Ernest Hilbert
Interviewed by Chloe Cook and Taylor Light
“Swimming South Off Key West” and “Unruled” exhibit a subtle and pleasant attention to sound, especially with internal rhyme. How do you employ prosody in your work? Do you actively reach for the rhymes, or do they subconsciously make their way into your poems?
The sound of a poem has always been of paramount importance to me, both as a reader and an author. “Swimming South Off Key West” is written in a free verse that settles into iambic pentameter at times, as in the line “The wind is up. I dive. I rise to find . . .” or “It breaks and glides to hunt in deeper blue.” This is the type of roughly decasyllabic line I used for most of the poems in my first two books, which were rhymed sonnets. I set this poem in tercets simply as a way of gaining control and managing the material, though I thought of the trinity as swimmer, bird, and sea. Its basic rhetorical structure is one of ecstatic imagery borne on a musical current to evoke an experience of wild motion—swimming in all that water. There is a sense of immersing oneself in the primordial ocean and of struggling to move determinedly within the sway of a greater force. This is a kind of allegorical realism in keeping with my most recent book, Storm Swimmer: the realization that, while we may be able to exert some control, we do so only within a medium larger than we are—one that at times will move us against our wishes, that may refuse to give us up or allow us to leave. That medium can be a family, an economic system, a job, a political situation. To answer your question more directly, I do not deliberately plan the sound of the poem. I wish I could. It arrives sideways, somehow, from the periphery of thought. I can’t decide when or how it will happen. My writing style is more a matter of feel than intention. I can’t summon the creative act at will. I must wait for it to happen, though I enhance it through revision. I really can’t write until the correct sound occurs to me. It begins with the sound, with a line, a set of rhymes, a stanza, in my mind. The sound precedes the poem.
“Unruled” is an example of what the modernist poet and illustrator David Jones referred to as the “poem as object.” It concerns the ways in which the imagination fashions new laws from old ones, reimagines how the pieces of one rubric or pattern might be used in another. To summon this process, I used iambic feet set in varying constructions—trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter—along with occasional rhymes—squares/stairs, sunlight/height. Again, it came to me more or less naturally in the moment. I picked up a notebook while my son was playing nearby and took notes in verse that I later used to make the poem. My son’s creation of a new game using old pieces of other games inspired in me a heightened sense of the ways in which play is vital to both art and life, but also how we often must suppress such unhesitating childlike impulses in order to function on a daily basis, get through our days, address our many responsibilities. It is also a poem about how poems are made, about bricolage, the way art is created from parts of the art that came before, from what is available to us, reassembled, envisioned in new ways.
“Barred Island” is cast in a higher register than the other two poems—a cold, classical style befitting the mythic setting. It is set in a free verse that relies heavily on iambic runs throughout, freely arranged, but easy to detect, as in “each time I fail, return, and wait. / I keep my watch as sunlight goes.” I sought language as flinty and forbidding as the setting itself, moving forward in starts, like the swimmer unsure if he will be able endure the freezing water long enough to reach the island he sees in the distance. It may be obvious that I feel more comfortable in the water than on dry land. It’s inevitable that some of that experience will get into the poems, even if the act of swimming stands in for something else. In that poem, the detailed images of the mainland display what the speaker knows because it is where he has lived for so long. No aspect of this frozen landscape is beneath notice. What is unknown is what lies on the island, the place longed for, seen in the distance, but never reached.
Both “Swimming South Off Key West” and “Barred Island” offer indelible imagery tethered to location. To what degree do geography and travel inform your work? Where is your favorite place to write?
The poems were inspired by real places, usually from notes taken at those places. The first poem is set in the warm, teeming, amniotic waters off the southernmost point of the continental United States, at Higgs Beach on Key West. The second is in the boreal, almost lethally cold waters at Goose Cove on the southern coast of Deer Isle, Maine, across from Barred Island, which can only be reached at low tide. I swam at both places. While working on “Barred Island,” I also had in mind the painting “Die Toteninsel” (“Isle of the Dead”) by Arnold Böcklin. In the first poem, the experience is more general, an elemental submersion that returns the swimmer to a time before the emergence of human thought, or to a place beneath it, a primal moment of intense, non-cerebral experience. The second is set in an entirely mythical realm, beyond history. Both poems are about life lived intensely but also about endless struggle, and, ultimately, confrontations with death. Like “Unruled,” they are attempts to re-spiritualize a despiritualized world, to shock it back to life.
I don’t have a favorite place to write or a routine of any kind. I’ve never really had time to write. From 6AM when I wake until I fall asleep again at night I have no time in which it is appropriate for me to write. Far from preventing me from being a poet, this struggle to find time has become the very thing that allows me to be a poet, because it compels me to be a poet all the time, to think about poetry every moment I have, and to write poems in my mind, on the tongue, so to speak, jot down whatever I have in fugitive moments among other demands. If I were given time to write, with no distractions or other concerns, I might spend the rest of my life staring at a blank page or screen or encountering only silence in my mind. I write wherever I am, on the bus, the trolley, at work, getting dressed, or, most fruitfully, when swimming. I need the sense that I’m pushing against forces arrayed against me. Writing a poem is one of the few things that has consistently brought me happiness, but the time spent working on a poem is also painful. I throw myself so fully into poems that it becomes a real struggle to get myself back out again. I suppose one might dismiss it as an elaborate form of escapism.
