INTERVIEW
sO, sING oN: AN INTERVIEW WITH eRNEST hILBERT
BY sTEPHANIE kOHLER AND bRIAN mALONEY
2014
Credit: Niamh O'Connell
For Ernest Hilbert, the sonnet is the most basic unit of human expression - it captures a moment in one “little song.” The couplet is the equivalent to a punchline, the form serves solitary contemplation, and the genre is intentionally blurred. Yet Hilbert views his modern take on the old tradition just as he views his predecessors and their craft. Art will always be art, he says, the “ancient things that still work.”
His latest anthology All of You on the Good Earth is no exception to his rule, and, as an antique book dealer, it is his expectation. In “Cover to Cover,” Hilbert explores his affair with books. “I don’t collect them,” he writes, an obvious and ironic fallacy. Like stories, “they just accumulate,” as time passes and as he experiences more of the world. An avid traveler, Hilbert is most interested in the variations among individuals, even if the pervasive voice in his poems is at most times alone. Though no name is mentioned, he speaks for everyone, to everyone, with the sonnet as his steadfast device.
A graduate of both Rutgers University and St. Catherine's College, and a composer of opera music, Hilbert believes that poetry and performance are independent but allied arts. He practices his art through various mediums, in hopes that he may be able to share his song with the varied masses.
His latest anthology All of You on the Good Earth is no exception to his rule, and, as an antique book dealer, it is his expectation. In “Cover to Cover,” Hilbert explores his affair with books. “I don’t collect them,” he writes, an obvious and ironic fallacy. Like stories, “they just accumulate,” as time passes and as he experiences more of the world. An avid traveler, Hilbert is most interested in the variations among individuals, even if the pervasive voice in his poems is at most times alone. Though no name is mentioned, he speaks for everyone, to everyone, with the sonnet as his steadfast device.
A graduate of both Rutgers University and St. Catherine's College, and a composer of opera music, Hilbert believes that poetry and performance are independent but allied arts. He practices his art through various mediums, in hopes that he may be able to share his song with the varied masses.
Glassworks Magazine (GM): Your debut poetry collection Sixty Sonnets, as well as All of You on the Good Earth, are comprised of sonnets. The word sonnet means “little song” and they were traditionally performed publicly. Why have you chosen a public form to convey private thoughts?
Ernest Hilbert (EH): While the public aspects may have held true in the chansonnier or troubadour dawn of the form, by the time of Shakespeare it had become a very intimate form, typically exchanged through correspondence. Even the first sonneteers were singing of love, or love that is unrequited, so it had an intimate quality. Still, you are correct in seeing the public side of the sonnet. A woman told me after a reading a few years ago that she thought it was a bit like a punk concert, in her opinion, because each of my poems takes about one minute to read, then I have a short break, with the repartee, the jokes, the setups, and back into another sonnet. From time to time I’ll refer to the sonnets as my songs until someone points out that I’m using the wrong term. It’s more than a Freudian slip. It’s a historical reality. It also reveals my own feelings toward the sonnet. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet cycle, addressed to a single person or group of people, is public only because it has been published. Throughout, we feel we are eavesdropping. We attempt to prize meaning from incompletely understood situations. I wanted to capture some of that while making the collection more public, less about myself and my circle, with a cast of characters and evocative scenarios into which they are placed. The sonnet may have its origins as a love song, but I feel the sonnet’s spiritual jurisdiction has grown to include just about any subject matter or emotional position.
There is another reason for the solitary speaker in some of my poems. After Wordsworth, the lyric poem has been used to trace the lineaments of the poet’s thought, to represent emotional states, register psychological shifts. Focus is on the poet, not society. Often, the speaker is alone in the poems, and my wife has accused me—or, I should say, accurately stated—that I have airbrushed her out of some scenes. Wordsworth removed his sister Dorothy from some poems, or diminished her presence, or reduced her to a literary device in his mental drama. Some poems are public and communal, but others are, by necessity, solitary, even if that solitude is fabricated for the sake of the poem. I know that citing Wordsworth is not creating the strongest case in my favor, but at least I can claim a precedent.
One case is the prelude to All of You on the Good Earth, a poem titled “Dusk Among the Ruins,” which was inspired by a visit to an Etruscan, Roman, and, later, Medieval Christian ruin, near the Etruscan city of Vulci. My wife, Lynn, who has excavated Etruscan sites in the region, was with me. How else would I have located such a remote ruin? As a poet, I was struck by two things: First, the deposits of history, the remains of civilizations that were overrun or simply outlived, or were violently supplanted by new ones. And, second, as the dusk set in, and it grew chilly, I watched a wall of shadow proceed across the valley until it overtook a white horse that grazed in the center. This scene haunted me for years before I wrote the poem, and it’s really about confronting literary history, the great monuments of art, and, to be honest, the finer writers of one’s own generation. The thrust is that you can be swallowed or destroyed by these thoughts, or you can gain strength, an almost adrenal rush toward the confrontation that energizes and fortifies: “I am summered and slow in withered light; / My flinted veins, my parched fields, grind and ignite.” That is something the writer must face alone, and that is why I am alone in that poem. Come to think of it, there may have been some brown horses as well, and I probably removed them. A single white horse is a more powerful image. Poets aren’t reporters. They don’t report the truth; they make it, to paraphrase James Dickey, a famous fabricator on and off the page. They attempt to locate and distill the essence of a scene or circumstance, get to the emotional nucleus and transmute it into a poem. These crucial details, if properly handled, can rise to the level of symbols. I’ve always admired the ways in which Amy Clampitt, for instance, allows bundles of imagery to become something more important. Her poem “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” is very important to me.
GM: But in your sonnets the first-person speaker in your work often suggests that he is alone. For example, in “Dinner Flushed Down the Toilet,” the speaker has been left by his friends in one of their houses. This is ironic considering the purpose of the sonnet.
Ernest Hilbert (EH): While the public aspects may have held true in the chansonnier or troubadour dawn of the form, by the time of Shakespeare it had become a very intimate form, typically exchanged through correspondence. Even the first sonneteers were singing of love, or love that is unrequited, so it had an intimate quality. Still, you are correct in seeing the public side of the sonnet. A woman told me after a reading a few years ago that she thought it was a bit like a punk concert, in her opinion, because each of my poems takes about one minute to read, then I have a short break, with the repartee, the jokes, the setups, and back into another sonnet. From time to time I’ll refer to the sonnets as my songs until someone points out that I’m using the wrong term. It’s more than a Freudian slip. It’s a historical reality. It also reveals my own feelings toward the sonnet. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet cycle, addressed to a single person or group of people, is public only because it has been published. Throughout, we feel we are eavesdropping. We attempt to prize meaning from incompletely understood situations. I wanted to capture some of that while making the collection more public, less about myself and my circle, with a cast of characters and evocative scenarios into which they are placed. The sonnet may have its origins as a love song, but I feel the sonnet’s spiritual jurisdiction has grown to include just about any subject matter or emotional position.
There is another reason for the solitary speaker in some of my poems. After Wordsworth, the lyric poem has been used to trace the lineaments of the poet’s thought, to represent emotional states, register psychological shifts. Focus is on the poet, not society. Often, the speaker is alone in the poems, and my wife has accused me—or, I should say, accurately stated—that I have airbrushed her out of some scenes. Wordsworth removed his sister Dorothy from some poems, or diminished her presence, or reduced her to a literary device in his mental drama. Some poems are public and communal, but others are, by necessity, solitary, even if that solitude is fabricated for the sake of the poem. I know that citing Wordsworth is not creating the strongest case in my favor, but at least I can claim a precedent.
One case is the prelude to All of You on the Good Earth, a poem titled “Dusk Among the Ruins,” which was inspired by a visit to an Etruscan, Roman, and, later, Medieval Christian ruin, near the Etruscan city of Vulci. My wife, Lynn, who has excavated Etruscan sites in the region, was with me. How else would I have located such a remote ruin? As a poet, I was struck by two things: First, the deposits of history, the remains of civilizations that were overrun or simply outlived, or were violently supplanted by new ones. And, second, as the dusk set in, and it grew chilly, I watched a wall of shadow proceed across the valley until it overtook a white horse that grazed in the center. This scene haunted me for years before I wrote the poem, and it’s really about confronting literary history, the great monuments of art, and, to be honest, the finer writers of one’s own generation. The thrust is that you can be swallowed or destroyed by these thoughts, or you can gain strength, an almost adrenal rush toward the confrontation that energizes and fortifies: “I am summered and slow in withered light; / My flinted veins, my parched fields, grind and ignite.” That is something the writer must face alone, and that is why I am alone in that poem. Come to think of it, there may have been some brown horses as well, and I probably removed them. A single white horse is a more powerful image. Poets aren’t reporters. They don’t report the truth; they make it, to paraphrase James Dickey, a famous fabricator on and off the page. They attempt to locate and distill the essence of a scene or circumstance, get to the emotional nucleus and transmute it into a poem. These crucial details, if properly handled, can rise to the level of symbols. I’ve always admired the ways in which Amy Clampitt, for instance, allows bundles of imagery to become something more important. Her poem “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” is very important to me.
