July 1, 2010

Ernest Hilbert

COVER TO COVER

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the
collector’s passion borders on the chaos of
memories.
—Walter Benjamin

I don’t collect them. They just accumulate,
Tower higher into shoddy columns,
Climbing weirdly like crystal formations
Or pillars of coral. The thought of their weight
Crushes, their coarse traffic of wars I’ve thumbed
Through, their long summers and snow. They weigh tons.
They slide onto the stove, under the fridge,
Into the tub. They prop open windows,
Serve as coasters. They have traveled with me
And slept beside me. They fashion a bridge
To vanished rooms, sorrows, and suns. Lord knows
Why I haul them from city to city.
I slip them together like bricks. They become a wall,
My greed, my fears, everything, nothing at all.

from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet

__________

Ernest Hilbert: “Among the many childhood memories that strike me from time to time is one of a small, inquisitive boy scaling a tall bookcase as if it were a ladder or a canyon wall, to reach something, though the object of his adventure may never be known or fully understood. I was the boy, of course, and my mother would routinely lift me off before I fell and hurt myself or brought millions of words down in a fatal avalanche. My father, the first in his family to attend college (on the GI Bill), was an avid reader of everything from espionage novels to Pepys’ diaries and The Waste Land. As a result, I came of age in a modest home with an incredible wealth of books, quite literally thousands of them. As I grow older, more and more volumes gather about me as well, like barnacles on the hide of an aging gray whale. I feel an intense animal affection for the books I’ve read, but I also experience their incredible weight as if it were on my very back. How many things do we actually hold in our hands, feel in so many ways for so long before relinquishing? I use books to help me remember my life, to give that life fuller sense and broader contour. In a way, I still climb that bookshelf, reaching for whatever is to be found on a higher shelf. How can anyone stand to let books go? I can’t, and so we have my humble poem on the subject.” (web)

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August 15, 2009

Review by Maryann Corbett

SIXTY SONNETS
by Ernest Hilbert

Red Hen Press
P.O. BOX 3537
Granada Hills, CA 91394
ISBN 978-1-59709-361-3
2009, 93 pp., $18.95
www.redhen.org

One look at the cover of Sixty Sonnets lets you know you’re dealing with a poet who’s got both slyness and chutzpah—at least if poet Ernest Hilbert and cover designer Jennifer Mercer worked closely together, and the acknowledgments suggest that they did. The cover design parodies the staid, pale dignity of a classical music score like the ones published by G. Schirmer and Boosey & Hawkes—the color, the placement of the graphics and rules, the typefaces, even the fake opus numbers. To that pattern the designer adds a splat of tea stain, a trompe-l’oeil ripped corner, and what looks like the print of a drippy wineglass. The seriousness of real art, and the grit and mess of real living. It’s a fair, and clever, representation of the book, and it was a smart move to turn it into the publicity stickers that the Baroque in Hackney blog tells us about. While we’re considering the looks of the book—something we should do while we still have the privilege of reading real books—we should also applaud page designer Sydney Nichols and note that 6-by-8 inch pages consisting of fourteen lines of Bembo set 10 on 18 are lovely to behold.

But you are reading this to learn about the poetry, and the first bit of poetry to be assessed is the title itself. The plain words Sixty Sonnets are a complicated sort of claim. One can’t ignore the likeness in sound to the TV program title “Sixty Minutes,” and the suggestion of an assortment of news stories. The word Sonnets by itself tells us that Hilbert means to engage with the tradition. “Engage” means both to gather in, as a speaker does to listeners, and to square off against, as an army does to enemy forces. The tradition with which he means to engage goes back to the Italian “little song” and comes in assorted classical forms, and is shaped (usually) in fourteen lines, most often iambic, and has a very definite sort of argument and structure, right down to the placement of its prescribed change of direction. Sixty Sonnets, with no other embellishment or limitation, tells us that this will not be a thematically unified collection like Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, or Tony Barnstone’s Sad Jazz: Sonnets, or Kim Bridgford’s To the Extreme (about world records), or Philip Dacey’s New York Postcard Sonnets, or Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets. We know we’re going to get a unity of form but also a variety of theme and subject matter. What we’ll want to see is how inventive, how various, how insightful, and how wise the poet can be within those limits.

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