It appears that these poems derive from book projects that are currently under construction. Could you speak to what we might expect—thematically, formally, geographically, or otherwise? How do “Unruled,” “Barred Island,” and “Swimming South Off Key West” represent those projects?
“Swimming South of Key West” is part of April Arsenal, a book devoted to meditations on the kinds of decline and renewal, decadence and reinvention, that occur over the course of a human life. In many ways, it is about the experience of entering an altered state, even one made up of memories, as part of that process of renewal, but it is also about how difficult it can be to escape from that state.
“Barred Island” and “Unruled” are part of a more ambitious book called High Ashes, a work of complete madness that has consumed me for nearly half a decade. It is a book that questions its own existence, that calls itself into being with help from the reader. It contains a playable D&D module with maps by fantasy artists, word puzzles, bibliographic entries, legal documents. It includes sigils and emblems from a noted heavy-metal logo artist. Some of the poems have been set by composer Stella Sung for baritone and symphony orchestra. That piece, titled “High Ashes,” was commissioned by German baritone Maximilian Krummen as a companion song cycle for Gustav Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). Another composer, Montreal-based Christopher LaRosa, scored a piece for crystal pyramids and recorded it as atmospheric music for the book. A digitally engraved staff for that piece appears as one of the poems, “The Music Heard Above.” A third, an English EDM artist named Charlie Philips, is also creating a soundtrack for parts of the book, music that may become part of a spoken word album. He worked on Radiohead’s Kid A album, arranging for them to record a portion of the album at Batsford Manor, the former home of the infamous Mitford sisters. I toyed with the idea of commissioning someone to create a new font specifically for the book, but I’ve since backed away from that.
“Unruled” and “Barred Island” are both about unknown worlds, the creation of new worlds from the old, about traveling to an undiscovered place, which works alongside the notion, conjured throughout the book, that author and reader work together to create something that hasn’t existed before, that departs from what is known but also makes use of all that came before. Because it is about a book that may not exist, as well as a place that may not exist, it is also my attempt to understand poetry as a way of conjuring, of imagination used as a kind of real magic in our lives. I’ve been tangled in the book for so long it’s become comforting to work on it. I dwell in its pages. I never want to stop working on it, but I fear the end is near for the book. The process of creation and revision has a natural conclusion, and I must accept that. I miss a book when I’m done working on it.
What are some books that have recently influenced you? Who are some poets to which you find yourself returning?
The last four poetry books I’ve read may be divided neatly between the late modernist and the late-this-very-year variety. I revisited Geoffrey Hill’s first few books as collected in Somewhere is Such a Kingdom, Poems 1952-1971, with an introduction by Harold Bloom. The hieratic, lapidary, almost palpable language of his early books appeals to me, as if I could touch and hold the poems as physical objects. I spent a few weeks reading and rereading David Jones’s Wedding Poems, a “Prothalamion” and “Epithalamion” (titles as nods to Spenser), which he wrote for two close friends who married in a small ceremony during the 1940 bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. The poems were lost for many years and only published in 2002 by Enitharmon Press, along with a lavish apparatus of footnotes, notes on revisions, foreword and afterword, and reproductions of drawings he made at the time. Meanwhile, in 2024, just last month, I found Amy Glynn’s Romance Language a delight, the very epitome of wry elegance, combining passion and intellectual playfulness, as well as a forceful sense of longing and regret, all in verse finely turned with an ironic wink. The last, which I’m midway through, is Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles, a sequence of gravity-defying leaps of intuition, imagery, and emotion, which I’m finding myself gripped by. It is a powerfully moving book. I also read at least one poem by Emily Dickinson each morning, just to keep her in my ear. I find her gnomic hymnody beguiling.
Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers?
I can begin with the advice poets gave in response to this very question when I interviewed them. W. D. Snodgrass answered, jokingly, “if you can be happy doing anything else, do it.” He went on to add, “Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded. But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.” Donald Hall told me that “life should be lived toward moments when you lose yourself in what you are doing.” He then told me what the sculptor Henry Moore told him, when he interviewed him in 1959: “You must have something you want to do more than anything else, that’s at the center of your being, the center of your life, the one thing you really want. The most important thing about this desire is that it must be incapable of fulfillment.”
My answer to you would be a combination of those two answers. If you’re a poet, you’re a poet for life, and it is a slow, long journey. It can’t be rushed. There are no shortcuts. The rewards are few, if any. In fact, they serve only as distractions to the work. You must serve the art as an acolyte of something greater than you are, something that has existed since the dawn of civilization, and which will go on after you are gone. You are small, but you are part of it, and that is consolation enough. Also, you must believe that the best poem you will ever write lies ahead of you. You simply have to keep trying for it. Be patient. Be aware. Work toward it. Care about it. Believe it is worth doing. Help others. Hope. And wait.