Jamey Hecht
Good morning, everyone! This is beginning to sound like same-old, same-0ld, but that’s because it is.
Depending on where we live and percentages of viruses, vaccinations, masking and hand-washing, we’ve all seen recommendations go up and down and, being the intelligent rule-followers that we are, we’ve done our best to obey.
But it’s exhausting – and even expensive, as our prices also go up and down. It’s at times like these that we most need the soul-healing experience of poetry.
With this in mind, I’m happy to introduce you to a wonderful poet named Jamey Hecht.
He’s new to me and probably not new to many of you, because he’s been writing for a very long time. Jamey is the author of five books to date: Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999); Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus, a translation with commentary, (Wordsworth Editions, 2005); Bloom’s How to Write about Homer (Chelsea, 2010); and two books of poetry. Limousine, Midnight Blue (Red Hen Press, 2009) is fifty elegies for President Kennedy. Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989 – 2019 is a collection published by IPBooks. Jamey is also a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn, and a member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP). Hecht has a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis University (1995), and a PsyD in Psychoanalysis from NCP (2019). His website is: www.drjameyhecht.com
His newest book, Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989-2019, begins with an epigraph from Owen Barfield
Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world,
:
stuck onto the rest of it.
It is the inside of the whole world.
Here then, with pleasure, are three poems from Dodo Feathers:
— Irene Willis, Poetry Editor
Old Flame
For D.A.W.
Suppose you fuck me over really bad.
Twenty years go by. Then, drinks in town.
It’s been forever. I’ve been really sad.
You’ve remarried, and he’s made a down
-payment on a brownstone.
Now you ask me to forgive you, and I say I do. I don’t,
though. And I know I don’t. But I can see
you really want this from me, and I won’t
deprive you of it because one of us, at least,
should have a decent shot at happiness.
You from our youthful vows released
yourself with one phone call. I guess
I’ve never been the same. My ring. My name.
I’m not your anything. You’re my old flame.
Aftermath
For B.B.H.
That woman you loved, the one you pine for,
She’s gone. It’s over. The past has swallowed it.
Likely you will never see her pretty face again.
That is all right. Why is that all right? Because
the mountains are flowing away like water
and all things pass away, tangent to eternity.
2016
First Divorce (after Lattimore’s Homer)
For D.A.W.
We live on the flat surface of the world, and compared with a God,
We can do nothing. If the God or the God’s divine messenger
Were to come to Manhattan and approach this bench and sit beside me
(there is plenty of space for Him or Her, and there is no rain)
Then I believe I could do something, as a famous singer does great things
Until he disappoints his people, or is killed; or like a preacher
Who works things with his voice, continually greater, till the God
Reaches out and down with hard bereavement and consumes him.
But as it is, my wife, two years ago, left me: I can do nothing.
I quit my job, moved hundreds of miles away and read and wrote;
Looked hard at other people’s lives as they tried to do this or that.
I learned from their stories, but the burning of the world goes on.
Now in my speech I call upon the beautiful past, knowing the lines
Come to nothing and are not poetry; that other men and women
Are left every day by their women and men, their vows torn open
Like trash into which the raccoons tear, eager to eat of it,
And they wreck the yard and the sidewalk and disown the mess of it.
When they have eaten their fill they return to the trees and are gone,
And behind them the sorry, noisome garbage scatters on the lovely grass.
Order and peace and abundance and joy are the long work
To which the young aspire in their early strength,
But madness comes, and the spoiling vermin down the streetlamp.
My wife becomes my ex-wife, and all the bridal veil and dress,
The heaped white lilies of the wedding day, somehow dissolve.
Their promise is consumed. We already happened, and are gone.|
2001