GM: But in your sonnets the first-person speaker in your work often suggests that he is alone. For example, in “Dinner Flushed Down the Toilet,” the speaker has been left by his friends in one of their houses. This is ironic considering the purpose of the sonnet.
EH: (…) “Dinner Flushed Down the Toilet,” (…) includes a speaker who is alone, but the poem uses the initial solitude to establish an investigative dichotomy. It’s based on lived experience. I was staying in a friend’s apartment about a block from the Chelsea Hotel. But what we get with the vision of the end is a comparison between deprivations in solitude of the poem’s beginning with the communal suffering of sailors drowning in the midst of a naval battle as their burning ship rolls under the waves. One of my goals is to introduce a sense of perspective that may be otherwise lacking, or to distort perspective in order to allow the reader an opportunity to reexamine a scene.
Some poets fall prey to what can only be called chumminess, or glibness, when their poems contain a rotating cast of wonderfully important, special characters, like something out of a Henry James novel, in which everyone is so gifted and brilliant. It’s almost suspicious. One should also be careful about using one’s friends and families too much in poems. As Elizabeth Bishop chided Robert Lowell after he published The Dolphin, which included extracts from letters written to Lowell by his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, “art just isn’t worth that much.” That may be an extreme case, but it makes the point. Others will disagree, I am sure. Someone once remarked that writers are assassins. First they kill their families, then their friends, then themselves. Remember, “sonneteer” has been, at times, a term of abuse, like poetaster. Just consider a novelist like Truman Capote, who ruined himself artistically and socially when he published excerpts from his proposed Proustian masterwork, Answered Prayers. I try to keep people closest to me out of the poems. This might explain some of the solitude upon which you remarked. Alicia Stallings wrote that my poems contain “a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the ‘fuck-ups,’ the ‘Gentlemen at the Tavern’—but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona—the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself—as much listener as talker—something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter.”
GM: I like what you said about “sonneteer” being a negative term of abuse. Now, most of us are familiar with Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets. You invented your own style of sonnet which has been called “Hilbertian.” What is different about your style of sonnet?
EH: Comic essayist Daniel Nester was the first to peg it as a “Hilbertian” sonnet, and he did so in a deeply sardonic way. It’s a bit of a joke. It’s a very minor innovation, if it could even be called that. I’m drawn to threes and sixes for some reason. The form consists of two sestets, ABCABCDEFDEF closing with a GG couplet. The sestets allow the rhymes to breathe a bit more, which is why I use a prompt or buttress rhyme (those are my own terms) at the start of following line, a trick I learned from Louis MacNeice’s classic “Sunlight on the Garden.” “Our freedom as free lances / Advances.” For instance, in my poem “The Singles Scene” I do it this way: “Donny who pines for his lost Marie, / While Ace Frehley, with no band, goes solo,” setting up Marie against Frehley to keep the line fresh before the next rhyme, “see” at the end of the eleventh line. It is worth noting that my use is irregular and MacNeice’s is fixed.
There’s nothing especially radical or inventive in my form. The poems are a combination of fabliaux, short story, song, and joke in differing proportions. What’s more important are my efforts to create original meaning in the poems. The Hilbertian sonnet uses parts of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms, with the final, “English,” couplet forcing a rhetorical sense of summing up a story or an argument. That final couplet can introduce some difficulties. It’s the equivalent of a punch line in a joke. David Yezzi published an insightful essay called “These are the Poems, Folks,” in which he delineates similarities between joke and poem structures, the setup, the pay off. It’s part of a book he’s writing on modes of the lyric poem, such as song, joke, prayer. I expect it will prove to be an extraordinarily important book. But back to jokes. I wonder if certain verse forms aren’t permanently associated with a kind of effect. What is it about a limerick, for instance, that makes it work so well for comic verse? Could you tell a sad story with a limerick? Something about the very way a couplet sounds makes it almost predisposed to corniness. It’s perfectly suited to the comic tone. But, like a joke, it can die if a single word is misplaced. In a tragic or more serious poem a couplet can wind up appearing trite. If you have the urge to moralize, the couplet will bring it out. It is too often the occasion for banalities and sentimental clichés. A lot of care must go into constructing a properly balanced couplet.
In Rattle magazine, Maryann Corbett remarked that the “Hilbertian” sonnet, if I may be permitted to utter the term myself, is “a form designed to grate against the expectations of the reader who is geared to the usual foursquare quatrains in the octaves of the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet forms. It also cuts across the squared grain of some of the poet’s arguments” and goes on to submit that “bucking our expectation of quatrains is a way of allowing rhyme to be present but not foregrounded.” I am a devotee of Charlie Mingus, the jazz bassist, bandleader, and composer. I listen to him all the time. He is an artistic hero of mine. There is a reason for that. In Robert Palmer’s liner notes of the classic double live album Mingus at Antibes, he discusses the way Mingus and his star players like Eric Dolphy were “proposing a brand of freedom built on . . . the skeletal remains of popular song structures,” which resulted in what he calls their “freedom-with-order.” I like that a lot. “Freedom-with-order.” I feel a kinship with that notion. I also feel an affinity for old heavy metal bands like Venom, who attempted, in a Faustian bargain, very structured and grand songs with a loose hard rock style borne of their own ineptness. If this analogy seems strange, I often contemplate stranger ones. I try to connect with everything that can be useful, without losing my sense of what is impressive and meaningful, and what is dross.
Robert Lowell used a rough blank verse style in his diary-like books Notebook (both a blue and a red edition were issued in quick succession due to his his manic revision) and History, which were epic in scale while sometimes exceptionally private in substance. John Berryman gave us the distressed, Shakespearean pastiches and character voices of his Dream Songs. Both Lowell and Berryman have exerted sizable influence on my own sonnets, as Adam Kirsch has observed. I feel their gravitational tug, like massive planets out in the dark somewhere. Ted Berrigan used collage and happenstance in his sonnets, which sometimes succeed, but which I sometimes find wearisome, though they are widely admired. I do like listening to recordings of them. I recently read, in The Walrus, a tetrameter sonnet by Jason Guriel, “Poetry is Barbarous,” which displays his method of fashioning a sonnet that sounds new, moving forward while containing the past. I also like Karen Volkman’s expressionist sonnets in Nomina, which sometimes border on pure sound.
I retain more of the basic sonnet qualities than some, though my sonnets are fraught, roughened, distressed, sometimes in an effort to mimic the subject matter. I almost never write the pristine, traditional sonnet some readers still prefer. I didn’t have a lot of time when I pulled together my first book, because I was given a contract before I really had a finished manuscript, and I considered a few different titles. I grumbled to a poet friend, “you know, these aren’t really sonnets,” and he replied that if I didn’t call them sonnets, everyone else would, so I brazenly titled the first collection Sixty Sonnets. Arguments about their “sonnetness” continue.
GM: Sonnets typically are fourteen line poems with a set rhyme scheme and a volta, or a turning point in the narrative. What do your voltas look like?
EH: I am more interested in variation than regimentation or standardization. I ring changes on the form both structurally and tonally. The volta is sometimes neglected or relegated to a very minor role, but when I use it, which is most of the time, I tend to dislodge it from its usual position. The volta is most essential when the poem makes an argument or introduces and then overturns an idea. The turn is away from a given meaning. It lends a structure to the poem, but I don’t always want that structure to dictate the shape of the poem.
GM: Are they mostly literal, metaphorical, or both?
EH: Both. I try to create meaning on as many levels as possible.
GM: Does your form of sonnet require a volta or are you conscious of one when you are writing?
EH: I am conscious of placement of the volta, except when I have chosen to remove it altogether in order to generate a different lyric experience. Benjamin Longfellow undertook an extensive examination of my use of the volta. I quote a bit from here.
The Hilbertian sonnet is based on variations; Hilbert has three main standards, and several variations, and his voltas are no different. The volta shifts position throughout his sonnets. It tends to explain or emphasize a point rather than solve a problem, and it takes on literal and metaphorical traits depending upon the sonnet itself . . . sometimes using a volta and a Shakespearean twist, sometimes using just a Shakespearean twist, and then, more rarely, he uses the sonnet as a single statement without a volta or a Shakespearean twist.
