At Length magazine’s “Telephone” project draws together a wildly diverse selection of poets, each of whom is given the dauntingly simple task of responding to a previous poet’s contribution to the ongoing and evolving conversation (like the children’s game “telephone,” in which a message is passed along and gradually transformed through a series of hearings and tellings, until the original message is changed marvelously and sometimes perversely). Each poet also provides a short explanation of the thinking behind the response poem.

The first Telephone series features Kimiko Hahn, Idra Novey, Jee Leong Koh, Catherine Barnett, Patrick Rosal, Joshua Weiner, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Dana Levin, Afaa Michael Weaver, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Burt, Peter Campion, Evie Shockley, Solmaz Sharif, Matthew Zapruder, and Quinn Latimer.

I am pleased to appear in the second Telephone series alongside Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, Roger Sedarat, Jason Schneiderman, Jennifer Kronovet, Ross Gay, H.L. Hix, A. Van Jordan, Marilyn Nelson, Allison Benis White, Kathryn Stripling Byer, J.P. Dancing Bear, Meena Alexander, Paula Bohince, Tara Betts, Kristina Jipson, and David Yezzi.

My poem “Internet K-Hole” falls between Kristina Jipson’s meditative poem “and Sharply” and David Yezzi’s beguiling poem “The Catches.” I humbly present the poem alongside my introductory commentary. I urge E-Verse readers to follow the links above to read the full series.

“Internet K-Hole” by Ernest Hilbert

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – L. P. Hartley

Like prehistoric petroglyphs they astonish us,
+++++++So many photos—from Aquarius
++++++++++++++To New Wave to Grunge,
++++++++++++++All those million gold cubes:

Sierras of snaps! Saharas of forced smiles!
Proud mullets, handlebar mustaches, muscle shirts, miles of cleavage and biceps!
Gleaming ice cream cones! Look at them.
Kodachromes and Polaroids, curled at edges.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++(As ancient, suddenly, as vellum, stylus, and parchment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++What fate befell those strange tribes?)

Harvested emulsions, mulled by time,
+++++++++++++++++++++Pent for decades in musty drawers
+++++++++++++++++++++Until a voracious magnet tugged them
+++++++++++++++++++++Up to us like iron filings—

Spent fashions sprint away and speed back again—
Hairstyles three times new and pants gone ironic
++++++++++++++Return refreshed to chilly malls
++++++++++++++And teeming high school halls.

Whole solar systems of style squandered on unsuspecting kids!
Why is everyone so happy? How could they be?
+++++++Or is that unbridled glee merely a try at posterity,
+++++++An aching “say cheese” rictus aimed at eternity?

Each gangly pose hints at some mystery,
+++++++Some dream, some clue just out of frame
++++++++++++++That will glue the scene together somehow, show us more.
+++++++++++++++++++++There is always so much more.

Everyone trying so hard to be sexy
In murky dad-fashioned dens or hot silver of mountain sunlight.
They pose and pose, tongues out, eyes crossed, head-banging to riffs unheard,
++++++++++++++Doubled at jokes forgotten,

All the hairspray in the world holding it together,
+++++++Parting bangs like waves of the Red Sea!
+++++++Observe Venus perched in her pearl-white Pontiac scallop!
And the sweaters! Like farm belts seen from the sky,
Jagged patches of cork and olive.
+++++++++++++++++++++It all seems so sad, so graceless and heartbreaking.

And that milk-wet flash, constantly caught in car windows and eyeglasses,
+++++++A quasar, an exploding star, bleaching half the scene.
It detonates in the mirror behind the prom couple in powder blue
+++++++As they squint, impatient to be released burning into their summer evening.

+++++++It keeps going! We are powerless before it.
+++++++Those downy orange kittens died long ago,
+++++++Mischievous mutts gone under grassy yards,
+++++++Scarf-tailed goldfish gulped by porcelain—
Forest-green shag rugs ripped up and rolled away,
Squat walnut televisions, big as tombs, hauled off . . .

Bermuda shorts like kaleidoscopes and toucan Hawaiian shirts! Velcro!
Zebra tights, tabby purses, Star Wars pajamas, and pillbox hats!
Water skis wielded like broad swords!
Nightmare Halloween Gorillas and, O, frowning holidays with the folks!
Such animation! Cartwheels suspended for all time, mascara’d winks,
++++++++++++++Rabbit ears rising from perms,
++++++++++++++Ditzy handstands, sudden kisses, icy beer-chugs,
++++++++++++++So much to forget.

