E-Verse Radio

Ernest Hilbert with Jill Alexander Essbaum at West Chester Poets House

by Ernie on 23/03/10 at 9:15 am

West Chester Poets House Presents Ernest Hilbert with Jill Alexander Essbaum
Wednesday, March 24th
823 S. High Street

Poets House, West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
610-436-3235
poetry@wcupa.edu
FREE

“Few poets’ roots go deeper than the Romantics; Jill Alexander Essbaum’s reach all the way to the Elizabethans. In her Harlot one hears Herbert and Wyatt and Donne, their parallax view of religion as sex and sex as religion, their delight in sin, their smirking penitence, their penchant for the conceit, their riddles and fables, their fondling and squeezing of language. But this ‘postulant in the Church of the Kiss’ is a twenty-first century woman, a ‘strange woman’ less bowed to confession than hell-bent on fairly bragging of threesomes and more complications than were wet-dreamt of in Mr. W. H.’s philosophy.” – H. L. Hix

“Eulogy” by Jill Alexander Essbaum

She was slattern and ash.
Hoarfrost on thorn.
Vinegar and hyssop.
A hiccough. A fuck-up.
No matter. No factly .
She was a casual exactly,
Habitually plastered.
And every havoc that had her
Disastered her.

She was a cat on a trash
Heap. A baby and a trembler.
In transit or in trouble,
Ever one or the other.
She was the warning
Your mother tried to woman you
About. The dementia
You presented with.
The misfortune you’ve resented,

Since. She was ankle iron,
Ironing board. Bored and forlorn,
She was horny, sore, and cheap.
She dreamed of doors and ceilings.
A creamy, skin-deep bything.
She was a mouthful of dirty
Words, pretty as pain.
was the staple
On a centerfolded page.

She was a swiftlet nesting
In a stew. What she did to you,
You let her do. Like the variegated
Musk of ambergris, she lingered.
Her particular taste
On your tongue and your finger.
She was linen white. And
Rubbish red. And maidenhead.
And fantastic in bed.

But now she’s dead.

First appearance in No Tell Motel

***

“Hilbert is one of our best rhymers since Robert Frost, and his poems have been compared by superb poets to those of John Berryman and Robert Lowell. We haven’t had a poetry like his—both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding—to enjoy and mull over for a long time.” – Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America

“An Aging Drunk Observes the Blizzard” by Ernest Hilbert

Inspired by The Drama of the Scharnhorst by Fritz-Otto Busch, 1956

I am lonely, of course, hung-over, pale, and fat.
Hairs wash out, slither down, thatch up the shower drain.
My teeth hurt. I dream they clatter like ice chips in
The bloody bowl of the white sink, and that
My smile bares purple sockets. I note a stain
On my gray shirt. Patches flake from my skin.
The hardened pinesap cold of Christmas saddens me.
Like vinegar, Easter’s angles of gold light sour.
Outnumbered, pursued, slowing, falling prey to sleep—
I nod into nightmares of a battleship in the North Sea,
Smoking, lost, blind in razoring rain, and losing power,
In desperate flight from twilit storms and destroyers’ sweep,
Hunted, hurt, steaming fast for Norway with torn bow,
Still deadly with guns bent in the screaming snow.

Ernie

Ernest Hilbert is founder of E-Verse Radio.

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