I wanted both books to contain something of the emotional range one encounters when listening to Elgar’s Enigma Variations or Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as opposed to a uniform series like Warhol’s soup cans, which were intended as a comment on serialization and mass production. I want to stretch things out. It’s hard to maintain engagement with sixty or a hundred and twenty poems that have no array or difference. My voltas aren’t neatly located. Sometimes they appear as late as the twelfth line, as Luke Stromberg pointed out in a paper about the title poem, “All of You on the Good Earth,” which introduces and elaborates an argument across two sestets and then starkly slams the door in the final couplet, which serves as both a commentary, a turning away (a man literally “turns from the locked door,” a little inside joke, since volta means, in Italian, to turn).
GM: Even though the context of your sonnets is private, you seem to be addressing everyone with the title, All of You on the Good Earth. The title is based on a quote from Frank Borman during the Apollo 8 mission when he says, “God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” Why did you decide to group this collection of poetry under that title?
EH: The image of an earthrise, of the living planet emerging on the horizon of a barren moonscape, really hits me. It’s certainly one of the most important images of all time. It throws human suffering into stark relief. One gains perspective from that photograph, quite literally. Borman’s 1968 sight of a distant, troubled earth serves as a corollary to my own distance and sympathy for the gallery of characters in my books, characters whose follies, anguish, and aspirations become a summary of what it means to be human, even if the gallery sometimes resembles a police lineup. Borman’s view can be understood as generally equivalent to what Auden called agape, a sudden, intense sense of being connected to all human beings, a deep and powerful empathy, not untainted by sadness, I suspect. I was overcome by that feeling myself at the end of a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when the characters emerge, all conflicts resolved, to sing the final nonsense song, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / A foolish thing was but a toy, / For the rain it raineth every day.” I suddenly had a vision of the rain that falls on everyone, and my chest quite literally ached, and I perched on the edge of my seat, near tears, and could not rise until the theater was completely emptied. When I emerged onto the street, I began to emotionally embrace all I saw. Everyone suddenly seemed bonded to me in their humanity, their inevitable deaths, and their fleeting moments of comfort or camaraderie. This being Philadelphia, it didn’t last long, but it was genuine. I sought to invest the two books with that feeling: That we’re all in this together, whatever it is.
GM: That’s a really great way of looking at it, that we are all truly in this together. You really seem to focus on the human condition, how humans interact with each other, and how we act while we are alone. You pay special attention to the outcasts in life: psychics, college dropouts, other poets, and loners. What attracts you about these people and their situations?
EH: I am not interested in abstractions, simplifications, reductions, the methods of social planners, politicians, tyrants, advertisers, capitalists. I am interested in humans as individuals, but what is most important about an individual is the universal quality of that person’s experience, something we can all feel and share, across cultures, across experiences, across time. The simple answer is that I find such characters more compelling, partly because I can identify with them and their stories. Tom Bissell assures us in his essay “Grief and the Outsider” that “literature is always written by outsiders.” I am no exception. CA Conrad begins The Book of Frank with a quote from his grandmother. When he, as a young boy, asked her why people were staring at them, she replied “Well of course they’re staring. We’re very interesting.” I love that, and I know what that feels like. Despite ourselves, we love those who are different, who court disaster, who fail, misbehave, and destroy themselves. This goes some way toward explaining the enduring attraction of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, though there are still arguments about just how much of his appeal is intentional. They took pains to show just how despicable and immoral a man he is, but he remains the most captivating one on the stage. He steals the show, like a child acting out. Some have gone so far as to actually suggest that the lives of the other characters, his would-be or real victims, only have meaning because of his outrageous behavior. Without him, they are directionless and flat. He defines them. He makes them. Beethoven hated this, by the way, which is why he took pains to reduce the attractiveness of some characters, like Rocco, in Fidelio.
To bring the tone down a bit, why is a scoundrel like Han Solo so much more appealing than a Parsifal-like innocent like Luke Skywalker? Bad guys are fascinating. Losers compel. You know, someone warned me—when my first book was about to come out—that no one wants to read about losers. People like winners, he argued. I think he’s wrong. Schadenfreude aside, it’s easier to relate to someone who has been humbled.
GM: You have categorized your sonnets in All of You on the Good Earth into sections, such as “Sieges and Flights” and “Monsters.” What differentiates these poems from one another? Are they about similar ideas, themes, or feelings?
EH: The chapters are divided by feel, if that isn’t too fuzzy a concept, also, more obviously, by intent. Satires need to be fenced off from tragedies, lest they be misconstrued. The poems were grouped only when the collection was assembled. They were not written according to prescribed categories. Also, without chapters, the book might feel a bit of a chore, poem after poem after poem. The poems deserve their own chapters, like little books. Besides, it’s nice to have a place to put a book down for a while, and that’s another beauty of chapters. The groupings also give me a sense of control that may be entirely illusory, but readers have assured me that the chapters shaped the ways in which they understood the book.
GM: There are instances when you directly reference death, or rather, foreshadow your own. One line from your poem “Sopranos Lament” runs, “Life is like a watch I will never rewind.” In “Simple Instructions” you map out how the narrator would like to be buried. How do you put yourself in a place of loss, remorse, and self-loathing during your composition?
EH: I think there is a therapeutic dimension to poems about death and last things. They are a way of confronting death, making it less frightening. Since the loss of my father, I’ve thought quite a lot about death. The first date I had with my wife was at the Woodlands Cemetery, where I’ve since set a number of my poems, including “At the Grave of Thomas Eakins, Late Winter.” What you call the self-loathing, I’m afraid, is quite as real. When I was young, I was constantly in fights with other kids. Violence and intimidation were daily occurrences. There were times when I had to stand my ground against a dozen brutes, who would spit in my face to goad me, but I did not yield my ground. I was skinny, but I suppose I could be fierce when defending myself. When I look back on what seemed like failures, I realize that just holding your ground against a determined bully is a triumph, even if it leaves you humiliated and shaken. That sort of thing has a way of staying with you.
GM: How much of it is imagined and how much of it is from experience?
EH: Sometimes the contemplation of death is indistinguishable from humor, as in my poem “Leander Without Heroes,” from Sixty Sonnets, when I designate the ways in which birthdays, as we grow older, begin to pass the death dates of others, “as birthdays pass, so do the death / Dates of great and good gone down in their day.” Some people talk of the Christ year, 33, when one is meant to consider what has been accomplished in one’s life at the age at which Jesus was crucified. So I came up with similar dates for Keats, Shelley, and Byron for poets to mull over. Then you start to get to things like the Dylan Thomas age. He was 38 when he suffered his fatal cerebral hemorrhage. It just goes on and on, but it is a way of thinking about death in life while also having a little fun. Death is around us all the time, though we usually choose to ignore it, and fear of it builds up, what Larkin called “the costly aversion of the eyes away from death.” Death is not at all an unusual thing. The miracle is that life happens at all, just as it’s a miracle when a good book is published or a good song recorded. In some ways I feel that all of life is nothing more than a long preparation for extinction, and maybe poems are merely a miserable, frantic clutching at some permanence, something that might survive the author. You only hope that you’ve done more good than bad by the time you die, as Allen Ginsberg said.
My father died when I was 21. I sometimes sit on his grave and write poems. I’ve brought parts of the world to his grave, like a floating stone I found in a bay on the Greek island of Patmos, alleged to be the birthplace of Homer, though who could know? I brought sand from the pyramids at Giza, and a palm leaf from Jerusalem, things I gathered when I was a young poet traveling around with a notebook, trying to get some great insight that would allow me to write a poem that mattered. So I’m at home with death, in some ways. My wife and I visit graveyards the way other couples visit shopping malls. We like them. Finally, death is one of the things poems are best at and always have been. Death and love.
Some poets fall prey to what can only be called chumminess, or glibness, when their poems contain a rotating cast of wonderfully important, special characters, like something out of a Henry James novel, in which everyone is so gifted and brilliant. It’s almost suspicious. One should also be careful about using one’s friends and families too much in poems. As Elizabeth Bishop chided Robert Lowell after he published The Dolphin, which included extracts from letters written to Lowell by his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, “art just isn’t worth that much.” That may be an extreme case, but it makes the point. Others will disagree, I am sure. Someone once remarked that writers are assassins. First they kill their families, then their friends, then themselves. Remember, “sonneteer” has been, at times, a term of abuse, like poetaster. Just consider a novelist like Truman Capote, who ruined himself artistically and socially when he published excerpts from his proposed Proustian masterwork, Answered Prayers. I try to keep people closest to me out of the poems. This might explain some of the solitude upon which you remarked. Alicia Stallings wrote that my poems contain “a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the ‘fuck-ups,’ the ‘Gentlemen at the Tavern’—but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona—the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself—as much listener as talker—something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter.”
