERRARO, Paul. Cambridge, MA: First Congregational Church of Cambridge, 2015. Poster. Measures 9 by 11 inches.

Poster created for Ernest Hilbert and David Blair’s appearance for the Hastings Room Reading Series at the First Congregational Church of Cambridge, MA, on November 12th, 2015, twelve copies total, six signed by the poets as well as hosts Michael Steffen and Daniel Wuenschel and designer Paul Ferraro, distributed the evening of the reading.

At the well-attended event, David Blair read poems from his 2007 book Ascension Days as well as his then-forthcoming volumes Friends with Dogs and Arsonville. Hilbert read exclusively from his third book, Caligulan, which had been published that September. Michael Steffen introduced the poets, remarking about Hilbert “the poems in Caligulan have a wonderful resonance. These new poems have something very ‘Cal’ [Robert Lowell] about them, the very personal tone and settings combined with extraordinary perceptions. The fishing boats in ‘Barnegat Light’ returning ‘as silhouettes’ is a haunting, beautiful image. At unexpected moments, Hilbert reaches for, and finds, the sublime.” Ferraro, who graduated from the New England Institute of Art, is known for the “pulse of color” and “awareness of space” in his work. The original run of posters, printed on high-quality paper and intended as a signed-limited series, mysteriously went missing the day before the reading and remain at large. Host Daniel Wuenschel hastily printed twelve copies of the present posters on lightweight paper at the Cambridge Public Library in order to hand them out the night of the reading. Six copies are known to contain the signatures of the two authors, two hosts, and designer. Other copies were posted around Cambridge that evening. A charming and scarce item of ephemera.

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“NAME CHECKS EVERYTHING FROM ZIPPOS TO STAR WARS FIGURES TO PLATO AND THOMAS EAKINS”: POSTER FOR ERNEST HILBERT AND JERICHO BROWN’S READING FOR FREQUENCY NORTH

(HILBERT, Ernest) HAMILTON, Mark and Chris Parody. Albany, NY, 2010. Poster. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Poster created for Ernest Hilbert and Jericho Brown’s appearance at the Frequency North Reading Series at the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York, printed in an unknown number of copies, distributed the week of the reading.

On March 18^th, 2010, poets Ernest Hilbert and Jericho Brown met with students at the College of St. Rose to discuss the role of the poet in America. That evening, the two delivered a reading to a full room at the college’s Events and Athletics Center, hosted by Daniel Nester, the series founder. Brown, a former speech writer for the mayor of New Orleans and professor at Emory University, read from his first book, Please (2008), which won an American Book Award. Hilbert read from his first book, Sixty Sonnets (2009), which the poster explains “name checks everything from Zippos to Star Wars figures to Plato and Thomas Eakins.” Hilbert read for half an hour despite a furious hangover acquired the night before, when he had attended a performance of David Yezzi’s verse drama On the Rocks at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. The two went drinking in area bars and ended in the small hours at the Chelsea Hotel, where Hilbert was staying with his wife. Mark Hamilton and Chris Parody, who designed the poster, are recipients of local awards for the series, including gold and silver ADDY® awards.

Critically-acclaimed poet, essayist, and memoirist Daniel Nester launched the Frequency North Reading Series in 2005. Its featured authors have included Rick Moody, Sharon Mesmer, Eduardo C. Corral, Darin Strauss, and Melissa Broder. “In creating the series . . . Nester set about to plug what he perceived as a large gap in the literary events offered in the Capital Region. He purposely designed the series to be ‘aggressively eclectic.’” Nester and a team of his assistants distributed copies of the poster to both college students and local citizens the week of the reading. The same image was issued as postcards and distributed digitally. A charming and scarce item of ephemera.

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“WE’RE VENETIAN OARSMEN, EGYPTIAN PULLERS”: FULL-COLOR LITHIC PRESS BROADSIDE

HILBERT, Ernest and HARVEY, Kyle. “Rowing in the Dawn.” Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2014. Broadside. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Full-color broadside featuring the poem “Rowing in the Dawn” by Ernest Hilbert designed by Kyle Harvey and published by Lithic Press, in an unstated limitation.

In 1994, Ernest Hilbert, recently arrived as a graduate student in the department of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, joined one of the “eights” rowing teams for his Oxford college, St. Catherine’s. The team acquitted itself soundly in that year’s Christ Church Regatta, held in the seventh week of Michaelmas term, winning two races though ultimately bested by the unrivaled Oriel squad. Years later, while living in Philadelphia, a city known for its boathouses and university rowing teams as well as Thomas Eakins’ iconic paintings of rowers such as the champion Biglin Brothers, Hilbert revisited his mornings on the Isis River in the poem “Rowing in the Dawn.” The poem first appeared in the Oxonian Review and is slated for inclusion in the collection Last One Out.

Designer Kyle Harvey remarked that “the words ‘oak,’ ‘dark,’ ‘dock,’ ‘clunk,’ ‘oarlocks,’ ‘clink’ are all vividly replicative of the sounds that wood, metal and water make. The combination of these words with the title led me to think of light in the morning, the air on the water, these sounds before the sounds of day dull them to our listening. Dawn is a magical time on the water. The primary image is a photo of courtesy of the National Rowing Foundation’s Hall of Fame. I collaged and overlaid a handful of layers to try and compliment the color and sounds of the water and sky at dawn.” Lithic Press was found by Danny Rosen in 2006. Formerly an astronomer and geologist, Rosen now devotes his energies “all manner of fine poetry presentations” with Lithic Press, which specializes in chapbooks, full-length poetry collections, and broadsides. Copies are available from Lithic Press or directly from the author while supplies last.

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“A SUNKEN ISLE / I’VE NAMED ATLANTICA”: FINE COLOR BROADSIDE

HILBERT, Ernest and HARVEY, Kyle. “Atlantica.” Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2014. Broadside. Measures 11 by 17 inches.

Full-color broadside featuring the poem “Atlantica” by Ernest Hilbert designed by Kyle Harvey and published by Lithic Press, in an unstated limitation.

Though the “Atlantica” of the poem is purely an invention of the poet’s imagination, the term does, in fact, refer to an oceanographic formation. “Atlantica (Greek: Ατλαντικα; Atlantika) is the name given to an ancient continent that formed during the Proterozoic about 2,000 million years ago (two billion years ago, Ga) from various 2 Ga cratons located in what is now West Africa and eastern South America. The name, introduced by John Rogers 1996 (‘A History of Continents in the Past Three Billion Years,’ The Journal of Geology), was chosen because the continent opened up to form the South Atlantic Ocean” (Wikipedia). The poem appears in Hilbert’s 2015 collection Caligulan.

