Forrest Hamer
Good morning, all – and happy post-Thanksgiving, our first, yes, since the pandemic lockdown and a time to relieve and refresh ourselves with poetry.
I had known of Forrest Hamer’s work as a poet long before I learned that he is also a psychoanalyst (notice what I put first here). Since so many of our readers are also in mental health professions, it seems more than appropriate to feature him now, when it’s what so many of us seem to need.
These are trying times, as Forrest Hamer reminds us in his article, “This Country Is Going to Kill Me” (The American Psychoanalyst. Vol. 54, No. 3. Fall 2020). I do hope you will be able to read his stirring article for yourselves, in which Hamer discusses his feelings of vulnerability on first learning that the virus is “disproportionately affecting Black, Latino, and Native populations in the U.S.” As one who is older, has health vulnerabilities, is Black and male, he knows he is at greater risk than many others, even though he realizes he is privileged by being able to work remotely and having access to good health care. He also observes that most of the Black male patients in his practice feel the same way he does. Then other fears resurface, as he reminds us ,of “Armand Arbery, hunted down and killed in Georgia; Amy Cooper, who threatened to weaponize her white womanhood against Christian Cooper in New York City; and George Floyd, who was killed when a Minneapolis police officer locked his knee against Floyd’s neck.” And because he thinks like a poet, he heard the voices as one voice, “gasping –from infection, from violence — for air.”
Poetry helps to keep all of us alive, as it has Forrest Hamer.
Forrest Hamer is the author of three collections of poetry: Call & Response (Alice James Books, 1995), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award; Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), which received the Northern California Book Award, and Rift (Four Way Books, 2007). His poetry has also appeared in many journals and anthologies, as well as in three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the California Arts Council, and has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops.
An Oakland, California psychologist, he is on the faculty of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
The three poems below are just a sample of his fine work.
–Irene Willis|
Poetry Editor
My Personal Epistemology
I don’t know what to believe, sometimes.
There are a few people I have known
With whom we knew what the other was thinking,
And sometimes we were thinking of each other
For exactly the same reason. We knew not to dismiss this as only chance.
I would know something was very wrong with my friend, for instance,
And when I called him the first thing he would say was,
I knew it would be you.
I believe the proof of an idea about the world lies
In the world of the personal, and the personal is evidence of being meaning-
Fully in the world.
I believe the truth of language lies in who is speaking.
I don’t know if knowledge and belief are speaking the same thing.
I often believed that, wherever in the world
I was, I would know the exact moment each of my parents died,
But I don’t know why
That didn’t really happen with my mother
And what that will mean about my father.
Because I was not saved, my family began to worry
About my eternal soul. I told them I didn’t believe as they did.
And what seemed to hurt us most
In all this was what we all now knew.
“My Personal Epistemology” from Rift by Forrest Hamer, 2007, appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
Ninety-Five, a Hundred
Let’s say, the self is a story.
Just ask my siblings, they’ll tell you:
In the family we grew up in,
Only adults could tell lies
Or call someone a liar;
Children had to call lies stories.
For a little while, my sister helped
Tell my brother the story of Santa Claus;
It seemed like a nice thing to do.
But Santa Claus terrified my brother:
One night, when the family was driving
Down Center Street, Santa Claus waving
From the Western Auto window,
My brother leapt across the front seat,
Afraid of being seen.
Our story was never fun for him,
Even when he got the toys he wanted.
So, call the self a story. My siblings refuse
To tell their children lies about Santa Claus.
They want them to know
Where their Christmas gifts come from;
They want them only accountable to God.
Their brother is another story.
The three of us used to play
Hide-and-go-seek for what seemed like forever.
One of us would count time down in a song
While the other two went looking
In all the spaces of our house
For somebody’s next surprise.
“Ninety-Five, a Hundred” from Rift by Forrest Hamer, 2007, appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
The Point of the Story
That next morning, a little depressed, I said, Self,
Don’t you finally get tired of yourself?
And the answer was obvious, but not absolute,
Which is, of course, just like a self.
So I countered, What’s your point?, uncovering
The whole other realm of questions and conjectures,
Only a few of which make sense.
Over dinner, my friend who was writing another novel
Had said she thought the narrative impulse was too much
With us in the end, even when
We move toward fracture, write towards nonsense.|
I agreed with her, lamenting that I sometimes feel
I only tell one story,
And there is always that other side.
As for all the other stories, Well, you can imagine
A book has its cover, its author
Probably not a good judge. Despite my best efforts,
I keep coming back to talking to myself.
It’s harder and harder to finally tell
Just what I’m saying back.
“The Point of the Story” from Rift by Forrest Hamer, 2007. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.