Ernest Hilbert at Large

By Ernest Hilbert • May 28, 2014 • E-Verse, Feature

My publisher has always been attentive to developments, such as they are, in my writing career, such as it is, and kindly shares that information publicly in a most professional manner. Here at E-Verse, however, my own site, I sometimes forget to announce the latest news. Though I’ve been remiss of late, by way of a remedy I offer a quick roundup of current events in the life of Ernest Hilbert as poet, again, such as it is or may be.

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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.” – All of You on the Good Earth reviewed in Angle, Journal of Poetry in English

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The Hilbertian sonnet, as some have called it, has a clear set of structural preferences. Each is fourteen lines long, the rhyme scheme is an untraditional double sestet plus couplet (ABCABC DEFDEF GG), and each line counts ten syllables, as you’d expect in lines of iambic pentameter—except these aren’t. There is not much accentual-syllabic regularity, but the lines do tend to stabilize, in varying degrees, toward the end of each poem. This irregularity gives the voice its verve. The poems are highly patterned, but there is enough wiggle-room in the decasyllabic lines to give Hilbert the prose freedom he needs to express his smart, gritty convictions. Within this sonnet shell, the needs of the speaking voice trump the metrical grid. It’s this rough-around-the-edges quality that points back so clearly to Robert Lowell’s work in Notebook and History. – AoYotGE reviewed in the New Criterion

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Let’s get something straight right up front: 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. – AoYotGE reviewed in the Philadelphia Review of Books

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The image of an earthrise, of the living planet emerging on the horizon of a barren moonscape, really hits me. It’s certainly one of the most important images of all time. It throws human suffering into stark relief. One gains perspective from that photograph, quite literally. Borman’s 1968 sight of a distant, troubled earth serves as a corollary to my own distance and sympathy for the gallery of characters in my books, characters whose follies, anguish, and aspirations become a summary of what it means to be human, even if the gallery sometimes resembles a police lineup. Borman’s view can be understood as generally equivalent to what Auden called agape, a sudden, intense sense of being connected to all human beings, a deep and powerful empathy, not untainted by sadness, I suspect. I was overcome by that feeling myself at the end of a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when the characters emerge, all conflicts resolved, to sing the final nonsense song, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / A foolish thing was but a toy, / For the rain it raineth every day.” I suddenly had a vision of the rain that falls on everyone, and my chest quite literally ached, and I perched on the edge of my seat, near tears, and could not rise until the theater was completely emptied. When I emerged onto the street, I began to emotionally embrace all I saw. Everyone suddenly seemed bonded to me in their humanity, their inevitable deaths, and their fleeting moments of comfort or camaraderie. This being Philadelphia, it didn’t last long, but it was genuine. I sought to invest the two books with that feeling: That we’re all in this together, whatever it is. – Ernest Hilbert interviewed at Glassworks magazine

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“We’ve entered the land of Jesus, Jacuzzis, / And jet skis.” – New poem, “Demography,” with audio in B O D Y Literature

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I would like to announce that I have new poems forthcoming in The Dark Horse, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Asheville Poetry Review, American Arts Quarterly, Hopkins Review, Clarion, Measure, New Criterion, and Birmingham Poetry Review. Keep an eye out for them in the coming year.

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Last and I hope not least, here are some national Poetry Out Loud (National Endowment for the Arts recitation program) finalists reading my poem “Domestic Situation” from my first book Sixty Sonnets.