Designer Harvey Kyles explains that the poem’s “words all lend themselves to geometric mapping lines. There is a sense of nostalgia and mystery to the poem that reminded me of a treasure map or exotic local. I Googled antique maps, which are a favorite of mine in collaging anyway, and once again layered the image.” Copies are available from Lithic Press or directly from the author while supplies last.

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“A FEW DRINKS AND WE’RE ALL POETS”

(HILBERT, Ernest) LANG, Stephen. “A Few Drinks and We’re All Poets.” Philadelphia: NP, 2013. Fan poster. Measures 7 ½ by 7 ½ inches.

Full-color fan art by Stephen Lang, using the title of Hilbert’s poem “A Few Drinks and We’re All Poets” from the “Legendary Misbehavior” chapter of his debut collection, Sixty Sonnets, limited to three copies, located in the homes of Lang and Hilbert and also in the kitchen at the Philadelphia office of Bauman Rare Books. A charming example of fan art. 

We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint, or
Maybe three, a cool thin ale, like sunlight,
Or a lager, toke the dregs of the day.
We’ll catch up, slide down, the barmaid will pour
And we’ll lean back from the compulsory fight
Over a highborn lady or new play.
A few shots, icy beaker of thinned gin,
Warm welcome of a good whiskey, and not
One moment to spare, as the bell will have rung.
They will pat you for guns on the way in,
And you’ll have a fine time, if you don’t get shot.
This is our last stark, sad chance to feel young.
What else to say of our faint star-fall town,
But we’ve sunk so low, we might as well drown.

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ON THE POETRY OF ERNEST HILBERT

These sixty new sonnets [All of You on the Good Earth] find Ernest Hilbert, “an earnest / Pilgrim of some kind,” charging up to the ruins of a shared and personal past as well into the ether of his own (mostly) earthbound head. Part shaman, part showman, he reaches his hand in, winks, and with a flourish, produces one little marvel after another. Like Lowell before him, Hilbert has found in the sonnet a form of confinement that excites and accommodates a liberality of temperaments, rhetorics, bad thoughts and big ideas, but where Lowell favored blank verse, Hilbert surprises with rhymes he unwinds with preternatural finesse. His material ranges from the all too familiar to visionary moments in which our debauchery brings us to “fall apart like ancient stars” or to witness a vaseful of stargazer lilies “unfastening like a vast nebula” with a “long pour of poisonous gas.” Retrospective, forward-looking, tonic and toxic, All of You on the Good Earth is a wonder of a book, and Hilbert’s best yet.

– Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

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Ernest Hilbert’s sure-footed poems have the breathless urgency of a man telling others the way out of a burning building. Unafraid to startle, often winning out over recalcitrant material, they score astonishing successes. A bold explorer with few rivals, Hilbert enlarges the territory of traditional form. Sixty Sonnets may be the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.

– X.J. Kennedy, author of Lords of Misrule and editor of Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

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Hilbert unerringly assumes the burdens of clarity. He knows the thing and has no lack of means to tell you about it, ravishingly. He pummels the sonnet-form back to life, breathing into it the whiskey-breath of the here-and-now. Hilbert has a gift for simile, metaphor, and phrasing. I can picture Hilbert in a drunken brawl with Christopher Marlowe. I mean this as a compliment. Hilbert holds his own.

– The New Criterion

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Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer is a gleaming cornucopia of dreams, nightmares, tenderness, and grace. In Hilbert we encounter the poet as allegorical realist: a seer who has “known beauty almost impossible / To believe, nearly always lost amid / All the usual distractions.” This is a rare book, both willing and able to capture the wide and relentless range of the human condition in its varying lights and shadows, and in settings spanning the mundane, the tawdry, and the sublime. Storm Swimmer is a book of great feeling and of great technical skill. Everything in it is sacrificed for poetry, which is why everything in this beautiful book lives.

– Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Living Weapon

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In Storm Swimmer, fatherhood is neither one-dimensional nor short-sighted; instead, fatherhood is a nexus, rigged with grace and curiosity—an enduring gift for a son and for readers. Toggling between the natural world and the relentless spectacle of contemporary life, acutely aware of the passage of time, Ernest Hilbert’s poems are marvelously built, resonant.

– Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems

* * *

Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer is a book of light and darkness enacted on scales personal (particular and intimate in its rendering of the bonds of fatherhood) and sweeping (societal, environmental)—often simultaneously. Throughout, the ocean’s push and pull is literal—littoral—and figurative—metaphorical, yes, but also “representing forms that are recognizably derived from life”—all definitional italics mine, of course, though the emphasis is all Hilbert’s, a patterning of attentive sound, sight, and specificity that calls to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’s instress, inscape. While the sublime of the natural world carries its own beauty and terror in Storm Swimmer, the booty and error of the Anthropocene, freighted with consumer stuff and consuming violence, pulls the reader in (and under) as well. As the book tips past its midpoint, we see ourselves in the storm (the repetition of “We’ve never seen a storm like this before” in “Visitation”); we see ourself in the oceanic depths (activated in “Range” by a gun’s report “Surging on the seafloor of my skull”). In Hilbert’s poems, the internal and external blur, while the language lights a way forward through the fog.

– Dora Malech, author of Flourish

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Ernest Hilbert’s ambitious book Storm Swimmer—it includes epigraphs in Greek from Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes—is a meditation on fatherhood and on the human legacy bequeathed to a young son, culminating in a poem appropriately indebted to Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” But this tender domesticity also achieves a pelagic reach, as the collection begins and ends with ocean swimming. The fact that one of its maritime settings is Corson’s Inlet on the New Jersey shore, where poet A. R. Ammons revolutionized the relation between thought and poetic line in a way that sparked Projectivism, is indicative too of the verbal and formal resourcefulness of this collection. And its cultural range is no less wide—from Mozart’s K. 265 or Fauré’s Requiem to a Heavy Metal tribute night.

– Karl Kirchwey, author of The Engrafted Word

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Ernest Hilbert has always written from the ragged edge between tradition and the present moment, and now he goes for a deeper immersion, a swimmer in life, aware of its most desperate and beautiful currents. Here we have the consolations of family life, but also the desolation and waste of pornography and the art world—even rhymed couplets on a semi-automatic pistol. The sea has taught him to ride out the detritus of existence, to see it but not be consumed by it, and his forms give spine to his vision. Storm Swimmer is his strongest book so far, urgent and real.

– David Mason, author of Pacific Light

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Hilbert has an appetite for life equal to his taste in literature: a rare combination in an age of dissociated sensibility. In these sonnets, whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell’s, Hilbert is alternately fugitive and connoisseur, hard drinker and high thinker. But he is always a true poet, proud to belong to the company of those who still feel “The last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”

– Adam Kirsch, senior editor for The New Republic and author of The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

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Both in title and subject matter of the many of the poems, Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, engages with natural forces in a way relatively unique in the modern world, one in which he is truly encompassed by them. Poems like “Storm Swimmer” come alive in moments of true immersion in waters alive in seldom perceived ways.