GM: I like what you said about “sonneteer” being a negative term of abuse. Now, most of us are familiar with Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets. You invented your own style of sonnet which has been called “Hilbertian.” What is different about your style of sonnet?
EH: Comic essayist Daniel Nester was the first to peg it as a “Hilbertian” sonnet, and he did so in a deeply sardonic way. It’s a bit of a joke. It’s a very minor innovation, if it could even be called that. I’m drawn to threes and sixes for some reason. The form consists of two sestets, ABCABCDEFDEF closing with a GG couplet. The sestets allow the rhymes to breathe a bit more, which is why I use a prompt or buttress rhyme (those are my own terms) at the start of following line, a trick I learned from Louis MacNeice’s classic “Sunlight on the Garden.” “Our freedom as free lances / Advances.” For instance, in my poem “The Singles Scene” I do it this way: “Donny who pines for his lost Marie, / While Ace Frehley, with no band, goes solo,” setting up Marie against Frehley to keep the line fresh before the next rhyme, “see” at the end of the eleventh line. It is worth noting that my use is irregular and MacNeice’s is fixed.
There’s nothing especially radical or inventive in my form. The poems are a combination of fabliaux, short story, song, and joke in differing proportions. What’s more important are my efforts to create original meaning in the poems. The Hilbertian sonnet uses parts of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms, with the final, “English,” couplet forcing a rhetorical sense of summing up a story or an argument. That final couplet can introduce some difficulties. It’s the equivalent of a punch line in a joke. David Yezzi published an insightful essay called “These are the Poems, Folks,” in which he delineates similarities between joke and poem structures, the setup, the pay off. It’s part of a book he’s writing on modes of the lyric poem, such as song, joke, prayer. I expect it will prove to be an extraordinarily important book. But back to jokes. I wonder if certain verse forms aren’t permanently associated with a kind of effect. What is it about a limerick, for instance, that makes it work so well for comic verse? Could you tell a sad story with a limerick? Something about the very way a couplet sounds makes it almost predisposed to corniness. It’s perfectly suited to the comic tone. But, like a joke, it can die if a single word is misplaced. In a tragic or more serious poem a couplet can wind up appearing trite. If you have the urge to moralize, the couplet will bring it out. It is too often the occasion for banalities and sentimental clichés. A lot of care must go into constructing a properly balanced couplet.
In Rattle magazine, Maryann Corbett remarked that the “Hilbertian” sonnet, if I may be permitted to utter the term myself, is “a form designed to grate against the expectations of the reader who is geared to the usual foursquare quatrains in the octaves of the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet forms. It also cuts across the squared grain of some of the poet’s arguments” and goes on to submit that “bucking our expectation of quatrains is a way of allowing rhyme to be present but not foregrounded.” I am a devotee of Charlie Mingus, the jazz bassist, bandleader, and composer. I listen to him all the time. He is an artistic hero of mine. There is a reason for that. In Robert Palmer’s liner notes of the classic double live album Mingus at Antibes, he discusses the way Mingus and his star players like Eric Dolphy were “proposing a brand of freedom built on . . . the skeletal remains of popular song structures,” which resulted in what he calls their “freedom-with-order.” I like that a lot. “Freedom-with-order.” I feel a kinship with that notion. I also feel an affinity for old heavy metal bands like Venom, who attempted, in a Faustian bargain, very structured and grand songs with a loose hard rock style borne of their own ineptness. If this analogy seems strange, I often contemplate stranger ones. I try to connect with everything that can be useful, without losing my sense of what is impressive and meaningful, and what is dross.
Robert Lowell used a rough blank verse style in his diary-like books Notebook (both a blue and a red edition were issued in quick succession due to his his manic revision) and History, which were epic in scale while sometimes exceptionally private in substance. John Berryman gave us the distressed, Shakespearean pastiches and character voices of his Dream Songs. Both Lowell and Berryman have exerted sizable influence on my own sonnets, as Adam Kirsch has observed. I feel their gravitational tug, like massive planets out in the dark somewhere. Ted Berrigan used collage and happenstance in his sonnets, which sometimes succeed, but which I sometimes find wearisome, though they are widely admired. I do like listening to recordings of them. I recently read, in The Walrus, a tetrameter sonnet by Jason Guriel, “Poetry is Barbarous,” which displays his method of fashioning a sonnet that sounds new, moving forward while containing the past. I also like Karen Volkman’s expressionist sonnets in Nomina, which sometimes border on pure sound.
I retain more of the basic sonnet qualities than some, though my sonnets are fraught, roughened, distressed, sometimes in an effort to mimic the subject matter. I almost never write the pristine, traditional sonnet some readers still prefer. I didn’t have a lot of time when I pulled together my first book, because I was given a contract before I really had a finished manuscript, and I considered a few different titles. I grumbled to a poet friend, “you know, these aren’t really sonnets,” and he replied that if I didn’t call them sonnets, everyone else would, so I brazenly titled the first collection Sixty Sonnets. Arguments about their “sonnetness” continue.
GM: Sonnets typically are fourteen line poems with a set rhyme scheme and a volta, or a turning point in the narrative. What do your voltas look like?
EH: I am more interested in variation than regimentation or standardization. I ring changes on the form both structurally and tonally. The volta is sometimes neglected or relegated to a very minor role, but when I use it, which is most of the time, I tend to dislodge it from its usual position. The volta is most essential when the poem makes an argument or introduces and then overturns an idea. The turn is away from a given meaning. It lends a structure to the poem, but I don’t always want that structure to dictate the shape of the poem.
GM: Are they mostly literal, metaphorical, or both?
EH: Both. I try to create meaning on as many levels as possible.
GM: Does your form of sonnet require a volta or are you conscious of one when you are writing?
EH: I am conscious of placement of the volta, except when I have chosen to remove it altogether in order to generate a different lyric experience. Benjamin Longfellow undertook an extensive examination of my use of the volta. I quote a bit from here.
The Hilbertian sonnet is based on variations; Hilbert has three main standards, and several variations, and his voltas are no different. The volta shifts position throughout his sonnets. It tends to explain or emphasize a point rather than solve a problem, and it takes on literal and metaphorical traits depending upon the sonnet itself . . . sometimes using a volta and a Shakespearean twist, sometimes using just a Shakespearean twist, and then, more rarely, he uses the sonnet as a single statement without a volta or a Shakespearean twist.
I wanted both books to contain something of the emotional range one encounters when listening to Elgar’s Enigma Variations or Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as opposed to a uniform series like Warhol’s soup cans, which were intended as a comment on serialization and mass production. I want to stretch things out. It’s hard to maintain engagement with sixty or a hundred and twenty poems that have no array or difference. My voltas aren’t neatly located. Sometimes they appear as late as the twelfth line, as Luke Stromberg pointed out in a paper about the title poem, “All of You on the Good Earth,” which introduces and elaborates an argument across two sestets and then starkly slams the door in the final couplet, which serves as both a commentary, a turning away (a man literally “turns from the locked door,” a little inside joke, since volta means, in Italian, to turn).
GM: Even though the context of your sonnets is private, you seem to be addressing everyone with the title, All of You on the Good Earth. The title is based on a quote from Frank Borman during the Apollo 8 mission when he says, “God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” Why did you decide to group this collection of poetry under that title?
EH: The image of an earthrise, of the living planet emerging on the horizon of a barren moonscape, really hits me. It’s certainly one of the most important images of all time. It throws human suffering into stark relief. One gains perspective from that photograph, quite literally. Borman’s 1968 sight of a distant, troubled earth serves as a corollary to my own distance and sympathy for the gallery of characters in my books, characters whose follies, anguish, and aspirations become a summary of what it means to be human, even if the gallery sometimes resembles a police lineup. Borman’s view can be understood as generally equivalent to what Auden called agape, a sudden, intense sense of being connected to all human beings, a deep and powerful empathy, not untainted by sadness, I suspect. I was overcome by that feeling myself at the end of a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when the characters emerge, all conflicts resolved, to sing the final nonsense song, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / A foolish thing was but a toy, / For the rain it raineth every day.” I suddenly had a vision of the rain that falls on everyone, and my chest quite literally ached, and I perched on the edge of my seat, near tears, and could not rise until the theater was completely emptied. When I emerged onto the street, I began to emotionally embrace all I saw. Everyone suddenly seemed bonded to me in their humanity, their inevitable deaths, and their fleeting moments of comfort or camaraderie. This being Philadelphia, it didn’t last long, but it was genuine. I sought to invest the two books with that feeling: That we’re all in this together, whatever it is.
