Ernest Hilbert

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Ernest Hilbert is an American poet, critic, and editor born in Philadelphia, PA in 1970. He is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Reviewand is known for his quarterly editorial views on the world of poetry publishing. Hilbert also edits a weekly blog/podcast/web TV show, E-Verse Radio. He is also noted for the interviews he has conducted with poets and novelists.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Hilbert received a Master's Degree and a Doctorate in English Literature from St Catherine's College, Oxford. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Dark Earth, Dark Heavens: British Apocalyptic Writing in the First World War and its Aftermath." While a student there, he founded the short-lived magazine Oxford Quarterly (1995-1997), which included among its advisory editors Iris Murdoch, Marjorie Perloff, and Seamus Heaney, and included contributors such as David Mamet, Charles Wright, Charles Simic, W.D. Snodgrass, Galway Kinnell, Caroline Kizer, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, John Hollander, Christopher Middleton, Andrew Motion (Poet Laureate of Britain), Michael Hamburger, Marilyn Hacker, Charles Tomlinson, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Les Murray, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, and Jorie Graham. After moving from Oxford to Manhattan, he worked as an editor for the punk and beatnik magazine Long Shot for one year before departing over creative differences. He then served as the poetry editor for Random House’s online magazine Bold Type for several years (2000-2004) and also edited the print and online magazine nowCulture (2000-2005).

In early 2003, he hosted an evening of readings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, entitled "The Future Knows Everything: New American Writing," which featured the poets Rebecca Wolff and Geoffrey Nutter and the novelists Liz Brown and Suzanne Wise.

Hilbert works as an antiquarian book dealer with the firm Bauman Rare Books, and lives in Philadelphia with his wife, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Hilbert is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the Philobiblon Club, and the Franklin Inn Club.

[edit] Poetry

Hilbert's poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poet, The New Criterion, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, LIT, Georgetown Review, Poetry East, McSweeney’s, The American Scholar, Verse, Volt, and Fence. He writes literary criticism and book reviews for several publications, including The New York Sun,[1] Scribner’s American Writers series, and the Academy of American Poets.[2]

In recent years he has composed in a unique sonnet form sardonically described by Daniel Nester as the “Hilbertian” sonnet. While retaining the 14 iambic pentameter lines of the traditional English sonnet, it substitutes the rhyme scheme ABCABC DEFDEF GG, to create two sestets and a final couplet. Other poets have written in the form, including Amy Lemon and Bill Coyle, whose sonnet "Hindsight" appeared in The New Criterion.[3]

His unpublished collection Cathedral Building, which combines a wide variety of styles and poetic approaches, has been a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry (under the title Removal of the Body), the Barrow Street Press Book Contest, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. It also received an honorable mention for the Dorset Prize.[4]

Hilbert's first collection, Sixty Sonnets, will be issued by Red Hen Press in the autumn of 2008. According to the publisher, "the collection is calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation. It contains memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems ('My love, we know how species run extinct'), satires ('The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy'), elegies ('The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut'), and songs of sorrow ('Seasons start slowly. They end that way too'). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian 'little song' and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona ('We'll head out, you and me, have a pint'), in the voices of both male and female characters ('I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA'), and across historical gulfs ('Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone'), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing 'the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.'"

[edit] Music

Hilbert has composed libretti for Daniel Felsenfeld for the following works:

  • Summer and All it Brings, solo cantata, chamber arrangement (score for soprano, spoken male voice, cello, and harpsichord); performed August 19, 20, 21, 2002, Bowery Poetry Club, New York City.
  • "Fortune Does Not Hide" (aria) performed live on WNYC, public radio, April 24, 2004
  • The Last of Manhattan, five-act opera, The Kitchen, Chelsea NYC, nine singers and ensemble accompaniment, two consecutive shows, May 11, 2004, each followed by a panel featuring Hilbert and Felsenfeld, moderated by Mark Adamo.[5]
  • Summer and All it Brings, full orchestral arrangement, performed by the New York City Opera at Symphony Space in Manhattan, VOX: Showcasing American Composers, May 26, 2004
  • "Of all those who held it would come," final section of The Bridge, song cycle for piano and soprano; performed at Grace Episcopal Church, May 18, 2003
  • In April, 2008, Hilbert signed a deal to record with Philadelphia record label Pub Can Records in Widget Studios. The CD, produced by David Young, will include recordings of Hilbert and others reading from his book Sixty Sonnets, backed by several musicians, including a drummer, bassist, and guitarist.[6]

[edit] Reviews

  • Ernest Hilbert’s sure-footed poems have the breathless urgency of a man telling others the way out of a burning building. Unafraid to startle, often winning out over recalcitrant material, they score astonishing successes. A bold explorer with few rivals, Hilbert enlarges the territory of traditional form. Sixty Sonnets may be the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.
- X.J. Kennedy, author of Lords of Misrule and editor of Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.
  • Just as the work of the modernists showed that the best free verse usually has something masterfully formal about it, Hilbert’s fine collection might serve to remind us that the best formal poetry has about it a marvelous colloquial freshness and inventiveness, and the ring of an actual human voice. It is a touching and intelligent book.
- Franz Wright, author of Walking to Martha’s Vineyard
  • Sixty Sonnets delights in a decidedly badass bravura. Hilbert’s red-blooded diction and febrile subjects put paid to any lingering suspicions about traditional verse’s chronic anemia. His erudition is salted with humor, his romantic flights with a rage for order. He is a twenty-first century beatnik in Elizabethan ruff. A smashing debut!
- David Yezzi, author of The Hidden Model
  • The American lyric rendered in these poems follows Coleridge’s description of the sonnet as “adapted to the state of a man violently agitated by a real passion.” Hilbert’s passion here is to contain, precious piece by precious piece, the unordinary quotidian of the American poetic. Sixty Sonnets is a gift to all of us from an exceptional ear and a fine consciousness.
- Afaa Michael Weaver, author of Multitudes
  • For scale alone, the project at first seems improbable. But then you read, and it's clear that Hilbert’s sensibility, bright-hued and gothic, sentimental, precise and ambitious, could be contained by no less. These wry and lovely poems are for anyone whose curiosity ranges from Petrarch to improv, and the result is a complex portrait of the America of our current era-composed in singing verse!
- Dave King, author of the novel The Ha-Ha
  • Like the minutes of the hour, these Sixty Sonnets both combine to make a whole and shine as individual moments. While groups of these sonnets occasionally suggest a narrative—refreshingly, like the fugitives and weary academics that people these pages—they work alone. The newspaper crime blotter itself, from which, perhaps, some of these incidents are torn, speaks up as a single sonnet. Here are barflies, high-school dropouts, retired literary critics, washed-up novelists and war-zone reporters, suburbanites and historians, and lyrics with a range of reference from Zippos and Star Wars figures to William James and Thomas Eakins. Mostly in a decasyllabic line that allows for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech, these sonnets tend to conclude in true iambic pentameter, the tradition that haunts rather than dominates these poems. It is the voice of a less lyrical Prufrock ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the "fuck-ups," the "Gentlemen at the Tavern"—but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona—the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself—as much listener as talker—something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter.
- A. E. Stallings, translator of Lucretius's Nature of Things for Penguin Classics

[edit] References

  1. ^ Search - The New York Sun
  2. ^ See the masthead of the Contemporary Poetry Review, http://cprw.com/hilbert2.htm
  3. ^ Hindsight by Bill Coyle - The New Criterion
  4. ^ Tupelo Press - 2006
  5. ^ > S P R I N G 2 0 0 4
  6. ^ Widget Studios » Blog Archive » Ernest Hilbert | Sixty Sonnets

[edit] External links

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[edit] Articles

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Interviews

[edit] Book Reviews