–  North of Oxford

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Last One Out is pitch perfect, both in tone and musicality. One is stopped often by the sonority, the stunning lines and phrases embedded in the seemingly straightforward approach of the language. The insight, the intersection with the world, rings true poem after poem after poem. What a good book.

– David Sanders, author of Compass & Clock

* * *

Ernest Hilbert has written some of the most elegant poems in American literature since the loss of Anthony Hecht. A fascinating blend of the Augustan and romantic (an Augustanism that flirts with the sweaty Rochester as much as the marmoreal Johnson, and a romanticism charged with as much street grit as lyricism and longing), with a cadence that can be as wickedly eloquent as Lowell or compressed, as an elegantly held fist, as Bishop, Hilbert holds tight to an understanding of poetry and the role of the poet—proud without complacency, authentic without cheapness, self-respecting and self-mocking—that is (thank God) not particularly popular in poetic circles today. . . He, or his poetic persona, moves across the world, an “earnest pilgrim,” from the necropolis at Vulci to Iwo Jima, to the bars of TriBeCa and the back alleys of Queens, to Senecan Rome, “from Grub Street to the Brill Building,” to the “dark suburbs” (“The insatiable sprawl thieves as it gives,” as he says in a memorable line in a book packed, jammed, and o’erbrimming with lines you will want to linger over, savor, like the wines of Helicon), to New Jersey’s Mullica River, to a graveyard in Philadelphia . . . Any page you open to contains, not a gem, but a treasury, a manuscript of illuminations, lapis lazuli and gold, even when the poet is watching his key chain spatter down a toilet bowl in a late New York club night. He describes, like a Milton cast away in the alleys, what he sees on a bleak night in the slums of a great, wounded city, or in the hungover misery of a bus ride down the east coast’s suburban sprawled flank, in a poverty-stricken childhood home life among “the peculiar clan at cul-de-sac’s end,” in the fissile fossilizing of a convention of archaeologists, in a list (far from incomplete) of America’s robust negatives, in a pixilated Oscar acceptance speech and a rancid envy’s tongue lashing of revenge—all without missing a beat or a foot.

– Christopher Bernard, Synchronized Chaos 

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The poems of All of You on the Good Earth are tighter and brighter than those of Sixty Sonnets. It’s clear that Hilbert’s verse is not “sentenced to stay still.” The book “rolls and glows” through another sixty sonnets (an appellation one should not utter in Mr. Hilbert’s presence unless you’re buying a copy of the book from him and a drink for him) with an ear that has developed beyond what A.E. Stallings called “the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech” in Hilbert’s first collection. Far more than his previous work or the work of most other poets today, Hilbert in All of You on the Good Earth lets his poems live within the sound of words, meaning not subordinated to sound like in a Stein poem but enhanced and enlivened by it as in the best words of Eliot or Plath. This is a fine collection.

– Literary Magnet

* * *

Ernest Hilbert [possesses] a wealth of imagination wedded to honesty of insight, integrity of vision, respect for form, and delight in the harmonies of language (including a strong appreciation for the Anglo-Saxon roots of English prosody that subtly inflects his own practices) that is second to none. His latest book, his fourth major collection, establishes him, I believe, as one of our leading poets. I always expect rich, fine gifts from Hilbert, and always get more than I expected. Last One Out is elegant and athletic, eloquent and brave, deeply thought and felt; the work of someone who, if we survive, may well become one of our classics. Poems like these helped make me fall in love with poetry when I was a teenager. May they have the same effect on some young reader today. – Synchronized Chaos

* * *

“Hilbert’s poems are good enough to choose virtues that run somewhat against the grain of present society. He portrays a remarkably witty and cool character on the downhill slide thrust upon our humanity by heartbreak and grief. At the same time, the presence of mind demonstrated by the composition of the poems and of Hilbert’s physical presence as a reader, affable and measured, reassure us of his survival, aplomb and fruition from that time of fire and rain.” – Boston Area Small Press and Poetry

* * *

Hilbert arrives before us by devious routes. Having received a doctorate from Oxford, we would expect him to show up in a faculty lounge, sporting tweeds—but the next chapter of his life begins in New York, on the punk rock scene. But just as we get used to the idea of Hilbert as raffish outsider, he shows up working for Random House and curating readings at the Whitney. Aha! We say. A Manhattanite creature of publishing and art! But just as we think we have him pegged again, he’s off to Philadelphia, to take up a position with America’s foremost dealer in rare books. And all the while he’s writing, writing, writing . . . – 2017 Poets’ Prize Citation

* * *

Just as all life once sprang from the sea, so too do the subjects and strengths of these poems. The work of an experienced poet approaching the height of his powers, Storm Swimmer truly is a collection—to modify a phrase from Norman Maclean—both haunted and nurtured by waters. – The Spectator

* * *

Just as the work of the modernists showed that the best free verse usually has something masterfully formal about it, Hilbert’s fine collection might serve to remind us that the best formal poetry has about it a marvelous colloquial freshness and inventiveness, and the ring of an actual human voice. It is a touching and intelligent book.

– Franz Wright, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

* * *

Ernest Hilbert has dared to wear the mantle of the public poet. Critics often compare Hilbert to Robert Lowell, not only because he allows his personal demons a say in his poetry, but also because, in many of his poems, his intended audience is not one reader or a small group of aficionados, but our nation, these hardly-united States—whether or not our nation is willing to listen.

– Newburyport Literary Festival 2020, “Public Poems and Private Songs: The Poetry of Ernest Hilbert”

* * *

Sixty Sonnets delights in a decidedly badass bravura. Hilbert’s red-blooded diction and febrile subjects put paid to any lingering suspicions about traditional verse’s chronic anemia. His erudition is salted with humor, his romantic flights with a rage for order. He is a twenty-first century beatnik in Elizabethan ruff. A smashing debut!

– David Yezzi, author of Azores and The Hidden Model

* * *

There’s much pleasure, clarity, and discipline to the way Ernest Hilbert looks around him in Caligulan, at the complicated textures of city and landscape, and at all the stuff, the materials, the detritus, that make up a place, a time, and a life. In these easily formal, easily idiomatic poems you’ll read about a dishwasher—his “arsenal of cutlery, / The spider-eggy fluff / That clings like mold to crockery”—and you’ll also meet the stuffed moose at a science museum: “You still startle, filling half the false sky . . . . // You tower / In the same black forests I’ve traveled lately.” Hilbert gets the details right, and he also gets the emotions right. “The smoke alarm fails, and your computer crashes” while an ATM is “pitiless, displays a message for / Insufficient Funds.” But there’s also this: “You want to fight. / You spit and shout. In daydreams you sing.” This is a book full of the real, and also full of heart.