GM: That’s a really great way of looking at it, that we are all truly in this together. You really seem to focus on the human condition, how humans interact with each other, and how we act while we are alone. You pay special attention to the outcasts in life: psychics, college dropouts, other poets, and loners. What attracts you about these people and their situations?
EH: I am not interested in abstractions, simplifications, reductions, the methods of social planners, politicians, tyrants, advertisers, capitalists. I am interested in humans as individuals, but what is most important about an individual is the universal quality of that person’s experience, something we can all feel and share, across cultures, across experiences, across time. The simple answer is that I find such characters more compelling, partly because I can identify with them and their stories. Tom Bissell assures us in his essay “Grief and the Outsider” that “literature is always written by outsiders.” I am no exception. CA Conrad begins The Book of Frank with a quote from his grandmother. When he, as a young boy, asked her why people were staring at them, she replied “Well of course they’re staring. We’re very interesting.” I love that, and I know what that feels like. Despite ourselves, we love those who are different, who court disaster, who fail, misbehave, and destroy themselves. This goes some way toward explaining the enduring attraction of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, though there are still arguments about just how much of his appeal is intentional. They took pains to show just how despicable and immoral a man he is, but he remains the most captivating one on the stage. He steals the show, like a child acting out. Some have gone so far as to actually suggest that the lives of the other characters, his would-be or real victims, only have meaning because of his outrageous behavior. Without him, they are directionless and flat. He defines them. He makes them. Beethoven hated this, by the way, which is why he took pains to reduce the attractiveness of some characters, like Rocco, in Fidelio.
To bring the tone down a bit, why is a scoundrel like Han Solo so much more appealing than a Parsifal-like innocent like Luke Skywalker? Bad guys are fascinating. Losers compel. You know, someone warned me—when my first book was about to come out—that no one wants to read about losers. People like winners, he argued. I think he’s wrong. Schadenfreude aside, it’s easier to relate to someone who has been humbled.
GM: You have categorized your sonnets in All of You on the Good Earth into sections, such as “Sieges and Flights” and “Monsters.” What differentiates these poems from one another? Are they about similar ideas, themes, or feelings?
EH: The chapters are divided by feel, if that isn’t too fuzzy a concept, also, more obviously, by intent. Satires need to be fenced off from tragedies, lest they be misconstrued. The poems were grouped only when the collection was assembled. They were not written according to prescribed categories. Also, without chapters, the book might feel a bit of a chore, poem after poem after poem. The poems deserve their own chapters, like little books. Besides, it’s nice to have a place to put a book down for a while, and that’s another beauty of chapters. The groupings also give me a sense of control that may be entirely illusory, but readers have assured me that the chapters shaped the ways in which they understood the book.
GM: There are instances when you directly reference death, or rather, foreshadow your own. One line from your poem “Sopranos Lament” runs, “Life is like a watch I will never rewind.” In “Simple Instructions” you map out how the narrator would like to be buried. How do you put yourself in a place of loss, remorse, and self-loathing during your composition?
EH: I think there is a therapeutic dimension to poems about death and last things. They are a way of confronting death, making it less frightening. Since the loss of my father, I’ve thought quite a lot about death. The first date I had with my wife was at the Woodlands Cemetery, where I’ve since set a number of my poems, including “At the Grave of Thomas Eakins, Late Winter.” What you call the self-loathing, I’m afraid, is quite as real. When I was young, I was constantly in fights with other kids. Violence and intimidation were daily occurrences. There were times when I had to stand my ground against a dozen brutes, who would spit in my face to goad me, but I did not yield my ground. I was skinny, but I suppose I could be fierce when defending myself. When I look back on what seemed like failures, I realize that just holding your ground against a determined bully is a triumph, even if it leaves you humiliated and shaken. That sort of thing has a way of staying with you.
GM: How much of it is imagined and how much of it is from experience?
EH: Sometimes the contemplation of death is indistinguishable from humor, as in my poem “Leander Without Heroes,” from Sixty Sonnets, when I designate the ways in which birthdays, as we grow older, begin to pass the death dates of others, “as birthdays pass, so do the death / Dates of great and good gone down in their day.” Some people talk of the Christ year, 33, when one is meant to consider what has been accomplished in one’s life at the age at which Jesus was crucified. So I came up with similar dates for Keats, Shelley, and Byron for poets to mull over. Then you start to get to things like the Dylan Thomas age. He was 38 when he suffered his fatal cerebral hemorrhage. It just goes on and on, but it is a way of thinking about death in life while also having a little fun. Death is around us all the time, though we usually choose to ignore it, and fear of it builds up, what Larkin called “the costly aversion of the eyes away from death.” Death is not at all an unusual thing. The miracle is that life happens at all, just as it’s a miracle when a good book is published or a good song recorded. In some ways I feel that all of life is nothing more than a long preparation for extinction, and maybe poems are merely a miserable, frantic clutching at some permanence, something that might survive the author. You only hope that you’ve done more good than bad by the time you die, as Allen Ginsberg said.
My father died when I was 21. I sometimes sit on his grave and write poems. I’ve brought parts of the world to his grave, like a floating stone I found in a bay on the Greek island of Patmos, alleged to be the birthplace of Homer, though who could know? I brought sand from the pyramids at Giza, and a palm leaf from Jerusalem, things I gathered when I was a young poet traveling around with a notebook, trying to get some great insight that would allow me to write a poem that mattered. So I’m at home with death, in some ways. My wife and I visit graveyards the way other couples visit shopping malls. We like them. Finally, death is one of the things poems are best at and always have been. Death and love.
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GM: You also have an accompanying spoken word album to Sixty Sonnets titled Elegies & Laments. Literally, elegies and laments are songs or poems that are sung or recited at someone’s funeral in remembrance. However, you and many of your subjects are very much alive. What is it that you are mourning if not death?
EH: At first the project lacked a working title. It also failed to attach to a realistic timetable or stable budget. When we first looked at mock-ups for the album cover, we were using the title Legendary Misbehavior, but I quickly realized that I might be misleading listeners with that title. Elegies & Laments felt more dignified, more appropriate to the occasion. That is partly due to the fact that I was saying goodbye to my youth in those stories, also to my father, and, funnily enough, now that I think about it, we were waving goodbye to a project that had meant so much to us for so long. No more late nights in the studio with the guys in the band. The recording took a few years, as we grew more ambitious, added an orchestra, as Marc and Dave wrote and then discarded hours of material, much of it experimental, as other projects drew our attentions and resources. Dave was busy recording symphony orchestras. Marc had a beautiful daughter not long after we started recording. So the elegy was also for the project itself, laid into the tomb of the vinyl record, the finished merchandise that goes out into the world. I realized after releasing the album that “Calavera for a Friend” was actually a belated, unconscious elegy for my father, so some part of me must have known that as well when I chose the name of the album. Also, it’s worth noting, both titles for the album are chapters in the book. “Legendary misbehavior” was a phrase I coined years ago in a review of the book The Beat Hotel, about 9 rue Git-le-Cœur in Paris where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso set up for a while. I loved the sound of it, so I used it as a chapter title, but it didn’t make the final cut as the album title.
GM: Not all poets recite their work, but sonnets lend themselves to being read aloud. Spoken word poetry takes recitation to a different level. What about performance poetry empowers you as a writer?
EH: I think the spoken word movement in the 1990s reinvigorated poetry as performance, as a live act, and allowed it again to contain certain kinds of humor and dramatic force. I suspect the popular appeal of it may have also pushed it closer to the art of the monologue or stand-up comedy, because those are very effective methods of connecting with a live audience, in short, entertaining. So I’ve learned much from it and welcome it. I also learn a lot about pacing and audience interaction from stand-up comics, like Patton Oswalt. But there is another equally important side to poetry, that of the solitary reader having an intimate experience. This sometimes involves complexity that demands repeated or very concentrated reading in order to be adequately appreciated. It’s hard to get some things across to an audience in a crowded room. I’ve always written in both modes. There are poems I reach for when assembling a set list because I know from experience that they will deliver in a public setting and be quickly understood, at least on some level, and get a reaction of some sort. I think the best poems are those that exist simultaneously in both modes. “Cover to Cover” in the new book seems to, as well as “Sunrise with Sea Monsters,” so they’ve both become part of my regular sets.
GM: What are you able to convey through spoken word that you cannot through paper or writing?
