Review: Jeffrey Hecker, Instructions for the Orgy

Jeffrey Hecker’s Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside, 2013) is a short chapbook of ten poems. [Spoiler alert:] They turn on a joke — with each succeeding arrival, the orgy is revealed as increasingly shambolic. The first to the orgy (the titles of the poems are “Instructions for the First to the Orgy,” “Instructions for the Second to the Orgy,” etc.) is advised to “Delouse the loving space,” for instance. To the sixth, it is remarked, “I can’t believe you’re the sixth male of six arrivals.” By the seventh, though, hopes are raised somewhat:

Separating spouses Reed and Pam

just walked in with a line of braided

Wiccan women who I think might all be

related. They brought their own maypole

to grind on, Whitsun-wedding style.

But satisfaction is quickly deferred. In the eighth, one couple has paired off together in the bathroom, while masturbation is suggested for the rest. By the ninth, the speaker is reduced to random thoughts about Google Maps, and the tenth and final arrival is merely asked to sign a ledger, which oddly dates back to the 1920s.

I’m not sure there is any “deeper” meaning to this, but Hecker’s conversational, satiric tone is engaging, and the desultory, sometimes slightly surreal elements of the series remind me a little bit of Samuel Beckett. The last poem ends, “Sign / who you are, 20XX, or why should anybody remember?” Perhaps the futility of ego and desire, then, is the theme, if meaning there must be. In any case, this is a worthwhile little volume, nicely printed and sewn by Sunnyoutside. Hecker is one to keep an eye out for, this a taster for further work perhaps.