Ernest Hilbert

Ernest Hilbert is an American poet, critic, and editor born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1970.

Biography

Hilbert graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Rutgers University in 1993. He also received a Master's Degree (1994) and Doctorate (2000) 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, 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). While at Bold Type, he interviewed Kevin Young, Cynthia Zarin, Kenneth Koch, and Mark Strand. As books and literary editor for nowCulture.com (issued as two print annuals, NC1 and NC2), Hilbert published up-and-coming authors from his own generation, including Matthea Harvey, Timothy Liu, Matthew Zapruder, Wells Tower, and Joshua Beckman. He also interviewed a number of authors for the magazine, including Gustaf Sobin, Alexandar Hemon, Matthew Kneale, and Joe Wenderoth.

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 Academy of American Poets, the Royal Society of Literature (London), the Philobiblon Club, Fine Press Book Association, and a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Poetry

Hilbert's poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poet, The New Criterion, American Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Yale Review, Boston Review, LIT, Georgetown Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Edinburgh Review, Harvard Review, The London Magazine, Poetry East, McSweeney’s, The American Scholar, Verse, Measure, Volt, and Fence. He has written literary criticism and book reviews for several publications, including Contemporary Poetry Review, the now-defunct New York Sun, Scribner’s American Writers series, and the Academy of American Poets. On January 16, 2009, he was interviewed by Curtis Fox about the poetry of W.D. Snodgrass for the Poetry Foundation podcast series "Poetry Off the Shelf." The episode was called "People Just Don't Read This Way Anymore."

In recent years he has composed in his own sonnet form sardonically described by Daniel Nester as the “Hilbertian” sonnet. While retaining the 14 lines of the traditional English sonnet, it substitutes the rhyme scheme ABCABC DEFDEF GG, to create two sestets and a final couplet. The iambic pentameter meter of the English sonnet is replaced by "a decasyllabic line that allows for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech," according to poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow A.E. Stallings, who goes on to explain that Hilbert's "sonnets tend to conclude in true iambic pentameter, the tradition that haunts rather than dominates these poems." Other poets have written in the form, including Amy Lemon, the Irish poet Justin Quinn, whose "The Snow Turns Down the Sound on Everything" appeared in his book The Months, Lorna Blake, whose sonnet "Endangered Species" appeared in Waccamau, Bill Coyle, whose sonnet "Hindsight" appeared in The New Criterion, and David Yezzi, whose sonnet "Varnishing Days" appeared in the PN Review. Hilbert's sonnet "Prophetic Outlook," which appeared in The American Poetry Review, was taught by Molly Peacock in her course "The 21st-Century Sonnet" at the New School in New York City in December 2008. His poems have also been taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Drexel University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Several of his sonnets were featured by David Lehman on the Best American Poetry website. His poem "Ashore," which appeared in the Yale Review early in 2009, was reprinted by the Academy of American Poets for their August 2009 "Shark Week" feature.[2] "Domestic Situation," "AAA Vacation Guide," and "Prophetic Outlook" are reprinted by the Poetry Foundation.

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, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. It also received an honorable mention for the Dorset Prize.

Nine poems from Sixty Sonnets (2009) and its companion volume All of You on the Good Earth (2013) appeared in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (Ohio University Press, 2009). His poem "Domestic Situation" appears in two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (2011) and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011).

In 2009, the Tollund Group, a Nordic translation firm, sponsored its first annual poetry translation prize. Two translations of Hilbert's poems were awarded cash prizes. The winner of the best Danish translation was Mette Bollerup Doyle, who translated Hilbert's "Outsider Art" ("Outsiderens kunst"). The winner for Norwegian translation was Marit Ombudstvedt of Vestby in Norway, who translated "Love Songs" (Kjærlighetssanger"). The judges failed to select a winner in the category of Swedish language.

He has written jacket recommendations for other authors under the pseudonym Vladimir Slender-Hedge.

Hilbert's first collection, Sixty Sonnets, was issued by Red Hen Press in early 2009. 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 ('Julius Caesar and Charlemagne, Marie Curie, Al 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.'"

Hilbert's own Nemean Lion Press issued a hand-sewn, signed-limited edition of Fletching of Hackles, a collaborative effort by Hilbert and David Yezzi. The book, designed by Jennifer Mercer and bound by Melissa Moffa, consists of dueling limericks and clerihews in which Hilbert and Yezzi challenge and insult each other. It is limited to 24 numbered copies with four authors' and artists' proofs, all signed by Hilbert, Yezzi, Mercer, and Moffa. The series sold out the week it was issued, in the second month of June, 2009, and is currently unobtainable. The second title from the press was 3 X 5 [Three by David Yezzi, Five by Ernest Hilbert] a small tête-bêche folio, hand-sewn issued in 2010, in Prussian-blue faux-snakeskin binding with cutaway title windows, stiff eggshell-blue wrappers, limited to 12 copies signed by designer, bookmaker, and both authors, only eight for sale. It sold out by subscription two weeks before publication.

