Jonathan Creasy, an editor at New Dublin Press, conducted a comprehensive, long-form interview with me over the course of several months. The first installment has been published, along with a new poem, “Caligulan,” with a recording of me reading it. Head on over and check them out. They publish many fine authors. Bookmark the site and stop back.

Click here to visit New Dublin Press. 

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Ernest Hilbert: Also, it’s important to remember that there are many dimensions of meaning in a poem. Even rhyme can be pushed beyond acoustics, in a sense. In the third stanza of the poem “Glacier,” which will appear in Last One Out, I provide two rhymes allied with a ghostly allusive third. The first rhyme is terminal, the second falling midway through the second line: “Tilted like a wave that swells and will take / A million years to break.” Several lines later, the stanza ends with “What furnace abandoned this dark form?” A line like that immediately summons the second line of the fourth stanza of “The Tyger” by William Blake, the most frequently anthologized poem in English, so the mind rushes to the author’s name and in so doing creates a third link in the rhyme chain: “Take / Break / [Blake].” I am enormously gratified when a reader remarks upon it. It’s all a bit Joycean, sure, but the poem works without the recognition. It’s an example of the sort of thing I like to embed in poems for those who read on that level. Many do. My ideal reader always does. Too often poems are read in a two-dimensional manner. One should be in 3D whenever possible, if only because so much more is possible. There are countless methods of communicating in a poem. Sound and rhythm are merely the beginning.