– Daisy Fried, author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice

* * *

Though a constant trembling of anguish informs many of these poems, like a quiet ostinato rumbling constantly in the bass, what is most notable is how the poet’s anxieties are, in the main, transmuted from personal spasms of what sometimes feels like merely neurotic terror into objects of great beauty, a beauty that transforms the anguish that generated them into victories, however temporary, of grace.

– Synchronized Chaos

* * *

The American lyric rendered in these poems follows Coleridge’s description of the sonnet as “adapted to the state of a man violently agitated by a real passion.” Hilbert’s passion here is to contain, precious piece by precious piece, the unordinary quotidian of the American poetic. Sixty Sonnets is a gift to all of us from an exceptional ear and a fine consciousness.

– Afaa Michael Weaver, author of Multitudes

* * *

“Caligulan delivers on all of its title’s promise. Every poem evokes the world we live in: we know something is wrong and, in a minute, will likely be worse; but there’s beauty in the portent and in the self-awareness we need to see it. Hilbert’s remarkable ability to draw a scene so clear you immediately make yourself at home, and so suggestive you want to get out because you know you can’t settle in, makes this collection a page-turner in a way most poetry books can never be.”

– Erica Dawson, author of Big-Eyed Afraid

* * *

For scale alone, the project at first seems improbable. But then you read, and it’s clear that Hilbert’s sensibility, bright-hued and gothic, sentimental, precise and ambitious, could be contained by no less. These wry and lovely poems are for anyone whose curiosity ranges from Petrarch to improv, and the result is a complex portrait of the America of our current era—composed in singing verse!

– Dave King, Rome-prize winning author of the novel The Ha-Ha

* * *

Like the minutes of the hour, these Sixty Sonnets both combine to make a whole and shine as individual moments. While groups of these sonnets occasionally suggest a narrative—refreshingly, like the fugitives and weary academics that people these pages—they work alone. The newspaper crime blotter itself, from which, perhaps, some of these incidents are torn, speaks up as a single sonnet. Here are barflies, high-school dropouts, retired literary critics, washed-up novelists and war-zone reporters, suburbanites and historians, and lyrics with a range of reference from Zippos and Star Wars figures to George Gissing and Thomas Eakins. Mostly in a decasyllabic line that allows for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech, these sonnets tend to conclude in true iambic pentameter, the tradition that haunts rather than dominates these poems. It is the voice of a less lyrical Prufrock (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the “fuck-ups,” the “Gentlemen at the Tavern”—but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona—the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself—as much listener as talker—something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter.

– A.E. Stallings, poet and translator of Lucretius’s Nature of Things for Penguin Classics

* * *

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, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America

* * *

Hilbert, one of our greatest contemporary poets, writes of psycho-mythical rapture as easily as garbage and urban decay, oftentimes in the same poem. A master of the seedy vignette, the deliciously vivid image, the imaginative flight of fancy, Hilbert has recently explored poignant new dimensions of paternal love and mortality, proving ever more definitively that there is nothing he cannot do.

– Loganberry Books

* * *

Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests—and thus it’s a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of “She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico” to the ironic call-and-response of “Fortunate Ones” to the elegiac fatalism of “White Noise” Hilbert takes the reader on a bravura run through seemingly every variation of tone and style that the sonnet can contain. It’s a craftsman’s book, a revival of form best summed up by the opening lines of “Song”: “A song for those who learn forgotten, slow / Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce.”

– Levi Stahl, poetry editor, Quarterly Conversation

* * *

[Sixty Sonnets] delivers the full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do. . . . We might see Hilbert as being God in these poems—as taking the all-gathering view of the merciful God who has room for all these lost ones, right along with the desperate fugitives, retired literary critics, crime victims, lovers, and godfathers. The poet as indwelling creator spirit? It fits for Hilbert: poet, from poietes, maker.

– RATTLE

* * *

One of his generation’s most interesting poets.

– The Hudson Review

* * *

The poems in Caligulan have a wonderful resonance. These new poems have something very “Cal” [Robert Lowell] about them, the very personal tone and settings combined with extraordinary perceptions. The fishing boats in “Barnegat Light” returning “as silhouettes” is a haunting, beautiful image. At unexpected moments, Hilbert reaches for, and finds, the sublime.

 – Michael Steffen, introduction at the Hastings Room Series, Cambridge, Massachusetts

* * *

Something is understood in these poems, not nailed down, but touched, glimpsed, adumbrated, glossed, caught only to be given back; the poems are built to move and live.

–  Hopkins Review

* * *

[Ernest Hilbert’s] poems are beautifully made in their diction. The intelligence is clear.

– Donald Hall

* * *

I took great pleasure in All of You on the Good Earth. [Hilbert has] a fantastic command of form that is bolstered by vernacular. I love the ending of “Soprano’s Lament,” for example.  There’s a wonderful diction that reminds me of my favorite poet, Auden, and also a dash of Ted Berrigan of the sonnets.  [Hilbert’s] touch is always of the best mind but also the down-to-earth perspective–radios paint-speckled, sirens, pissing lynxes . . .

– John Skoyles, author of Secret Frequencies: A New York Education

* * * 

Ernest Hilbert is one of the finest poets writing in the formal traditions of U.S. and European poetry. He is a master of craft, measure, and music. His poem “Domestic Situation” has taken on the status of cult classic, widely performed and anthologized.

– New Dublin Press

* * *

Ernest Hilbert is a formalist, and a skilled one. He is well aware of the poem’s ability to wrest itself away from the poet (this is, after all the subject of “Kite”), but he is also aware of the shaping power of the imagination, and how it can redeem a world of dread. It is this exalted sense of the power of the act of poetic making that truly marks Hilbert as a Romantic, more so even than his love of nature or his occasional flirtations with the notion of the alienated poète maudit. And, while the poems of Caligulan come to us from a political era now ended, this faith in imagination as a cure for pervasive dread marks Hilbert as an important poet for the new and dreadful era of American public life upon which we are now entering. It will be a Caligulan time, for which we will need books like this.

– Literary Matters, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

* * *

I’m deeply moved by Ernest Hilbert’s new collection—his fifth—called Storm Swimmer. That title captures the harrowing action of this book perfectly. In these poems, the joys of fatherhood are hounded by the certainty of death, the undeniable delicacy of human life set against the beautiful chaos of nature. But ultimately it’s not the shadow of despair that colors these pieces; it’s the flame of his resistance. “I know we’re dust,” he writes, “and stardust too, but more.”

– Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club

* * *

As anti-pastoral as Hilbert can be, he shares Robert Frost’s commitment to describing impressions as precisely as possible, which may offer, as it did Robert Frost, a “momentary stay against confusion,” even if such descriptions can lead to contradictory conclusions . . . . The music of Caligulan is, by turns, smooth and jagged. This is by design. Poetry reflects and clarifies complexity . . . . An honest volume for dishonest times, Caligulan reminds us that “thunder / Sinks your song, because, like the day of birth, / The day you’ll wake and have your death is set.” It “just hasn’t happened yet.”

– Washington Free Beacon

* * *

The only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.

– Strong Verse

* * *

[Hilbert’s] that rare thing these days, a sonneteer, but he brings a conversational vibrancy to the form that continually pushes against its constraints even as it draws strength from them. And, oh, the pleasures he takes in sound and rhythm and rhyme! “Taped up, damp now, smeared photo of the stray / On each scratched steel lamppost along the way.”

– ivebeenreadinglately.com Book of the Year (Poetry), 2013

* * *

Caligulan may have a lurid cover and title and you may be able to purchase t-shirts advertising the book in a bespoke heavy metal font, but such paraphernalia should not distract us from Hilbert’s very high ambitions for his poetry. Individual poems can function in a similar manner to the book as a whole: distracted by his sometimes disheveled persona, you may want initially to compare this poet to someone like Bukowski, which is by no means a mean comparison to make, but I think that Hilbert writes very carefully to make himself heir to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.

–  Edward Clarke, author of The Spirit of Poetry

* * *

Hilbert insists that perspective, where and how we are when we observe, is everything. . . . Just as Hilbert observes his modern world, he also reflects on the past, not his past, but that of humanity. He does so as if he were there, as if he were able to time-travel and seize these moments for future examination. A denizen of the present and an admirer of the past, Hilbert doesn’t overlook the not-so-pristine images of industrialism or modernity, but he also does not herald the great histories. Instead, he delves into both, mixing old and new, reaching for truth as he sees it, using one of the most classical literary forms, each sonnet a small window looking out to the larger view.

– Glassworks

* * *

Who gets away with rhyming “looker” and “fuck her”?  Ernest Hilbert does, that’s who. And who among us has a sonnet form named after them? Why, it’s Ernest Hilbert yet again. “Be glad you’re not too stupid, or too short,” he advises, being neither of those things himself.

– Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Heaven, Harlot, and Hausfrau

* * *

Ernest Hilbert, in Sixty Sonnets, reminds us how vigorous and fun a form the sonnet is. That the form is still fecund becomes abundantly clear when one sits down with this collection and reads four, seven, nine sonnets at a sitting. . . . These sixty leave one hungry for sixty more.

– Library Thing

* * *

The work of art that moves through summer to spring is the work of an optimist. So don’t let the title fool you. As the star under which the poems in this collection move, the title Caligulan is brutal and yet beautiful, highly refined and yet enticingly diurnal. Moved by beauty, attuned to the sublimity of natural things, livened by paradox, coaxed into song by pentameter, Ernest Hilbert’s rich new book covers more emotional ground than a reader has any right to expect of a poet writing in this muted and mumbling world we have made for ourselves. “Caligulan” poems like “Squirrel Hill” are hard to come by. And when you come to them you feel grateful for such a luscious reminder of how poetry can honor the life lived, the live taken from us, and the life still to be lived. Indeed, Caligulan is a timely reminder that the only tyrant that can take poetry away from us is us.

– Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Heaven

* * *

When a formal poem is doing its job well, it couldn’t exist in any other way. In All of You on the Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert takes on the sonnet form with every poem. At their best, Hilbert’s poems use that form to full advantage, revealing depths of meaning that would otherwise remain inaccessible . . . . If you’re interested in formal poetry—or even if you’re not—do yourself a favor and check out Hilbert. With work appearing everywhere from American Poetry Review to Yale Review to B O D Y to Rattle, he’s poised to become a major voice in contemporary formalism.

– Cleaver Magazine

* * *

Books of the year are those you know you’ll never bin; Sixty Sonnets belongs in their company.

– ivebeenreadinglately.com selection for Book of the Year (Poetry), 2009

* * *

Hilbert is masterful at rhyme. This is not over-the-top praise; his technique is simply awe-inspiring. Reading this and the rest of the poems in this collection, a reader will mostly be unaware of his tremendous craft and only after search and analysis will his strict formalism become apparent. Nothing he does is obvious, his rhythmic constraints are unfelt, all of his seams are hand-sewn yet flawless and undetectable.

– Philadelphia Review of Books

* * *

The point is all-inclusiveness, acceptance of the whole world of subject matter. The book means to take in the beautiful and the awful, and it does; its publicity tells us that it ‘continues to explore the bizarre worlds of twentieth-century America.’ The attractive cover design, purely color and text, avoids any interpretive tilt, neither approving nor condemning that bizarreness. The index of the book’s cultural references runs from Alighieri to Zevon, through Nick Cave and Montaigne and Wilde and assorted others on the way. To get everything here, the reader needs to be able to parse a little Latin and a little Italian and have a purchase on most of Western history, poetry, movies, and television. The breadth is consonant with the list of accomplishments in the poet’s bio. The small, witty touches that enlivened Hilbert’s first book are here too—for example, the sly statement on the copyright page that resemblances to actual persons are ‘of course, purely intentional.’ Close observation in all things, low or luxuriant, is the great strength of the poems . . . The best we can do with the sad strangeness is to look carefully and take the marvels where we find them, admitting that they never finally wipe away the tears of things. . . . It’s a poetic stance we can believe in the twenty-first century. It’s a significant one, in a poetic world that has become, in David Yezzi’s phrase, “like a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun.” Hilbert’s is a voice we can trust and be grateful for as a way of making sense of this bizarre, and sad, and laughable—and good—Earth.

