Ernest Hilbert Reads with Daniel Tobin
Thursday, November 13th at 6:30pm
Cambridge Public Library
449 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Hosted by Daniel Wuenschel, introductions by Bill Coyle
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Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), and From Nothing (forthcoming, Four Way Books, 2016). Among his awards are the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book Award.
“BB” by Daniel Tobin
Bright grit, pellet, bead of summeriest bronze
Broken off the string of a furled necklace,
Pearl of my anger’s petrifying slough,
I loaded the like of it one by one
One afternoon into the barrel’s craw,
Then went for those boys and their mocking names
With my father’s tree-target gun, my aim
Honed to the moment when the pupil narrows—
Though no one fell at the glare of my hate,
And my brother trooped me away, the bullet
Of my self’s little i, rogue period,
Smaller than this box-bound, reddish planet.
I hear thousands falling now, in the first
Drops, the patter, the babble on the roof
Ernest Hilbert is the author of two collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets (2009) and All of You on the Good Earth (2013), as well as a spoken word album recorded with rock band and orchestra, Elegies & Laments (2013), available from Pub Can Records. He hosts the popular blog E-Verse (www.everseradio.com) and the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review as well as in a number of anthologies, including The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009) and two Penguin classroom anthologies, Poetry and Literature (both 2011). He is a senior specialist at Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, Lynn Makowsky, Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
“Nights of 1998” by Ernest Hilbert
It’s boiling up: my tin-ceilinged cavern
Downtown. I’m struggling to play a record,
But my fingers quiver and the needle
Shrieks like scraped chalk through the speakers. I turn
It up, and up, and up. I’m lit like a war
With pills, lines, so many drinks I can’t feel.
I find two women shooting heroin
In my bed. I’m coming up so hard I puke.
O Christ the summer is stunned with lilacs!
Someone gets kicked in the nose, and then
More arrive, and more, and would you look
At all this, and God the noise, we can’t go back—
We fall apart like ancient stars, sparks—
Gold like pollen blown across all this dark.
