Ernest Hilbert with Tim Green at the Ruskin Arts Club, Los Angeles
by Ernie on 01/04/10 at 10:29 am
RED HEN PRESS PRESENTS POETS ERNEST HILBERT AND TIM GREEN
Sunday, April 11, 2010
2:00PM
The Ruskin Art Club
800 S. Plymouth Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90005
310.669.2369 or 818.831.0649
Admission: General $10
Students & Seniors $5
Timothy Green was born in Upstate New York in 1980. American Fractal is his first book-length collection of poetry. He edits the very successful literary magazine Rattle and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet Megan O’Reilly Green.
“The Sense of Being Looked At” by Tim Green
Around the corner, footsteps. A heel
clicking stone. The slosh of loose gravel
and then the no-sound itself conspicuous—
even the crickets hold their breath, hush
their rough legs while deep inside houses
women reading bedtime stories pause
to change their endings, one good wish
at a time. A car sails by with its lights off,
but Elvis on the radio still crooning after all
these years, still young—like nothing’s gone
wrong. When you turn, the trees spring back,
defensive. They point to each other all at once,
a dozen limbs like the Scarecrow’s saying,
He went that way. No, no, he went that way.
Ernest Hilbert’s debut collection is Sixty Sonnets (2009). LATR Editions, Brooklyn, issued Aim Your Arrows at the Sun, a hand-sewn chapbook in an edition of 250 with a foreword by Adam Kirsch. Hilbert’s poems have appeared in Measure, The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, Meridian, American Scholar, and the London Review.
“The Envelope, Please” by Ernest Hilbert
Thank you, oh, thank you (hold up statuette)
Thank you (breathe) so much. This is just too much.
I couldn’t have done it without the drugs . . .
And the booze. It took a whole lot of sweat
And tears. Mostly sweat. It’s such
A huge, huge honor to be here. It sort of bugs
Me that it took so long, but here I am.
I’d also like to thank the drugs. Wait, did
I say that already? Okay. The booze?
Right. Well, man (sob), I had fun (slam
Award on podium), and they were really good
Drugs. I’d also like to thank (ignore cues)
Fans, friends, you at home, dealers, mom and dad,
But most of all I’d like to (cut to car ad).
