Ernest Hilbert: “Sixty Sonnets”

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours …

— William Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet”

Believe me, Billy, I do not scorn the sonnet.

I have been a sonnet fan since I first discovered poetry in high school. There was something about the “rules” aspect of sonnets that I, in my OCD propensities, found comforting. Oh, you just have 8 lines first – and the rhyme scheme is abbaabba, easy – then you have 6 lines, and you can rhyme it cdcdcd, or a number of other schemes, and if you just follow the rules, you have a sonnet, right? Right, Sheila, right.

I share all of this basically to say that the sonnet, to me, was always the most interesting of poetry forms, and there was something in it – the strictness of it – that seemed to set poets (good ones, anyway) free. Some of my favorite poems of all time are sonnets: John Milton’s “On his Blindness”, first and foremost, “Ozymandias”, by Shelley, too many to count by Shakespeare, and I also have a soft spot for Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets.

The sonnet is perhaps seen as old-fashioned now, but I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t think “old-fashioned” is necessarily an epithet. It’s wonderful to see what contemporary people can do with the old forms, and it is that which keeps something alive, fresh, tangible – as opposed to something in a dusty museum case.

Ernest Hilbert, well-known poet, and beloved editor of a poetry newsletter called E-verse Radio which I have been receiving since the late 1990s, has come out with his breathtaking first collection of poetry, called Sixty Sonnets, a collection I just read over the last four or five days.

Some of the poems made me laugh out loud. Some made me cringe in recognition – even down to the place-names. Astor Bar. Ouch! Bellevue! Ouch! The world he describes is one I have inhabited. And some brought tears to my eyes.

Here is what I think is special and remarkable about Hilbert’s work: His vocabulary can be daunting, as can his various frames of reference. You wonder if there is anything this man doesn’t know. You, as the reader, must be prepared to leap from ancient Greece to the East Village in one or two lines, and you had better be familiar with the Oresteia as well as Metallica … otherwise you will be lost. But none of this comes off as too-clever, or coy. It is truly an expression of who Hilbert is, the breadth and depth of his curiosity and interests, and how his mind works. It is a quicksilver mind, generous and open and humorous and also somehow conservative, in its way, as well – with a respect for all that has passed, the voices that chorus around him, the history of literature. Even with the giants of the past, like Auden and Eliot, Hilbert can say, in one of the sonnets in the collection:

So thank God for gin, whiskey, and lager,
Publisher’s parties. Let the critics rail.
Too much chat of gyres, grails, gods, Rose, or Rood
Will leave a young man questing for the door.

Another thing that has struck me about his poetry, since I first started reading it back in the late 90s, is how often it includes some kind of genuine sucker-punch. I can’t tell you how many times I end up in sudden tears, reading his stuff. I get lulled into a rhythm, I am taken with the imagery (Hilbert’s images are often arresting), and maybe one image reminds me of Moby Dick, so I think a little bit about that, another image makes me remember some bacchanalian night I had once at Astor Bar when I tripped down the steps in my sandals and couldn’t find the bathroom … and then, in the last stanza, he rips my heart out. I don’t know how he does it, but it happens repeatedly.

If I had to analyze it (and apologies, I know how to review movies – but I feel a bit out of my depth here) I would say that what Hilbert pulls off here is what James Joyce pulls off in the astonishing last four paragraphs of The Dead. That’s what it feels like: the consciousness going from microscopic to macroscopic, moving from detail to universality – and there is pain and loss and grief in the transfer, because it is in those moments that we become aware of our mortality. But, very important: there’s not only loss being expressed. And that’s one of the things I think is sometimes missing in the understanding of what Joyce does in those last four paragraphs, and I think is essential to understanding Hilbert’s work, too: ultimately, it’s about love. It’s not a love that is cozy, or domestic. It’s a love that is rather searing, almost unbearable, hopeless, really, because it comes out of acute self-awareness. Just like Gabriel, at the end of The Dead, has his tragic realization of how connected he is to all of mankind (even “the shades”), and this realization only comes about because he is face to face, for the first time, with how little he knows about his wife, so does Hilbert, after dragging us through the boozy alleys of New York, making us drink more pints than we want to, showing us the loneliness and noise that can infiltrate your head at 3 a.m., step back, at the end, and almost shake his head, humorously, about how much he loves it all.

My love, we know the universe must bend
Until it ends, entropy will labor
Until all is cold and flat, that stars close
Across icy gulfs, suns crash.

— from Hilbert’s sonnet “Love Poem”

It’s the “My love” there that sets Hilbert apart from many of his contemporaries, who perhaps remain a bit cooler, aloof, embodying the too-cool-for-you energy of the day.

Hilbert’s is a true voice, distinct, individual (and, full disclosure, I know Ernie, so I know what he sounds like – but that’s not what I am referring to here), with something to tell us, something he needs to share, and maybe feels he should hold off on divulging, but by the end of each sonnet, he can’t help it, and out it all comes. You just need to sit back and get out of the damn way.

Before long
I will try to remember what happened.
Memory is just a haunting of ghosts,
And the night is crushed below like eggshell.

— from Hilbert’s sonnet “Corned Beef Hash and Two Eggs Over Easy, Coffee”

Another thing great about this collection is the humor in it, the characters who emerge: the dude who falls off bar stools (“One second he’s there, then he’s gone from view”), the lonely single girl, looking back on her collection of dolls as a young girl (“Donny who pines for his lost Marie”), and many more. I love these people. I love the specificity in which they are drawn, how Hilbert tells us just one or two things about them, and, in a flash, an entire human being erects itself before our very eyes. It is my favorite kind of writing. Spare, elegant, and yet not at all afraid of the “ba-dum-ching” ending, or the absurd details that make up life sometimes.

Adam Kirsch, author of The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry is excerpted in a blurb at the beginning of Sixty Sonnets, and he writes:

Hilbert has an appetite for life equal to his taste in literature: a rare combination in an age of dissociated sensibility.

This, to me, expresses that “sucker punch” thing I described earlier, because Hilbert’s stuff is the opposite of “dissociated”, and perhaps I am used to the “dissociation” of our current crop of writers, and that is not my thing, it is not what I respond to, although I often can appreciate the cleverness of the devices. Hilbert comes from a classical background, his knowledge of poetry is encyclopedic, huge, and often that kind of knowledge comes off as either precocious or tiresome insider-information (if you look at, say, the earliest poems of Sylvia Plath, where she basically wants to show the reader how smart she is, and how much she knows about, well, everything). But in these sonnets, Hilbert incorporates it all, leaving out nothing, letting the Golden Fleece sit beside Suzanne Vega, and I just feel happy to be going along for the ride.

He raises a pint, not only to his crazy friends sitting at the Astor Bar with him, or suffering through their hangovers at a local diner the next morning, but to all of the poets who have gone before, Hilbert’s emotional and intellectual history.

According to Wordsworth, Shakespeare “unlocked his heart” with the “key” of the sonnet.

So, too, has Ernie Hilbert.

Read more about Hilbert and Sixty Sonnets. You can also listen to Hilbert read some of his work here. Hilbert’s bio here.

Purchase Sixty Sonnets here.