E-Verse Radio

“Epitaphs” by Ernest Hilbert

“His Shield” by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore came to the attention of poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound beginning with her first publication in 1915. From 1925 until 1929, Moore served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial. This continued her role, similar to that of Pound, as a patron of poetry; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and James Merrill.

Fall Schedule Unveiled for KGB Bar Poetry!

Mark up your calendar! The new KGB season is here.

“Poem (The day gets slowly started)” by James Schuyler

Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Schuyler was a central member of the New York School. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent his teen years in East Aurora, New York, before attending Bethany College in West Virginia. During World War II, Schuyler served on a destroyer in the North Atlantic and remained in the US Navy until 1947. Before moving to New York in 1950, Schuyler lived for two years on the Isle of Ischia in Italy where he worked as a secretary for W.H. Auden.

“She Discovers an Unsent E-Mail to an Ex-Boyfriend” by Ernest Hilbert

“Untitled Poem [Unslide the door]” by Joshua Beckman

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and earned his BA from Hampshire College, where he studied poetry and the art of the book. He is the author of five books of poetry: Things Are Happening (1998); Something I Expected To Be Different (2001); Nice Hat. Thanks. (2002), written with Matthew Rohrer; Your Time Has Come (2004), and most recently, Shake (Wave Books, 2006).

“Sepsis” by C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young was born in 1969 and grew up in south Florida. He is the author of three collections of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books 2007), and TORN (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2012). He works full-time as a physician, edits poetry for the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives in San Francisco.

“Reality TV” by Ernest Hilbert

“Under the Shadow” by Joanie Mackowski

Joanie Mackowski is a poet, teacher, and sometime juggler. Her second book of poems, View from a Temporary Window, will be released by the Pitt Poetry Series in January 2010. Her first book, The Zoo, also from the Pitt Poetry Series, won the AWP Award Series in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Mackowski has received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Her poems appear in The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, edited by David Yezzi, in Best American Poetry 2007, edited by Heather McHugh, and in Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner; they’ve also recently appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, The New England Review, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review and on Slate.

Mackowski was born in 1963 and grew up primarily in Connecticut and in coastal Massachusetts. When she was 21 she drove to California and worked as a journalist, a kitchenware salesperson, an itinerant French translator, and as a juggler. She can juggle five balls, but not very often.

She earned her MFA at the University of Washington in Seattle and her PhD at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She teaches with the Creative Writing Program at the University of Cincinnati, and she’s married to Charlie Green.

“Guide to the Modern Man (Beach Issue!)” by Ernest Hilbert

“To My Friends” by Joseph Harrison

Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His first book of poems, Someone Else’s Name, was published by the Waywiser Press in the United Kingdom in 2003, and by Zoo Press in the U.S. in 2004. It was named as one of five recommended poetry books for 2004 by the Washington Post, and was a finalist for the 2005 Poets’ Prize. In 2005 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser (in the U.S. and the U.K.) in 2008.

“Poem Begun on the Autumn Equinox” by Ernest Hilbert

“The Otherwise Sedentary Novelist Finds his Fantasy Turns Out All Wrong” by Ernest Hilbert

Share Her ass was just as hard as Formica. Her knuckles in his side were like rock drills. This wasn’t turning out to be much fun. Still, he’d come so far. There’s nothing like a No-frills kick, but these were not even “thrills” In the conventional sense of the term. “When you try kickboxing down [...]

“Memories of West Street and Lepke” by Robert Lowell

Share Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is “a young Republican.” I have a nine months’ [...]

“Terminal” by John Foy

John Foy’s first book of poems is Techne’s Clearinghouse (Zoo Press).

“Mirage” by Ernest Hilbert

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert’s first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain 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, cruel husbands, 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”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times 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.”

“On the Longing of Early Explorers” by Elizabeth Bradfield

Share I would prefer one hour of conversation with a native of terra australis incognita to one with the most learned man in Europe. —Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, 1740 Before satellites eyed the earth’s whole surface through the peephole of orbit, before we all were tracked by numbers trailing from us like a comet’s [...]

“My Wife Reads the Paper at Breakfast on the Birthday of the Scottish Poet” by Miller Williams

Miller Williams (born April 8, 1930) is an American contemporary poet, as well as a translator and editor. He has authored over twenty-five books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments have been chronicled in Arkansas Biography. However, he is perhaps best known for reading a poem at President Clinton’s 1997 inauguration.

“White Castle” by Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry: American Linden, The Pajamaist, and Come On All You Ghosts, forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. In Fall 2010 he will be the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. An editor for Wave Books, he lives in San Francisco

“Advertisement for the Mountain” by Christina Davis

Christina Davis is the author of Forth A Raven (Alice James Books, 2006) and Raven’s Brew (Firefly, 2008). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Jubilat, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New Republic, Paris Review and other publications. She is the recipient of residencies from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford, she is currently Curator at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, and the poetry editor of Nightboat Books.

“Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too” by James Hall

Share All my pwoblems who knows, maybe evwybody’s pwoblems is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth dat I am SPIDERMAN. I know. I know. All da dumb jokes: No flies on you, ha ha, and da ones about what do I do wit all doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat’s funny [...]

Two Epigrams by Martial, translated by William Matthews

Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial) (March 1, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD), was a Latin poet from Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. He is considered to be the creator of the modern epigram.

“Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946.

“The Kraken” by Lord Alfred Tennyson

“Song” by Ernest Hilbert

“Love Poem” by Ernest Hilbert

“Sea Poppies” by H.D.

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1886. She attended Bryn Mawr, as a classmate of Marianne Moore, and later the University of Pennsylvania where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

“Variations Of An Air” by G. K. Chesterton

Share A wonderful series of parodies by Mr. Chesterton, on “Old King Cole.” Old King Cole Was a merry old soul And a merry old soul was he He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fiddlers three after Lord Tennyson Cole, that unwearied prince of Colchester, [...]

“Symmetries” by Ernest Hilbert

“Paper Toys of the World” by Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder (born 1967 in Washington, D.C.) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His first book, American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) won the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize.