Ernest Hilbert, with Caleb Barber and novelist Dave King, at the Bowery Poetry Club

by Ernie on 30/03/10 at 9:00 am

Click here for the Academy of American Poets listing.

Ernest Hilbert with poet Caleb Barber and Dave King, author of the best-selling The Ha-Ha, soon to be a major motion picture starring Josh Brolin.

March 31, 2010, 6 PM
Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York City, NY

Sponsored by Red Hen Press, a literary publisher based in California.
212-614-0505
mail@bowerypoetry.com

“Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests—and thus it’s a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of “She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico” to the ironic call-and-response of “Fortunate Ones” to the elegiac fatalism of “White Noise” Hilbert takes the reader on a bravura run through seemingly every variation of tone and style that the sonnet can contain. It’s a craftsman’s book, a revival of form best summed up by the opening lines of “Song”: “A song for those who learn forgotten, slow / Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce.” – Levi Stahl

“Stargazer Lilies” by Ernest Hilbert

The vase itself is a spent shell casing—
Lush petals pour out like surging steam,
Lacquered battle-bent cuirasses, photograph
Of fireworks in humid July skies, racing
Into an umbrella of spark and cream,
Falling as luxurious glittered ash.
The arrogant smudged stamens jet high
And proud like vapor trails, the whole bouquet
Unfastening like a vast nebula,
Long pour of poisonous gas; arms fly
Out and fade, and the soft leaves, in late day,
Aim down, oar blades in air above Formica,
Limp and breathing in a dry universe,
Wet pennants, green ghosts, long surrendered spears.

***

“For one so young, Caleb Barber has an unusually mature, self-assured and convincing voice that seems to me full of promise.” – David Wagoner

“I Went in with My Hands Up” by Caleb Barber

“Sweet Jesus as morning the queenly women of our youth!
The monumental creatures of our summer lust!”

—Thomas McGrath, “Letter to an Imaginary Friend”

It was a little like that pregnant black heifer
stuck in the aluminum feeder-box sized specifically for calves
—jackknifed, full of muesli and seed, her head turned out
toward the snowy morning.

Me and that 80-year-old Irishman had to lift it,
the several hundred pounds of green metal, knowing,
with our elbows hefted above our divergent hairlines
and our ankles foundered in thick pasture mud, we would be totally exposed.

And she’d be coming out in a hurry, big and taut around the middle.
Us just hoping she wouldn’t lose her calf in the fuss.

It was a little like that. Stopping by that girl’s house
the other night. Except without the help. And this doesn’t come out right.
I would never be so pigheaded as to compare a woman to a cow.
Just to compare the parameters using the inconsequential vessel of simile.

I didn’t even know what horns that heifer bore.
What spawn might be brewing within her black belly.
But it had to be done. She had to be turned loose. I kept my legs.
And one doesn’t count as a stampede.

– from Rattle 27, Summer 2007

***

“What earthly business does Dave King have writing a first novel as wonderfully accomplished and achingly full of heart as The Ha-Ha? That’s what the rest of us would like to know.” – Richard Russo

Excerpt from The Ha-Ha:

I’m on a small road now, where dry, bleached-looking blossoms and skinny trees line the shoulders. The macadam shimmers in the heat, and I pass under an interstate to see a worn billboard nestling in the undergrowth, the faded image of a cartoon bird on its surface. Suddenly I recall a day not at all like this one, when I did not want to be here but drove out with my parents. The leaves were greener than they are today, the sun was not baking down, and the folks had requested a single afternoon, just the three of us, no one else. It must have been early summer, maybe a week before I reported to boot camp, and I was grumpy in agreeing because I’d been spending every moment with Sylvia. But even in those days I was generally compliant.

We drove to a state park that was famous for its buzzards. My father always wanted to see the buzzards, and we’d come out other years but never during the migration period when the birds are easy to spot, so we’d never seen them. We didn’t see them that day, either, but it didn’t matter. My mom had packed a lunch, and as we spread an old rose picnic blanket on the bank of the reservoir my father said, “Helen, honey, give him a deviled egg to make him stop sulking.” I did love her deviled eggs. After lunch, my mom and I walked to a boathouse where there were rowboats for rent. We rented one for a few hours and I rowed her across the water.

I remember I had on a loud-patterned, clingy knit shirt with a long, pointed collar, and my hair was to my shoulders then, like every other high school boy. When I began to perspire, the shirt grew uncomfortable, and I took it off. Immediately, I felt self-conscious. My mother had seen my body before, of course, but always in the context of some activity like swimming. Now she sat just a few feet away, with nothing to look at but my pale, imperfectly developed chest, its small containment of hair at the center and a few zits in awkward spots. How juvenile I must have looked to her then, how unsuited to soldiering! But she only murmured, “Howie, you’ve gotten so strong!” and gazed off toward the shoreline until my father came into view. She had a knack for that, for being intimate and complimentary without causing me embarrassment, and she could remark on my physicality in a way my father, for all his years in haberdashery, never could. I remember the same quality years later, when there were only two of us, and she’d tell me I looked handsome in my pinstriped suit.

I took my father out rowing next, and he asked if I was frightened. I said I wasn’t. My dad said it was all right to be scared; he’d been scared himself when he went off to the service, even though he remained stationed in England and managed to escape D-day. He looked down at the oarlocks and said there were times he wished he’d gotten himself out of the whole damn experience, and I knew he was giving me permission to find a way out myself—go to Canada or Sweden or declare myself bonkers—but was too shy to say it. Maybe in later years my dad looked back on that conversation and regretted speaking so elliptically. Maybe he wished he’d urged me to flee. But I knew what he was getting at and didn’t need clarification. As I turned the boat toward shore, he took the Masonic ring from his finger and said he’d like me to have it, and I’ve worn it since.

It must have been one of those long, long days of June, because we stayed for hours. My father waded around at the reservoir’s edge, and about thirty yards down he discovered a spring that ran out of the hillside. When I strolled over to see what he was doing, I found him building a dam across the stream, and I pitched in, helping him wedge a slab of bluestone into an outgrowth of roots. By the time my mother wandered over, my jeans were wet right up to the waist, and Dad had pondweed on his cheek. Behind the dam a pool was forming, and Mom kicked off her sneakers and knelt in the water to shovel clay and silt at the dam’s leaky interstices. Slowly the pines at the distant shore merged into silhouettes, and the sunlight flashing on the water turned gold. Perhaps a buzzard even flew overhead.

We didn’t speak much as we worked. My father was generally disinclined toward idle chat, and we had other means of communicating. We stayed well into dusk, pointing and lifting and working as a troika, and saying no more about the war or my impending departure. And as I sit now in the hot cab of the truck, gazing across the wildflowers at the faded sign, I want to return to the rowboat and the buzzards and the dam, but I don’t want to return alone. So I back the truck up, turning away one more time, and head back to the city.