EH: When performing you can control the speed of delivery, tone of voice, emphasis through volume, make facial expressions, gesticulate. You can put on character voices. A good reading—and they are rare—will bring out a poem’s intentions more clearly than they might otherwise be grasped if read silently. Performance is an allied but separate art. You have to learn to master a microphone and figure a sense of pacing for an audience, figure out what you can get away with. Sometimes people take poetry too seriously. Other times, maybe not seriously enough. It’s hard to know until you walk into the room and start.
GM: As readers, what can we gain from the musical accompaniment Elegies & Laments that we may not be able to get from reading alone?
EH: The album begins and ends with the same poems as the album, so it is something of a mirror image. It reproduces the arc. It was intended as a score, or a soundtrack, to the album, to bring out the noir sensibility a bit more. A woman contacted me after I appeared on NPR’s “Radio Times” to tell me that she had been so moved by the recording of “Calavera for a Friend” that she chose to buy the album and use it at the dedication ceremony of a monument she had commissioned in memory of her daughter, who had passed away. I was really moved by this, and I realized that it was only the version with the music that could do that. The music really allows that poem to generate meaning on a very powerful level. As I count down the few trinkets and other parts of ourselves that are left behind after we die, the strings begin to drop out of the descending figure, until there is only one violin left. Christopher LaRosa, who composed that music, did a superb job. The album is a work of art, distinct from the book.
GM: Aside from publishing poetry and recording spoken word albums, you run your own blog/vlog titled E-Verse Radio, yet another medium through which you can reach readers. What is different about your site from your print work?
EH: E-Verse is a clearing house, a place to have fun, a way to get the word out about things I admire and enjoy. I’m lucky to have two excellent staff writers, Bethany Leigh and Cynthia Barbette. It’s also a way to share poems I’ve been reading and also get exposure for poets I support. The site gets a few hundred thousand readers a year. It started as a mass e-mail when I moved from SoHo to Queens, as a way to stay in touch with people. It started with ten recipients, and, immediately, one of them, an ex-girlfriend, asked to be removed. It was embarrassingly low-tech. I would ask people to write their e-mail addresses down on bar napkins and I’d add them the next morning. This was the late 1990s, remember, so well before social media as we know it. I built it up to over 1,500 readers who were extraordinarily involved and wrote in with amusing and thoughtful things, book recommendations, and drink recipes. I had met every one of those readers at some point, in a bar, at a reading, at an art gallery. It was very much about connecting and staying in touch with people I met. And I met a lot of people.
GM: Are you promoting the same message here as in your other work?
EH: No, E-Verse is pop, smart, but more relaxed. We do things like “Top Five Great Moments in the History of Raw Meat” and “Top Five Evil Movie Gynecologists.” Those are Bethany [Leigh]’s thing. We run short films, music videos, poems, all sorts of cool things. Cynthia comes up with all sorts of fun posts, from zombies to flower shows. E-Verse is exists to supply brief distractions. My poetry is very serious business, at least to me, even when I strive to be amusing. The stakes seem quite high to me. I want to write the best possible poems while also taking risks, which means constantly courting disaster. E-Verse is a way to relax. It puts me more in the role of an arts administrator, or editor, than when I’m writing. Less pressure.
GM: There is definitely a common thread through all your work: it is meant to be performed or presented in some way, and you, as the author, are very involved in how this happens. How do you view the various mediums you use?
EH: That’s a very good question. The critic Levi Stahl called my first book “a performance as much as a book of poems.” Different endeavors cross and embrace. When I write an opera, I apply verse for the songs and arias, so poetry enters that medium at the root level. My years of editorial work--Oxford Quarterly, Random House’s Bold Type, the Contemporary Poetry Review—prepared me for the job of selecting material for E-Verse, which in turn is used as a platform to announce my readings and post news about publications. The album sells the books, and the books send some curious souls to seek out the album.
GM: Does each have its own purpose?
EH: There is a hierarchy, as you suggest. The purest for me is the poetry, over which I exert the most control and into which I throw the most effort. Down from that is an opera libretto. I’m really in service of the composer’s vision, so I don’t have total control, only some. I have a habit of getting involved with everything from the design of my book covers to the merchandise that accompanies a book or album release to the light settings in a venue when I give a reading, but I’m not a controlling person, just a caring one. You can laugh, but it’s true. I pattern myself after bands, not other poets. I like merchandise, for instance. It gives readers something to grab onto, show their support. It’s also kind of funny. I do it all with a glint in my eye.
GM: Are they each doing the same thing in a different way?
EH: Yes, it all comes together to form a constellation, I believe. Or perhaps it’s more of a web, to entangle readers and hold them.
GM: Considering that you write about all types of people, does each medium serve to reach a separate audience?
EH: My hope—and this will sound naïve—is that each buttresses the other. One thing draws a reader to become a listener or a regular on the website or a Twitter follower or Facebook friend and back again in a circuit. Whether or not it will all cohere into a meaningful project is yet to be seen, but, at the absolute center, and of the greatest significance for me, is the poetry. These are all allied arts. I’m never far afield. I’m a rare book dealer, and I issue limited edition books from Nemean Lion Press. I have commercially published volumes as well as fine press books and letterpress broadsides from other presses. I use venerable technology like printing presses, and ancient ones like verbal performances, alongside whatever the latest technology may present itself. E-Verse started out as a private AOL account! Technology changes, but worthwhile art remains constant in most ways. I want to be hypermodern and traditional all at once. That’s not simply a choice of mediums. It’s in the poems as well. I’ve even thought of publishing with a modern incarnation of an ancient Sumerian cylinder seal, which one would roll in ink and then roll out to create a legible pattern that can be read, only instead of “seated god” it would be “Cover to Cover.” The album can be purchased on an X-Box, downloaded from iTunes, streamed on Spotify, and played on vinyl record, the last being the best sound. I want to make my message available to as many people as possible. I’m not a snob about that sort of thing.
GM: You seem to embrace technology as a tool to translate and transform your writing. Do you feel that your work is ever compromised by technology and what it can or can’t do?
EH: What I’m doing with the poetry is primitive. I create sounds and add stories, combine memories and music in memorable ways that carry and release meaning on as many levels as possible for as many people as possible, constructed to be durable and convincing. That part has nothing to do with technology. My wife works at an archaeological museum, so I spend time behind the scenes with ancient artifacts. It’s quite humbling to think of the antiquity of these objects, how they live on after their cultures. Works of poetry are like that as well. It’s the most ancient literary form. The novel is quite modern by comparison. My wife also guides me to remote ruins, from the Andes to Crete. I am at home in these places. We are haunters of ruins. I love the ancient things that still work. Though I may not be an early adopter of new technology, I’m not a Luddite. I like having a current phone and wireless capability in the house. I have a large online presence, but that is only valuable if one has boots on the ground, as they say. You have to turn up to events, participate, be generous and open. That’s why I started the E-Verse Equinox reading series, so I can invite poets like Tim Donnelly, Matthew Zapruder, Daisy Fried, Matthew Dickman, introduce them, hang out and have some drinks. Also, it is worth noting that it is much more fulfilling to read a poem in a finely produced volume than on a cell phone screen, though that is surely the way the world is headed, and I’m happy to accommodate. E-Verse poems look great on smart phones. The best way to experience a poem, the very best way, is to hear the poet read it. All technology aside, it must succeed or fail on the tongue and in the air.
GM: In the poem “Cover to Cover,” you reflect on the role books play in your life, as “pillars of coral” or “as coasters.” Collecting books may be a hobby, but it is the stories within them you are passionate about. Books seem to pervade everything. You write, “They become a wall / My greed, my fears, everything, nothing at all.” What is it you’re referencing in these last lines?
EH: I suppose I was trying to be surprising and comprehensive at the same time by pointing out that every collection or accumulation of worldly good contains the seed of its own destruction or dispersal. In “The Old Fools,” one of his truly terrifying poems, Philip Larkin puts it this way: “At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see.” There is a terrible sadness when you stop to wonder what will happen to the objects that, in part, define you, your clothes, your books. “Cover to Cover” is in some ways a reprise of “Calavera for a Friend.” The ominous wall formed by the books is an expression of the isolation readers sometimes feel. When we read, we connect with the world created by the writer, but we are quarantined and sedentary. I love to read, but when I read too much, I start to go a bit gray, feel numb and cut off from other people. One must strive for a balance, of course, but I wanted to show that while we like to think of reading as a virtuous or healthy activity, it too can be taken too far and has its perils. Also, what is more unsettling than observing your library—the books that supply your mental furniture, the fiber of your beliefs—in the age of the tablet, the smart phone, when someone can say, with no embarrassment, why do you have books?
