Moveable Beats Reading Series
Ernest Hilbert Reads with James Arthur, hosted by James Mancinelli
Good Karma Café
928 Pine St
Philadelphia, PA 19107
(267) 519-8860
Sunday April 21st, 6PM

FREE

James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize, as well as fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He will be a Hodder Fellow at Princeton for the 2012-2013 academic year. His first book of poems, Charms against Lightning, will be published in October of this year by Copper Canyon Press, as a Lannan Literary Selection.

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“In Praise of the Indeterminate” by James Arthur

It has no form, and out-Houdinis Houdini
by dissolving from shape to shape, struggling
to escape itself, remaining the same thing,
like a video feed of the almost random variations
in the similarity of the sea. It becomes melon-seed,

a cider press. It knows that what it sees
it sees through the pinhole of one consciousness.
It says a star is a star is a hydrogen bomb.
Like an envoy sent back from the last evolution
of the human race, it has no face

and knows more than it understands.
It says the makers of the Parthenon aren’t to blame
for framing the symmetries of a rational age

when planets turned in harmonic spheres
chasing the enigmatic moon, which now we know
to be floating away from the Earth forever
at the rate of an inch per year, give or take.
It defends your freedom to be wrong
and promote your point of view,

your freedom to give up your freedom
by degrees. It’s the silt and the dam:
impregnable, a Sing-Sing, a jukebox
grinding out the tune
that you yearn for, and can’t name.

* * *

Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets (2009) and All of You on the Good Earth (2013). He teaches a summer intensive course on the art of the opera libretto at Western State University of Colorado Master of Fine Arts in Poetry program, and his latest evening-length opera with composer Stella Sung, titled The Thin Red Thread, received fully staged workshop productions this year at the Michigan Opera Studio and will have its world premiere at the Curtis M Phillips Center for Performing Arts in Florida in April 2014. His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He hosts the popular blog www.everseradio.com and works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.

* * *

“An Aging Drunk Observes the Blizzard” by Ernest Hilbert

I am lonely, of course, hung-over, pale, and fat.
Hairs wash out, slither down, thatch up the shower drain.
My teeth hurt. I dream they clatter like ice chips in
The bloody bowl of the white sink and that
My smile bares purple sockets. I note a stain
On my gray shirt. Patches flake from my skin.
The hardened pinesap cold of Christmas saddens me.
Like vinegar, Easter’s angles of gold light sour.
Outnumbered, pursued, slowing, falling prey to sleep—
I nod into nightmares of a battleship in the North Sea,
Smoking, lost, blind in razoring rain, and losing power,
In desperate flight from twilit storms and destroyers’ sweep,
Hunted, hurt, steaming fast for Norway with torn bow,
Still deadly with guns bent in the screaming snow.