Ernest Hilbert

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 popular blog/podcast/web TV show, E-Verse Radio. He is also noted for the interviews he has conducted with poets and novelists.

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). While at Bold Type, he interviewed Kevin Young, 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, 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 and the Philobiblon Club,.

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, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The London Magazine, Poetry East, McSweeney’s, The American Scholar, Verse, Measure, Volt, and Fence. He writes literary criticism and book reviews for several publications, including the now-defunct New York Sun, Scribner’s American Writers series, and the Academy of American Poets. On January 16, 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" and can be found at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/Snodgrass_POTS0111909.mp3

In recent years he has composed in a unique sonnet form sardonically described by Daniel Nester as the “Hilbertian” sonnet. While retaining the 14 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, the Irish poet Justin Quinn, whose "The Snow Turns Down the Sound on Everything" appeared in his book The Months. 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. Several of his sonnets were featured by David Lehman on the Best American Poetry website.

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.

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 ('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.'"

Nemean Lion Press issued a hand-sewn, signed-limited edition of Flectching 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 in increasingly hostile manners. It is limited to 24 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.

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

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
• 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.

External links

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