– Angle, Journal of Poetry in English

* * *

Opening a book by Ernest Hilbert is like walking into the home of a skilled carpenter. There is an immediate sense of craftsmanship, solidity. Things are not about to fall apart here. Yet Hilbert writes about the world we live in, where things often come undone in spectacular fashion. The tension between the well-made poem and the fractured world it evokes is only one of many tensions that charge his work with dramatic energy. Hilbert’s formal verses are like boxes of gunpowder fit to burst. “My heart is a meteorite,” he tells us. “I am its crater.” In his most recent book, Last One Out, even the poems of childhood offer imagery better suited to the battlefield than the playground. He writes of kids in “broken boots” whose dogs are leashed with frayed twine, in “scattered groups, like aimless parts / Of a convoy attacked from the air.” This is childhood as a war zone to be evacuated. At the center of the new collection is a poem titled “Against the Art of War,” in which Hilbert writes, “War begins and builds in all things,” and supports his claim with an extraordinary list poem. “It waits all summer in the young wasp’s tail, / On a tetanus-bristling nail,” he writes. He sees it in “The crouch and pounce of household cat, / The loser’s shoulders pinned to the mat, / The slippery floor of the slaughterhouse, A trap pulled back for a mouse . . .” The poem goes on to say that it’s “as if we’re born for war and it for us.” Another poem, “Mars Ultor,” presents the vision of a world in which the god of war is the first to receive a sacrifice on imperial holidays. After all, “Law relies on guns / or must withdraw.” That is to say, where there is imperialism, war is inevitable. What other contemporary poet contemplates this kind of hard truth? I sometimes think of Ernest Hilbert as a poet of Empire. It’s not that he celebrates imperialism —who can read his poem, “On Passing the Remains of a T-62 in the Sinai,” without thinking of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”? Hilbert recognizes imperialism as an act of colossal hubris, but he chooses not to look past the evidence that ours is an imperialist nation. Here is another of his lists, this one of American battleships: “Maine rests at anchor in Yokohama, / Ohio in Suez, Kansas at Gibraltar.” The book’s title itself, Last One Out, makes one think of helicopters lifting people out of Vietnam. It is Hilbert’s unflinching gaze at realities not often considered in poetry that gives his work its heft and authority.

– Alfred Nicol, author of Winter Light

* * *

Ernest Hilbert has an enviable ability to speak about contemporary America as if his words were washed in the blood of Achaean soldiers. Hilbert, speaking to the violence underlying human nature, sees war everywhere. Watching the Super Bowl in his living room, the football players—”Towering champions, created to win, // Will strut to their positions and pose, / Burnished, armored in emblems”—become iron age warriors. Outside his house, birds swerve “in squadrons.” “The border of the republic,” says the speaker of “Mars Ultor,” “Is breached without notice: / More tug of war / Than elegant chess.” This refers to Romans preparing for battle—but also to Donald Trump. In fact, “Mars Ultor” was read aloud at the Trump Tower by (highly literate) protesters. In Last One Out, Hilbert—as with many poets writing at the heights of their powers—conveys a sense that we are being told a single narrative of human existence, that each poem is a small part of a larger mosaic, being revealed to us slowly.

– Literary Matters, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

* * *

Ernest Hilbert’s second collection of poetry, All of You on the Good Earth, is an enlightening example of the revival of the sonnet. The poems are intelligent, topically indulgent, and extremely well crafted. The sonnets are capsules, compressing large ideas or expanding small ones, lined up in equal measure. 

– New Pages

* * *

Hilbert is at once ironic, dark, and witty. [His] lines reflect our own precarious hold on the world, where we are always close to losing control. From the perspective of an intriguing mishmash of subjects, Hilbert often takes on the persona of the failed, the beat up, and the beaten down, in which all are “sinking on a soft black balloon.” Hilbert entreats his hapless heroes to “go on, get high,” though there is always a price to be paid.

– Bookslut

* * *

Hilbert’s poems are filled with images of other worlds, lost worlds, ancient Rome, a series of Atlantises, the detritus of wars long-over covered in dust and rust. These places, things, contain messages—incomprehensible, garbled, or lost—to this very observant man. Hilbert is haunted by what used to be here, either 20 years ago or 1,500 years ago. Sometimes the past sits on top of the present, kind of like those digitized holographic images which show you what a landscape looks like pre- and post-hurricane, or how a New York block changed over time. Hilbert never just sees ‘Now.’ Hilbert’s honesty is not just refreshing, but revelatory.”

– The Sheila Variations

* * *

Hilbert’s work attains a high level of intensity through laser-sharp vision focused unsparingly on the detritus of post-modern life . . . . He has a pitch-perfect ear.

– Raintown Review

* * *

From the outset these are poems of mood [Storm Swimmer], built on physical sensation. Nature, lovely or harsh, is set at times next to the violence of things commercial and pop-culture derived. Interestingly, in this book Hilbert doesn’t use the trademark “Hilbertian sonnet,” where rhymes come in tercets, cutting across the foursquare sonnet shape. Instead, he’s making new moves: many other invented stanza forms, in mix-and-match line lengths and rhyme schemes. He’s also still fond of mixing pop culture with high, heavy metal with Homer and Mozart, still the “hard drinker and high thinker” of Adam Kirsch’s phrase.

– The Hopkins Review

* * *

Ernest Hilbert’s Vassar Miller Prize-winning Storm Swimmer explores the quieter rewards of fatherhood and memory—the sort of humane vision that online life threatens to eclipse. In this, Hilbert’s fifth book, storms (including interior ones) swirl and rage, potent in action or as lurking threat. Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer, so remarkable for its style and polish, is most impressive for its kindly, meditative depths.

– Literary Matters

* * *

The comparisons to Lowell are just . . . What’s so attractive here is the colloquial nonchalance that transpires within the formal decorum. It’s quirkier, more low to the ground, more hip, as one said in the olden days. “You should know I’ve come to terms with weather / since you left.” This made me laugh out loud.

– James Longenbach, author of Modern Poetry after Modernism

* * *

[All of You on the Good Earth] is filled with gritty, vibrant, technically innovative and masterful poems that speak directly to how we live now. They’re dark, they’re funny, they can be quite tender, and they always observe the world closely.

– Conundrum Best Books of the Year 2013

* * *

Ernest Hilbert is known for the sonnet, and rightfully so. In Caligulan, he doesn’t so much break free of that but makes it clear that whatever he does, whether with subject, verse form, or anything else, it’s because it’s what he damn well wants to do. Poets like Hilbert roll that way. These poems will make you laugh and break your heart even as they drink you under the table.

– Quincy Lehr, author of Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar

* * *

When one opens a book of poems and sees the music of words become a spell for opening up of experience, for bringing back childhood, for seeing ourselves inside these “long days that fill with night,” one knows one is reading a true poet. Ernest Hilbert’s poems don’t shy away from the world. There are public poems here, and very private songs, there are also poems that are unafraid to look into the mirror and see “slow, confused motions of a ghost,” and poems that light our path through the darkness as if we are boys who hunt for fireflies and these poems in our hands “swim like wind-stirred lanterns.” There are lines which make me think of Seamus Heaney’s way of mining of human experience not to hear stories, but echoes. To hear the music of those echoes between our days is no small thing. It takes a true artist, it takes someone who can make a poem of just a few lines wherein time pauses, and silences come out—and become visible, while “the light is leaving and windows brighten / across the street.” Last One Out is a very beautiful book. It sings.

– Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

* * *

There are plenty of people who have declared themselves poets, but not nearly as many poems worth reading. Ernest Hilbert’s, however, take their readers seriously. Mundane stuff, like tubes of sunscreen, are described in new and bracing ways (“Kinked at center, cargo of clouds squeezed out”), and even at their grimmest, his lines are alive with wit (“We boil horses and harness girls to tow / Corpses”). These are well-made, moving poems, designed with our pleasure in mind.

– Jason Guriel, author of The Pigheaded Soul: Essays and Reviews on Poetry and Culture

* * *

Non omnis moriar, “I shall not die completely,” Ernest Hilbert attaches this motto to his latest book of poems, and it makes sense. Last One Out is a book haunted by loss: besieged and ruined cities, a blasted tank abandoned in the desert, incinerated houses sifted for what trinkets of past lives remain. It begins with the poet’s grandfather and father—both long dead—and continues with an atavistic yearning to enter the past and drag it forward into the present. The book isn’t a lament, though: it’s a journey, taking us from images of the poet as bereaved son to a portrait of the poet as protective and loving father. Take the trip.

– Robert Archambeau, author of Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme

* * *

The reader must be prepared to leap from ancient Greece to the East Village in one or two lines, and familiar with the Oresteia as well as Metallica . . . his is a quicksilver mind, generous and open and humorous.

– The Sheila Variations

* * *

Hilbert’s poetic stance is a satellite in action; his poems orbit the globe capturing (in high-res) the grime, sublime, and everything in-between. Hilbert’s poetic prowess shines brightest when his lines are coated in darkness. “Sailing the Mullica River (Great Bay Estuary) 1978” sends the reader downriver atop waters “housing ghosts and unseen summers in shadow.” With his father, an old sailor himself, the speaker witnesses “clouds dyed and bruised like the sea.” Black mud stirs below their traveling vessel. Images like these, while beautiful, are dabbed with gloom. Hilbert excels with a somber palette—especially when he’s painting lines of the seafaring sort. “Ashore,” depicts a “harpooned great white shark” who’s washed up on the beach—dead. A crowd gathers to inspect the body. Hilbert is quick to remind the reader that, beneath the waves, lies “slit sails, drowned crews, [and] split hulls.” Setting aside visions of oceanic romance, Hilbert exposes the sea’s subtle haunting humanity. It’s a visceral must-read sonnet. But let’s not get too serious. Ernest Hilbert can have fun. Of all Hilbert’s poems in All of You on the Good Earth, there’s nothing like “Sunrise with Sea Monsters.” As a love letter to Ray Harryhausen (American producer and visual effects pioneer who created films like It Came from Beneath the Sea), the poem is a huge success, but it’s also something more. “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms skulks/Ashore, hearing a foghorn, lonely for friends” writes Hilbert who also mentions the “clumsy frogman from the Black Lagoon” and “Nessie.” These are set pieces that, despite their hilarity, make us feel for these ugly mugs. They’re “[b]eaten back by ray guns, germs, and Marines” as sea gulls peer into the ocean “watching for the next poor monster.” We almost revel in their destruction. This rare moment shows that Hilbert can be humorous, albeit the dark sort. Hilbert supplies us with poems like “Nights of 1998” to keep things fresh. There’s an intense party happening downtown (drugs, drinks, fights, and puke included) in the speaker’s apartment and he’s attempting to make sense of the unfolding mayhem. “I’m lit like a war,” he says. What a fantastic line. “We fall apart like ancient stars, sparks— / Gold like pollen blown across all this dark” writes Hilbert. Suddenly, I’m back in space, watching the Earth, Ernest Hilbert’s Earth, rotate wonderfully, horrifically on.

– Apiary Magazine

* * *

Who mixes transgression with formal constraints better than Ernest Hilbert? Answer: no one.

– Blake Wallin, author of No Sign on the Island

* * *

Bob Dylan, another poet who often takes the fugitive as a persona, put it this way: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” That begins to explain, for me, [Hilbert’s] identification with people on the fringe, gangsters, drunks and women who return to the men who batter them. He’s acknowledging that the poet in this place and age is a person on the fringe.

– Alfred Nicol, introduction at Newburyport Literary Festival

* * *

To give you an idea of Hilbert’s black-bile humor, his Eeyoric temper (or Yorick, perhaps), the title of his previous collection, Caligulan, is a word of his own coinage. Hilbert goes on for two pages giving a full dictionary entry for his newly minted adjective, a condition that denotes, among other things, “an abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension, marked by physiological signs . . . by doubts concerning the reality and the nature of an unspecified threat, and by self-doubt about one’s capacity to address it” or “an inclination to use threats and the menace of violence to keep a person or group of people in a state of intimidation and unease” and “a sense that something is very, very wrong.” It’s eerie now, rereading these definitions, at how this speaks so specifically to the moment. Even eerier, though is the final sentence of the entry: First known use 2015, USA (emphasis, mine). The book, seemingly a product of the Zeitgeist, was in fact arguably prophecy of 2016 and beyond.

– B O D Y Magazine, on Caligulan

* * *

A perfect book for our times.

– Robert Archambeau, on Caligulan

* * *

Ernest Hilbert is a Philadelphia poet who spent years writing free verse in the Allen Ginsberg vein, but his first books of poems, Sixty Sonnets (2009), is exactly what its title suggests. Earlier this year he published his second volume—also a set of 60 sonnets—called All Of You On The Good Earth. Hilbert experiments with how many ways he can prod, twist, and kick at the sonnet to pull the form into the 21st century.

– Peter Crimmins, “NewsWorks Tonight,” WHYY/NPR

* * *

Hilbert’s references are classical and contemporary. The world is beautiful and junky; our lives are marked by completely unexpected moments of happiness and regular bouts of boredom, depression, and self-destruction . . . . One of the things I appreciate about Hilbert is the understated realism of his work. He tries to capture—without theatrics or moralizing—what it feels like to live in the contemporary world. In fact, realism is a kind of ethic for him. His work is, in many ways, about facing the suffering and cruelty of life with honesty and courage.

– Prufrock

* * *

Hilbert’s unapologetically gorgeous fourth book shimmers with rich language, imagery, and insight . . . drawn to both beauty and dread, and always elemental. Last One Out speaks with a voice that is at once stately and humble, deeply connected and deeply solitary, unique.

– Asheville Poetry Review

* * *

Persevering with the sonnet, while evoking the hero-wanderer of epic, Hilbert reserves his promise to sing the songs of, as Seamus Heaney phrased it, “single things,” of the poet’s dilemma as it is, without agonizing much in the modal auxiliaries of ‘may,’ ‘might,’ or ‘should’ . . . Hilbert’s poems are good enough to choose virtues that run somewhat against the grain of present society. He portrays a remarkably witty and cool character on the downhill slide thrust upon our humanity by heartbreak and grief.

– Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

* * *

In his debut collection, Sixty Sonnets, Hilbert establishes a variation on the sonnet form, employing an intricate rhyme scheme and varied line length. A skillful practitioner of form and nuance, Hilbert shifts between delicately sonic moments and humorous narrative sequences. Hilbert’s second collection, All of You on the Good Earth, returns to his idiosyncratic, highly inventive sonnet form.

– Poetry Foundation

* * *

Hilbert’s debut, Sixty Sonnets made him something of a “bad boy” among the decorous New Formalists. The sonnets were saturated in alcohol, violence, literary allusion, and urban squalor; in them, muggers rub shoulders with fading academics. (Hilbert is neither, but perhaps on the outskirts of both highway robbery and scholarship: an antiquarian book dealer.) The 2013 All of You on the Good Earth sealed his promise as master of the modern American sonnet, but pushed his range of subject matter: all the brows—high, middle, and low—Science Fiction, pop-culture, academia, the TLS, Philadelphia neighborhoods, World War II, the Cold War. “Zeppelin” in a Hilbert poem could easily refer to either Count Ferdinand Von or Led.

– A. E. Stallings, author of Like: Poems

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Hilbert has a tough, unsentimental vision of contemporary life. One review of his new book, Caligulan, calls it “an honest volume for dishonest times,” partly because the poems don’t rest any more easily in traditional poetic forms than they do in free verse, and partly because his scenes are often so full of unease, dis-ease, death, and things gone awry. Steeped in tradition, the poems are also street-smart and utterly unacademic. His first full-length book, Sixty Sonnets, inaugurated a form now called “the Hilbertian sonnet”—a very workable variation on Petrarch and Shakespeare. Hilbert is one of the very few poets ever to have a verse form named for him, which is surely some kind of honor. As it happens, I read a lot of contemporary sonnets, and most of them bore me to tears. The best in the Hilbertian mode have a jangly, new-fangled music that never settles into formalist quilting bees. His second full- length collection, All of You on the Good Earth, continued in that vein, extending the range of subjects if not the form. Caligulan not only brings a new and disturbing adjective into existence, but also proves Hilbert a poet of greater intellectual and formal breadth than we might previously have realized. Hilbert is a poet of psychological restlessness, of urban and sometimes rural scenes in which cruelty is natural and grace sometimes hard to find. But the hard-earned grace of his work will linger in the mind and the heart.

– David Mason, editor of Twentieth Century American Poetry and Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry

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A fine book, circling environments ancient and modern, while evoking a subtle malaise of spirit in our current moment. A line from the title poem—”lightning blackens your temple”—startles in its perfect combustion of image and emotion, a quality found in every poem.

– Ryan Blacketter, author of the novel Down in the River, on Caligulan

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Engaging with Hilbert you quickly understand the wealth of knowledge he wields. Hilbert’s poetry matures with each new collection. His ear for music is unparalleled.

– Schuylkill Valley Journal

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Ernest Hilbert is not an optimist. In his latest collection, Last One Out, the title poem addresses not only our individual mortality, but a kind of “last call,” a “hurry up please it’s time” for the world as we know it. Nor is he a pessimist; the pessimist, expecting the worst, puts himself in the position of being sometimes pleasantly surprised. Rather, I think, Hilbert is a pejorist—things are going to get worse rather than better. It is a clear-eyed stance that nonetheless allows for some wonder at things as they are, some wry humor, some bonhomie. One day it will all be over, but even on that day, there will be hosting and toasting as well as ghosting. Last One Out is imbued with this feeling of belatedness, and serves both as a kind of middle of the journey reckoning and overview of career and ambition, but also a new starting out. The book’s epigraph is a tag out of Horace: Non Omnis Moriar—I shall not die altogether; something will remain. Is there possibly a glimmer of hope in this? With the title, Last One Out, perhaps it sets up an unresolved dissonance . . . “Masculine” in poetry might mean a rising rhyme suitable to Anglo Saxon monosyllables. The adjective recently most likely to modify it might be “toxic.” But Last One Out is an exploration of another species of masculinity—one of tenderness and gravitas, regret and responsibility, anchored by marriage and mortgage. Dedicated to Hilbert’s father, the book begins with a memory of his grandfather (“German/ With shoulders of granite, / Of beer and blue skies/ blast furnaces”) throwing him as a small child into a river to teach him to swim, and ends on a sort of agnostic prayer for Hilbert’s own young son, Ian. – B O D Y Magazine

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To be haunted, for an American poet today, is a rare and enviable condition. Not by personal demons—everyone has those, and when poets write about them they are really haunting themselves. To be genuinely haunted, as Ernest Hilbert is in these outward- and backward-looking poems, one must be conscious of the past, and of the chastening contrast between the past and the present; in other words, one must have a sense of history. And history is the “bruising storm” that “matures” on the horizon of Hilbert’s poems, as he writes in “Selv’oscura,” while the poet remains “swaddled” in the untrustworthy comfort of the present.

When Hilbert is visited by the past it is by grand and violent phantoms: “I read on about the lives and deaths of kings,” he writes in a Lowellian phrase in “April Arsenal.” Like Robert Lowell, Hilbert is drawn to scenes of carnage, where the true face of humanity seems to reveal itself. A destroyed tank in the Sinai Desert has weathered into landscape, its “long-ago blow and loss” like an archeological reminder of the ways human beings, in the Middle East especially, keep returning to ancient patterns of violence: “proof that armies advanced this far / Before in the baffling waste,” as Hilbert puts it in “On Passing the Remains of a T-62 in the Sinai.” The scene rhymes with the “Normandy beachhead, beneath clouds of naval gunfire,” in “Surrender of Breda,” a poem titled after Velasquez’s masterpiece of a forgotten war.

But if the poet’s present seems much more peaceful than the poems’ past, Hilbert is not at all sure that is an advantage. The most savage poems in Haunts use the past’s grandeur to reproach the pettiness of our world. In the Juvenalian “Bread and Circuses,” Hilbert sees our TV shows and fast food as the equivalent of the largesse with which Rome’s rulers stupefied her people. “Gettysburg,” continuing the tradition of Civil War poems by Allen Tate and Lowell, contrasts the Union and Confederate dead with their parody reenactors: “The soldiers who fought that day / Weren’t plump. They didn’t wear wristwatches,” Hilbert observes.

After such humiliating contrasts, Hilbert and the reader can only take comfort in the truth stated in “Dining with Representatives of the Vatican Museum”—that it is art, including the art of poetry, that survives the past and incarnates it. Poems like the ones in Haunts are the “small remains of each man and each age” that remind us of what is past and passing, and that will represent us in times to come.

– Adam Kirsch

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