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 amusing quarterly editorial viewson the world of poetry publishing. Ernest also edits a weekly blog/podcast/vlog, Everse Radio.

Hilbert's first collection, Sixty Sonnets, will be issued by Red Hen Press in the autumn of 2008.

1 Poetry
- 1.1 Examples of His Poetry
  - 1.1.1 Calavera for a Friend
  - 1.1.2 In Bed for a Week
2 Music
3 Life
4 Reviews
5 External links

[edit] Poetry

His poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poet, The New Criterion, Boston Review, LIT, McSweeney’s, The American Scholar, Verse, Volt, and Fence. He writes literary criticism and book reviews for several publications, including The New York Sun, Scribner’s American Writers series, and the Academy of American Poets.

In recent years he has composed in a unique sonnet form sardonically described 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.

[edit] Examples of His Poetry

[edit] Calavera for a Friend

When your heart is scorched out, the unruly world

Will seal around you as a dark ocean

Behind a ship at dusk—the wake will fade

And spread wider, until fully unfurled.

Love reserved for you will slacken. Your portion

Of commerce ends with the last deal you made.

A stranger will take your job, buy your home,

Maybe wear your shirts and shoes, and the books

You cherished will be thumbed by new readers.

Young tourists will roam everywhere you roamed.

Some small items might remain, artifacts,

Footnotes, fingerprints, cuff links, little anchors,

Small burrs that cling: initials carved in a tree,

Your name inscribed where no one will see.

The New Republic, 1-15 January, 2007

[edit] In Bed for a Week

It happens to us all, at least one time,

The black, caught knot of storm threatens, distant,

But buckling closer, waves capped and blown white.

Heavy tides, laden with fresh wreckage, climb,

Drop down the throat; life is a persistent

Ache of sunken vessels and squandered light.

Barrier islands and breakwaters lost,

The sea flails the darkness, its frayed currents,

Wind-flung sediment, shards like stones thrown,

Pooled mirrors blown to blur down the cold coast,

Leaving foam, crushed scum, marsh sun, a grim sense

Of many inherited contours gone.

But the dark flush in the heart will subside,

Drain slowly, slowly draw back as a tide.

New Criterion, February, 2007

[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
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

[edit] Life

Hilbert received a Master's Degree and a Doctorate in English Literature from St Catherine's College, Oxford. While a student there, he founded the short-lived magazine Oxford Quarterly (1995-1997), which included among its advisory editors Iris Murdoch and Seamus Heaney, and included contributors such as David Mamet, Mark Strand, and Jorie Graham. He served as the poetry editor for Random House’s online magazine Bold Type for several years (2000-2004) and later edited the print and online magazine nowCulture (2000-2005). He composes libretti and song texts for the composers Daniel Felsenfeld and Mark Adamo; New York City performances of his works have included Bowery Poetry Club, The Kitchen, and Symphony Space.

In early 2003, he hosted a sold-out 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 fiancée, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

[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