In November 2009 LATR Editions in New York published Hilbert's Aim Your Arrows at the Sun, a chapbook of primarily free-verse poems, limited to 250 copies, featuring hand-sewn covers designed and printed by Woodside Press and a foreword by critic Adam Kirsch.

Hilbert's second sequence of sixty sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, is scheduled for publication by Red Hen Press in 2013.

Books

• Sixty Sonnets (Red Hen Press, 2009), ISBN 1597093610, poetry
• Aim Your Arrows at the Sun (LATR Editions, New York, 2009), hand-sewn, letterpress chapbook
• A Fletching of Hackles, Fresh Verse by Ernest Hilbert and David Yezzi (Nemean Lion Press, 2009), signed-limited art book
• "Such Root Satisfaction," 3 X 5 [Three by David Yezzi, Five by Ernest Hilbert] (Nemean Lion Press, 2010), signed-limited art book

Anthology Appearances

• Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels, ed. Shanna Compton (Soft Skull Press, 2004), ISBN 1932360573
• Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions, ed. Robert Hartwell Fiske (Marion Street Press, 2008), ISBN 1933338253
• Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, ed. David Yezzi (University of Ohio Press, 2009), ISBN 0804011214
• Two Weeks: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, ed. Ash Bowen and Johnathon Williams (Line Break Press, 2011)
• Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, ed. R.S Gwynn (Penguin, 2011), ISBN 9780558752118
• Literature: A Pocket Anthology, ed. R.S Gwynn (Penguin, 2011), ISBN 9780205032198

Selected Essays and Reviews

• "Artificer of Americana," review of John Updike's Americana, for Random House's magazine Bold Type, May 2001
• "The First American Modernist," review of Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life by Scott Donaldson, New York Sun, February 26, 2007
• "A Strange and Beautiful Noise: Late Ashbery Syndrome, or, Listening without Hearing," Contemporary Poetry Review, December 2010

Selected Interviews

• New Addresses: Ernest Hilbert Interviews Kenneth Koch for Random House in 2000
• The Secret Glory: Ernest Hilbert Interviews Franz Wright for the Contemporary Poetry Review in 2005
• The First Confessionalist: Ernest Hilbert Interviews W.D. Snodgrass for the Contemporary Poetry Review in 2008

Music

Hilbert has composed libretti for Daniel Felsenfeld.

• 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

• April 30, 2009, Summer and All it Brings was performed as part of the PEN American Center "[Elaborations/Collaborations]http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3216/prmID/1502" festival at Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. Author Wesley Stace, also known by his stage name John Wesley Harding, performed the spoken male voice.

• Friday, May 8th, 2009, Hilbert appeared on stage as a special guest with the rockabilly-punk band Mercury Radio Theater at the Khyber Pass rock club in Philadelphia.

• June 21st, 2009, "Of All Those Who Held it Would Come" was performed as part of the [Make Music New York] series.

Hilbert has composed song cycles for the composer Christopher LaRossa.

• Christopher LaRossa set four poems from Sixty Sonnets as "Elegies and Laments," World Premiere in Ithaca, NY, April 20, 2012

• Hilbert supplied the words for the "Turning Point" portion of Vignettes of Two Lovers, world Premiere in Ithaca, NY, February 26, 2011.

• Hilbert's poem "Symmetries" was used by Christopher LaRossa a the foreword of his piece "Symmetries."

Hilbert has also worked with indie rock bands.

• Hilbert writes scripts, performs live on stage, and acts in short films for the post-punk conceptual band Mercury Radio Theater. He appeared on stage with the band and a film at the Khyber Pass rock club in Old City Philadephia in April 2009. More recently he participated in the multi-media "Death of Mercury Radio Theater" at Johnny Brenda's rock club in Northern Liberties Philadelphia.

• In April, 2008, Hilbert signed a deal to record with Philadelphia record label Pub Can Records in Widget Studios. The album, produced by David Young, will include recordings of Hilbert and others, including Quincy R. Lehr and Paul Siegell, reading from his book Sixty Sonnets, backed by several musicians, including a drummer, bassist, organist, and guitarist, as well as a full orchestra and harp. The album is due out in the fall of 2012 in an edition of 100 signed, limited edition vinyl copies. Digital downloads will also be available.

External links

• An article by composer Daniel Felsenfeld, from Playbill
• Special issue of the Cortland Review guest-edited by Hilbert.