I play on that dread in my Christmas poem “For ________,” with the lines “May carolers be brined in snow. / May the closing of the presses be slow,” which is meant to conjure wine presses and the biblical grapes of wrath, as well as printing presses, and actual publishers, the independent presses that keep writing and writers alive, all at once. I try to set out multiple meanings that go off at once, so the reader experiences a harmonic interval of ideas. You call it a hobby, but, for many, the gathering of books is more of a passion, one that may tip over perilously into bibliomania. Each new book acquired is a hedge against a future moment of relaxation, knowledge, time alone with the mind. We hold the book in our hands contemplating the time we will spend with it.
GM: With that being said, is All of You on the Good Earth a collection of stories or a single story?
EH: The sequences were built up from individual poems. I see the individual poem as the smallest discreet literary form, even if it becomes a constituent part of something larger, like a collection, but each stands alone. Those parts are built into patterns, and the patterns are devised in such a way that they begin to suggest stories in themselves. When Literary Magnet reviewed the book, it proposed that the poems from “Ashore” to “The Fast,” a total of five poems, constituted “a re-envisioning of Odysseus’s journey not as a character of the epic poets badly taught in classrooms but as a man. He’s helpless, harried, and hungry.” I would argue it begins earlier, with “Sailing the Mullica River (Great Bay Estuary) 1978,” but one doesn’t like to quibble with such an insightful reviewer. So, to answer the question, I’d say each individual story comes first, and then longer stories are summoned in the process of editing a book. I like to think the book has affinities with a collection of stories as well as with an album of songs. Those affinities are revealed in its organization.
GM: You have redefined the sonnet in your writing. You’ve used the archaic form to speak about today’s societal problems and modern themes. What does that say about the past, present, and future of writing and the purpose of the sonnet?
EH: Well, we can start by clarifying that the sonnet, while antique, is not yet fully antiquated, or archaic, though one may not know it to read some contemporary anthologies and literary magazines. One could be forgive for believing that the art form is frozen in time, a museum piece, a mere exercise, essentially irrelevant. However, there are those who continue to breathe life into the form. Sonnets can no more become obsolete than songs, though individual examples may grow dated. The key is to write in one’s time, be contemporary. Traditionalists sometimes add nothing to the world’s store of the form when they cling too closely to old examples, but then that was never their intention. (…) On the other hand, futurists or experimental poets run the risk of straying so far from tradition, ignoring or destroying forms, that what they create is something else altogether, something only identified by themselves as a sonnet, because no reader could otherwise guess. The sonnet is, at its core, a song. While the sonnet as we know it is not even a thousand years old, songs date to the earliest origins of human society. Singing is universal, and universally treasured. Ezra Pound said that “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.” About that much, at least, I believe he was right, and I think that as long as poets care about the song, the eternal music that inhabits the best poems, and keep singing of the disappointments, the joys, defeats, disappointments, doubts, and hopes of humankind, the sonnet will live. As Shakespeare put it in one his sonnets, more beautifully than I ever will: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” So, sing on.
EH: At first the project lacked a working title. It also failed to attach to a realistic timetable or stable budget. When we first looked at mock-ups for the album cover, we were using the title Legendary Misbehavior, but I quickly realized that I might be misleading listeners with that title. Elegies & Laments felt more dignified, more appropriate to the occasion. That is partly due to the fact that I was saying goodbye to my youth in those stories, also to my father, and, funnily enough, now that I think about it, we were waving goodbye to a project that had meant so much to us for so long. No more late nights in the studio with the guys in the band. The recording took a few years, as we grew more ambitious, added an orchestra, as Marc and Dave wrote and then discarded hours of material, much of it experimental, as other projects drew our attentions and resources. Dave was busy recording symphony orchestras. Marc had a beautiful daughter not long after we started recording. So the elegy was also for the project itself, laid into the tomb of the vinyl record, the finished merchandise that goes out into the world. I realized after releasing the album that “Calavera for a Friend” was actually a belated, unconscious elegy for my father, so some part of me must have known that as well when I chose the name of the album. Also, it’s worth noting, both titles for the album are chapters in the book. “Legendary misbehavior” was a phrase I coined years ago in a review of the book The Beat Hotel, about 9 rue Git-le-Cœur in Paris where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso set up for a while. I loved the sound of it, so I used it as a chapter title, but it didn’t make the final cut as the album title.
GM: Not all poets recite their work, but sonnets lend themselves to being read aloud. Spoken word poetry takes recitation to a different level. What about performance poetry empowers you as a writer?
EH: I think the spoken word movement in the 1990s reinvigorated poetry as performance, as a live act, and allowed it again to contain certain kinds of humor and dramatic force. I suspect the popular appeal of it may have also pushed it closer to the art of the monologue or stand-up comedy, because those are very effective methods of connecting with a live audience, in short, entertaining. So I’ve learned much from it and welcome it. I also learn a lot about pacing and audience interaction from stand-up comics, like Patton Oswalt. But there is another equally important side to poetry, that of the solitary reader having an intimate experience. This sometimes involves complexity that demands repeated or very concentrated reading in order to be adequately appreciated. It’s hard to get some things across to an audience in a crowded room. I’ve always written in both modes. There are poems I reach for when assembling a set list because I know from experience that they will deliver in a public setting and be quickly understood, at least on some level, and get a reaction of some sort. I think the best poems are those that exist simultaneously in both modes. “Cover to Cover” in the new book seems to, as well as “Sunrise with Sea Monsters,” so they’ve both become part of my regular sets.
GM: What are you able to convey through spoken word that you cannot through paper or writing?
EH: When performing you can control the speed of delivery, tone of voice, emphasis through volume, make facial expressions, gesticulate. You can put on character voices. A good reading—and they are rare—will bring out a poem’s intentions more clearly than they might otherwise be grasped if read silently. Performance is an allied but separate art. You have to learn to master a microphone and figure a sense of pacing for an audience, figure out what you can get away with. Sometimes people take poetry too seriously. Other times, maybe not seriously enough. It’s hard to know until you walk into the room and start.
GM: As readers, what can we gain from the musical accompaniment Elegies & Laments that we may not be able to get from reading alone?
EH: The album begins and ends with the same poems as the album, so it is something of a mirror image. It reproduces the arc. It was intended as a score, or a soundtrack, to the album, to bring out the noir sensibility a bit more. A woman contacted me after I appeared on NPR’s “Radio Times” to tell me that she had been so moved by the recording of “Calavera for a Friend” that she chose to buy the album and use it at the dedication ceremony of a monument she had commissioned in memory of her daughter, who had passed away. I was really moved by this, and I realized that it was only the version with the music that could do that. The music really allows that poem to generate meaning on a very powerful level. As I count down the few trinkets and other parts of ourselves that are left behind after we die, the strings begin to drop out of the descending figure, until there is only one violin left. Christopher LaRosa, who composed that music, did a superb job. The album is a work of art, distinct from the book.
GM: Aside from publishing poetry and recording spoken word albums, you run your own blog/vlog titled E-Verse Radio, yet another medium through which you can reach readers. What is different about your site from your print work?
EH: E-Verse is a clearing house, a place to have fun, a way to get the word out about things I admire and enjoy. I’m lucky to have two excellent staff writers, Bethany Leigh and Cynthia Barbette. It’s also a way to share poems I’ve been reading and also get exposure for poets I support. The site gets a few hundred thousand readers a year. It started as a mass e-mail when I moved from SoHo to Queens, as a way to stay in touch with people. It started with ten recipients, and, immediately, one of them, an ex-girlfriend, asked to be removed. It was embarrassingly low-tech. I would ask people to write their e-mail addresses down on bar napkins and I’d add them the next morning. This was the late 1990s, remember, so well before social media as we know it. I built it up to over 1,500 readers who were extraordinarily involved and wrote in with amusing and thoughtful things, book recommendations, and drink recipes. I had met every one of those readers at some point, in a bar, at a reading, at an art gallery. It was very much about connecting and staying in touch with people I met. And I met a lot of people.
GM: Are you promoting the same message here as in your other work?
EH: No, E-Verse is pop, smart, but more relaxed. We do things like “Top Five Great Moments in the History of Raw Meat” and “Top Five Evil Movie Gynecologists.” Those are Bethany [Leigh]’s thing. We run short films, music videos, poems, all sorts of cool things. Cynthia comes up with all sorts of fun posts, from zombies to flower shows. E-Verse is exists to supply brief distractions. My poetry is very serious business, at least to me, even when I strive to be amusing. The stakes seem quite high to me. I want to write the best possible poems while also taking risks, which means constantly courting disaster. E-Verse is a way to relax. It puts me more in the role of an arts administrator, or editor, than when I’m writing. Less pressure.