Phalanxes of sophomores, acres of acne, greasy floss of waist-length hair,
Sweat-licked volleyball stars, dirt-bikers muddy as barbarians,
Silver radios the size of suitcases, weighted with depth-charges of D batteries!
Pastel sprays of bridesmaids, arrays of such uncanny silk confections!
Cloudy white pyramids of wedding cake, Crayola-hot cummerbunds—

Velvet flares of bellbottoms, misty sheen of Christmas lights,
And all that wood paneling: In rec rooms,
+++++++On the flanks of barge-wide station wagons.
+++++++So auburn, so golden, so gone and lonely those years!
Up the BB-pocked water tower, into the murky lake,
Down to the foggy shore at dawn, away, away, away!

Those moments seem so happy, but possibly, on reflection,
+++++++After all this time, were no more than more wasted time,
+++++++Hours blissfully wasted on waves of blue smoke and sunsets,
Or else mere remnants, meaning nothing, flash cubes discarded,
Depleted ammunition, all wasted, all trash. . . .

And yet here, after all this time, forever floating
+++++++In his one small happy moment,
++++++++++++++Everyone’s friend, you knew him too,
+++++++The one who made everyone laugh until ribs were raw,
There he is above the mouthwash-blue
+++++++Spangle of warm swimming pool,
Like a boulder hurled by a blinded Cyclops,

Yes, he’s still there, cannon-balling
For all time in that affectionate air,
Eyes clamped shut, clasped in fetal position

As everyone flinches

Waiting for the splash.

Ernest Hilbert commentary for “Internet K-Hole” for At Length Magazine

Kristina Jipson’s poem “and Sharply” is a tranquil, meditative poem that inspired me to think of photographic processing from the age of the silver gelatin print, an art and craft that seem oddly remote to the age of instant “photographs” captured on phones and directly uploaded to social media sites and blogs where they may be witnessed by any number of viewers. (Her poem does not actually describe photographic development, as far as I can gather, though her description of “tin trays with water” into which paper is “slowly dipped” sent me in that direction.) The care and attention required to develop a photograph (or at the very least drop it off for development and then drive to pick it up again), placed certain demands on a photographer. A photograph cost money and time to bring to its final state, so one was, understandably, selective when closing the shutter.

Around the time I was introduced to “and Sharply,” I was also directed to a website called Internet K-Hole. Urban Dictionary defines an “Internet K-Hole” as “the place you go when you have been surfing the internet mindlessly for too long and lose track of time or what you are doing.” The website itself offers the slogan “endless photos of strangers.” If that intrigues you, then welcome to the age of voyeurism without consequences. Privacy has been abolished. The pornographic resonance of the name Internet K-Hole is not entirely misleading. It is a website on which tens of thousands of photographs from the pre-digital age have been scanned and uploaded in no particular order and without annotation. The images date back to the 1960s and begin to taper off in the 1990s, when digital photography became more prevalent. The subjects of the photos are often “partying,” sometimes in a state of partial or complete undress, smoking pot, drinking beer, mugging and posing for the cameras, generally “letting themselves go.” The terminal line of Jipson’s poem describes a “sun like a hole in the sky, burning,” and so I felt that two loose intuitive filaments had found purchase. A web would soon emerge.

My first impression upon scanning through the photographs on Internet K-Hole was that I had lifted a cool rock and found a lair teeming with pill bugs. They had been hidden safely down in the protected soil, and I had suddenly aerated their den and exposed them to killing sunlight. Oh, those awful haircuts. Oh, all that wasted time, wasted brain cells. Did people really look like that? Did I? Can’t we just leave it all behind us? Oh, the mercy of oblivion! The photographs on Internet K-Hole were never meant to be “shared” the way digital shots are now or the way in which they are, in fact, now shared on that very site. They were taken for the eyes a small group of participants or for a single viewer, who perhaps never intended to share them at all. Yet here they are, pinned up for the world to see. The subjects have since aged, or perhaps died. Surely few if any of the subjects are aware that their photographs have been so rudely exposed to the public.

I decided to reply with an expansive, maximalist gesture, a puffing of the chest. I used the exuberant, wild, popular American dynamism found in Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. I went full adolescent. I wanted the poem to be big, brawny, obnoxious as the characters on Internet K-Hole. I wanted it to sprawl and loaf like the boundlessly abundant photographs. It’s a poem about the noise of the modern age. It’s about the death of privacy. It’s about memory. But it is not angry. It’s in the comic mode, a goof. It’s nostalgic. I wanted it to be unabashed, out of bounds, too big for its own good, gawky, feral, vulgar, excited, and, finally, innocent. The website Internet K-Hole is a kaleidoscopic imprint of recent history. It is delightful, shocking, and fun. I can only hope my poem of the same name, conjured from its spirit, can match it.