Witness the Death of Mercury Radio Theater (with Promo and Movie Featuring Ernest Hilbert)!
by Ernie on 03/02/12 at 9:21 am
Unfortunately I’ll be in LA this night, but I’ll be up on the big screen over the band! Check out the video.
Full Story“Cryptid” by Ernest Hilbert in the New Issue of The Edinburgh Review
Edinburgh’s oldest literary journal and released three times a year, The Edinburgh Review has been transforming the critical landscape since 1802. Issue 133 features poetry by Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Jen Hadfield, David Wheatley and many more!
Full Story“That’s Why I Talk Money Like a Pool Sharp. It’s All Survival; Forgive Me”: Charles Bukowski Learns the Literary Hustle After Quitting His Job
Thanks to E-Verser Brian for sending this one in.
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Books Read or Reread in 2011
Another year gone already? Strange. I never seem to spend as much time reading as I’d like. I imagine others share my dismay when I realize that yet another twelve months have spun round. Here are some of the books I did manage to read. There’s always next year. Onward!
Full Story“&: A Serial Poem” by Daryl Hine
“For his control of learning and wit I can think of few poets alive who can approach him. There are very few poets as good as Daryl Hine and almost none like him.” – John Hollander
Full Story“The Galilean Moons” by Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie (b. 1962) spent much of her early poetic career answering the question posed by the disapproving elders in her famous poem ‘The Queen of Sheba’: “whae do you think y’ur?”. Born in Renfrewshire, Scotland she studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Awarded an Eric Gregory at nineteen, Jamie used the money to travel, especially in the Himalayas, something that’s significantly influenced both her poetry and prose. Her eight collections of poetry include The Queen of Sheba, Mr & Mrs Scotland are Dead, Jizzen, and The Tree House which between them have garnered three TS Eliot Award nominations, two Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes, and two Forward Poetry Prizes. She is currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews.
Full Story“Romance” by Wild Flag
Most of the comments on YouTube are “hey, it’s that chick from that show on TV!”
Full StoryTop Five 2011 Movies that Make Reference to World War I
No, that’s not a typo. We mean World War One. The Great War. The War to End All Wars. It seems like every year sees a lot of big budget pictures on World War II, but WWI gets short shrift.
Full StoryErnest Hilbert’s Reading at St. Paul’s Chapel on Boxing Day
I had the rather humbling honor of reading three of my poems at St. Paul’s Chapel at 200 Broadway, nicknamed the 9/11 Chapel, with the Trinity Bach orchestra and choir, under the direction of Julian Wachner, on Boxing Day. The chapel was at overflow capacity, with balconies and even floors and doorways completely filled with Bach devotees, visitors to the shrine, congregants, tourists, and, to my delight, some young poets who came out for it.
Full Story“The Oxen” by Thomas Hardy
“The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.” – Thomas Hardy
Full Story“Schnaps Das War Sein Letztes Wort” by Onkel Tom Angelripper
Merry German metal Christmas!
Full StoryBethany’s Top Five Versions of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”
We don’t know if anyone still does a full twelve days of Christmas, but here are our top five versions of the song.
Full Story“The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman” (1487) by Emily Dickinson
“Mr Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” – Emily Dickenson
Full StoryBethany’s “Top Five Literary Gatherings I’d Give My Soul to Have Been Part Of”
5. The Bloomsbury Set: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey, etc. 4. The Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Roger Lancelyn Green, Lord David Cecil, etc. Ernie used to sit at Tolkien’s end of the booth in the Eagle and Child in Oxford. 3. [...]
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“Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele
Timothy Steele was born in 1948 in Burlington, Vermont. He received a B.A. in English in 1970 from Stanford University, followed by a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977 from Brandeis University. His first collection of poems, Uncertainties and Rest, published in 1979, attracted attention for its colloquial charm and its allegiance to meter and rhyme at a time when free verse was the predominant style, especially among younger poets. Writing about the book in The Hudson Review, Richmond Lattimore called it “desperately and delightfully unfashionable.” – Academy of American Poets
Full Story“Shitter Was Full!”: Classic Scenes from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
For some reason this remains one of my favorite Christmas films. Funny as all hell. Check out a few clips.
Full StoryTop Five Ways to Remember People Who Died this Year
We think this year has seen an unusual number of celebrity deaths, both good and bad. Now that the year is ending, it’s time to celebrate the lives of the beloved, and celebrate the deaths of the evil. This is what we’re planning.
Full Story“Hedgehog” by Paul Muldoon
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”
Full StoryTop Five Movies Based on Children’s Games or Toys
Lots of people making movies now were born in the late sixties and early seventies, so, when they sit around brainstorming ideas for new movies, rather than reach for campy TV shows like the older generation did, they go one better and say “hey, remember that game we used to play? Yeah, why not make a movie out of that?” With a board game, one needn’t worry about pre-existing plots or characters, just a big warm fuzzy icon of youth identifiable to middle-aged nostalgia hounds. Here are a few of these risible movies clogging up screens near you.
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“Chelsea Hotel” by Ernest Hilbert in the New Issue of The Edinburgh Review
Edinburgh’s oldest literary journal and released three times a year, The Edinburgh Review has been transforming the critical landscape since 1802. Issue 133 features poetry by Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Jen Hadfield, David Wheatley and many more!
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Ernest Hilbert Reads at St. Paul’s 9/11 Chapel in Manhattan with Trinity Choir and Trinity Baroque Orchestra conducted by Julian Wachner
On Boxing Day, December 26th, at 1PM, I will read from Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio” as well as from my own poems alongside performances of Bach cantatas by The Trinity Choir and Baroque Orchestra conducted by Julian Wachner at St. Paul’s 9/11 Chapel at 209 Broadway (Broadway/Fulton), New York 10007, 212-602-0800. For more information, visit Bach [...]
Full Story“Please” by Allan Peterson
“Peterson has a remarkable way of connecting diverse aspects of being. He touches on the subtle images he sees by exploring a vision beyond the momentary. His titles alone hint at the long afternoons spent contemplating existential themes, spiritual notions, concepts as natural to these poems as wings would be to a dragonfly.” – The Adirondack Review
Full Story“The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Me Was on Christmas. Oh, God. It Was So Horrible”: Top Five Downer Christmas Movies
Bah humbug! For those of you who need an alternative to all the sugary-sweet stories going around during the holiday season, check out these Christmas-related depressing movies.
Full Story“’Good Taste Is the Excuse I’ve Always Given’” by Ernest Hilbert
All of You on the Good Earth by Ernest Hilbert (scheduled release in 2013) guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers and spaced-out movie stars, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, self-indulgent denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the amusing and heartbreaking debris of life on this world, all the while recalling Seneca’s dictum, non est ad astra mollis e terris via (“the road from the earth to the stars is not easy”).
Full Story“Existential Horror Santa” and Other Scary Santas
It’s surprising that kids aren’t more scared of a fat old hermit who enters their houses once a year in the dead of night, and these guys aren’t helping! Welcome to Scary Santas. Click on “Existential Horror Santa” below to visit the UGO, where they have 50 Scary Santas (that’s right, 50!).
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