GM: There is definitely a common thread through all your work: it is meant to be performed or presented in some way, and you, as the author, are very involved in how this happens. How do you view the various mediums you use?
EH: That’s a very good question. The critic Levi Stahl called my first book “a performance as much as a book of poems.” Different endeavors cross and embrace. When I write an opera, I apply verse for the songs and arias, so poetry enters that medium at the root level. My years of editorial work--Oxford Quarterly, Random House’s Bold Type, the Contemporary Poetry Review—prepared me for the job of selecting material for E-Verse, which in turn is used as a platform to announce my readings and post news about publications. The album sells the books, and the books send some curious souls to seek out the album.
GM: Does each have its own purpose?
EH: There is a hierarchy, as you suggest. The purest for me is the poetry, over which I exert the most control and into which I throw the most effort. Down from that is an opera libretto. I’m really in service of the composer’s vision, so I don’t have total control, only some. I have a habit of getting involved with everything from the design of my book covers to the merchandise that accompanies a book or album release to the light settings in a venue when I give a reading, but I’m not a controlling person, just a caring one. You can laugh, but it’s true. I pattern myself after bands, not other poets. I like merchandise, for instance. It gives readers something to grab onto, show their support. It’s also kind of funny. I do it all with a glint in my eye.
GM: Are they each doing the same thing in a different way?
EH: Yes, it all comes together to form a constellation, I believe. Or perhaps it’s more of a web, to entangle readers and hold them.
GM: Considering that you write about all types of people, does each medium serve to reach a separate audience?
EH: My hope—and this will sound naïve—is that each buttresses the other. One thing draws a reader to become a listener or a regular on the website or a Twitter follower or Facebook friend and back again in a circuit. Whether or not it will all cohere into a meaningful project is yet to be seen, but, at the absolute center, and of the greatest significance for me, is the poetry. These are all allied arts. I’m never far afield. I’m a rare book dealer, and I issue limited edition books from Nemean Lion Press. I have commercially published volumes as well as fine press books and letterpress broadsides from other presses. I use venerable technology like printing presses, and ancient ones like verbal performances, alongside whatever the latest technology may present itself. E-Verse started out as a private AOL account! Technology changes, but worthwhile art remains constant in most ways. I want to be hypermodern and traditional all at once. That’s not simply a choice of mediums. It’s in the poems as well. I’ve even thought of publishing with a modern incarnation of an ancient Sumerian cylinder seal, which one would roll in ink and then roll out to create a legible pattern that can be read, only instead of “seated god” it would be “Cover to Cover.” The album can be purchased on an X-Box, downloaded from iTunes, streamed on Spotify, and played on vinyl record, the last being the best sound. I want to make my message available to as many people as possible. I’m not a snob about that sort of thing.
GM: You seem to embrace technology as a tool to translate and transform your writing. Do you feel that your work is ever compromised by technology and what it can or can’t do?
EH: What I’m doing with the poetry is primitive. I create sounds and add stories, combine memories and music in memorable ways that carry and release meaning on as many levels as possible for as many people as possible, constructed to be durable and convincing. That part has nothing to do with technology. My wife works at an archaeological museum, so I spend time behind the scenes with ancient artifacts. It’s quite humbling to think of the antiquity of these objects, how they live on after their cultures. Works of poetry are like that as well. It’s the most ancient literary form. The novel is quite modern by comparison. My wife also guides me to remote ruins, from the Andes to Crete. I am at home in these places. We are haunters of ruins. I love the ancient things that still work. Though I may not be an early adopter of new technology, I’m not a Luddite. I like having a current phone and wireless capability in the house. I have a large online presence, but that is only valuable if one has boots on the ground, as they say. You have to turn up to events, participate, be generous and open. That’s why I started the E-Verse Equinox reading series, so I can invite poets like Tim Donnelly, Matthew Zapruder, Daisy Fried, Matthew Dickman, introduce them, hang out and have some drinks. Also, it is worth noting that it is much more fulfilling to read a poem in a finely produced volume than on a cell phone screen, though that is surely the way the world is headed, and I’m happy to accommodate. E-Verse poems look great on smart phones. The best way to experience a poem, the very best way, is to hear the poet read it. All technology aside, it must succeed or fail on the tongue and in the air.
GM: In the poem “Cover to Cover,” you reflect on the role books play in your life, as “pillars of coral” or “as coasters.” Collecting books may be a hobby, but it is the stories within them you are passionate about. Books seem to pervade everything. You write, “They become a wall / My greed, my fears, everything, nothing at all.” What is it you’re referencing in these last lines?
EH: I suppose I was trying to be surprising and comprehensive at the same time by pointing out that every collection or accumulation of worldly good contains the seed of its own destruction or dispersal. In “The Old Fools,” one of his truly terrifying poems, Philip Larkin puts it this way: “At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see.” There is a terrible sadness when you stop to wonder what will happen to the objects that, in part, define you, your clothes, your books. “Cover to Cover” is in some ways a reprise of “Calavera for a Friend.” The ominous wall formed by the books is an expression of the isolation readers sometimes feel. When we read, we connect with the world created by the writer, but we are quarantined and sedentary. I love to read, but when I read too much, I start to go a bit gray, feel numb and cut off from other people. One must strive for a balance, of course, but I wanted to show that while we like to think of reading as a virtuous or healthy activity, it too can be taken too far and has its perils. Also, what is more unsettling than observing your library—the books that supply your mental furniture, the fiber of your beliefs—in the age of the tablet, the smart phone, when someone can say, with no embarrassment, why do you have books?
I play on that dread in my Christmas poem “For ________,” with the lines “May carolers be brined in snow. / May the closing of the presses be slow,” which is meant to conjure wine presses and the biblical grapes of wrath, as well as printing presses, and actual publishers, the independent presses that keep writing and writers alive, all at once. I try to set out multiple meanings that go off at once, so the reader experiences a harmonic interval of ideas. You call it a hobby, but, for many, the gathering of books is more of a passion, one that may tip over perilously into bibliomania. Each new book acquired is a hedge against a future moment of relaxation, knowledge, time alone with the mind. We hold the book in our hands contemplating the time we will spend with it.
GM: With that being said, is All of You on the Good Earth a collection of stories or a single story?
EH: The sequences were built up from individual poems. I see the individual poem as the smallest discreet literary form, even if it becomes a constituent part of something larger, like a collection, but each stands alone. Those parts are built into patterns, and the patterns are devised in such a way that they begin to suggest stories in themselves. When Literary Magnet reviewed the book, it proposed that the poems from “Ashore” to “The Fast,” a total of five poems, constituted “a re-envisioning of Odysseus’s journey not as a character of the epic poets badly taught in classrooms but as a man. He’s helpless, harried, and hungry.” I would argue it begins earlier, with “Sailing the Mullica River (Great Bay Estuary) 1978,” but one doesn’t like to quibble with such an insightful reviewer. So, to answer the question, I’d say each individual story comes first, and then longer stories are summoned in the process of editing a book. I like to think the book has affinities with a collection of stories as well as with an album of songs. Those affinities are revealed in its organization.
GM: You have redefined the sonnet in your writing. You’ve used the archaic form to speak about today’s societal problems and modern themes. What does that say about the past, present, and future of writing and the purpose of the sonnet?
EH: Well, we can start by clarifying that the sonnet, while antique, is not yet fully antiquated, or archaic, though one may not know it to read some contemporary anthologies and literary magazines. One could be forgive for believing that the art form is frozen in time, a museum piece, a mere exercise, essentially irrelevant. However, there are those who continue to breathe life into the form. Sonnets can no more become obsolete than songs, though individual examples may grow dated. The key is to write in one’s time, be contemporary. Traditionalists sometimes add nothing to the world’s store of the form when they cling too closely to old examples, but then that was never their intention. (…) On the other hand, futurists or experimental poets run the risk of straying so far from tradition, ignoring or destroying forms, that what they create is something else altogether, something only identified by themselves as a sonnet, because no reader could otherwise guess. The sonnet is, at its core, a song. While the sonnet as we know it is not even a thousand years old, songs date to the earliest origins of human society. Singing is universal, and universally treasured. Ezra Pound said that “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.” About that much, at least, I believe he was right, and I think that as long as poets care about the song, the eternal music that inhabits the best poems, and keep singing of the disappointments, the joys, defeats, disappointments, doubts, and hopes of humankind, the sonnet will live. As Shakespeare put it in one his sonnets, more beautifully than I ever will: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” So, sing on.
