The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

September

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,
standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

You know Whitman’s “ample hills of Brooklyn”? I’ll tell you a secret that has been hidden by ample hills of ice cream. And the two kids. What can I tell you?, you swell. So the point is, the secret is inside my wedding ring, which no longer comes off. Though, is my husband’s ring equally stuck? Just checked and Yes! So it’s a quite secret message that I’m sneak-peeking you. Inside our wedding rings we had engraved G.F.U.G.W.W.W. Can you guess? It’s Good For Us, Getting What We Want. The poem of mine we took it from, "September," came out in The Best American Poetry in 1999 and we were married in 2001. Just had our twenty-year anniversary — and we’ve got two teenagers. On Getting What We Want I’d say it’s not great to want anything specific, but apparently, as the Stones taught, if you try, and practice a ruthless patience with yourself, you get can what you need. I wouldn’t say that even now I’ve exactly got my oars in the water, but the four of us manage to keep afloat under the weird glowing skies of recent times.
--Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. She is the author of seven books including Who Said (Copper Canyon), Doubt: A History (Harper), and Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale). Hecht holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is finishing a book on poetry and post-religious ritual for FSG. She blogged with great fun on BAP for years and is delighted to visit in this form. Thanks Angela, for thinking of me.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighteen): Jennifer Michael Hecht [by Angela Ball]

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “September” is a living paradox: it works through allegory, but is absolute in its immediacy. It is an “I do this I do that” poem—not of exuberance, but of despair.

     Like Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”

     The Feet, mechanical, go round

     Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—

     A Wooden way, regardless grown,

     A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

Hecht’s poem seems enunciated from afar; yet, unlike “After great pain,” and like Frank O’Hara’s action/observation poems, we are with the speaker in the moment. A time freeze analogous to the invocation of held breath at the end of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” galvanizes the poem’s center:

     The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.

     I remember you in a black and white photograph

     taken this time of some year. You were leaning against a half-shed tree,

     standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

 

     When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

“The Day Lady Died” ends in a tumble of syntax without a period—“and everyone and I stopped breathing”—in ecstatic tribute to Billie Holiday’s passing. The syntax of Hecht’s poem is crystalline and correct—“A Wooden way”—declarative, accurate, end-stopped—so much so that it invites life’s vital disorder—the welter that includes people “getting just what they need”—to its edges, killing it on contact: “I remember you in a black and white photograph / taken this time of some year.” The figure stands in lost leaves, hardly distinguished from grayness, but with the power to produce an endlessness the opposite of bliss: “When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.”

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s masterful “September” has so numbed us with sadness that when the speaker “trails her hand” in the water and produces a mild exclamation, “Such a soft wind,” the change is electric. From wooden despair, the speaker wakes to recollect nature. Yes, the oars are gone. But the lone skipper obeys the ironclad law of maritime advice: Stay with the boat.
--Angela Ball

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thanks, Angela -- and Jennifer -- for this terific post.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, David. What a treat it was to talk about Jennifer Michael Hecht's unforgettable poem--part of the long community of Best American.

[Jennifer Michael Hecht]

"Stay with the boat."! So great. Love all of this.

[Michael C. Rush]

Loved Doubt: A History. Didn't know Hecht wrote poetry--thanks for bringing that to my attention.