Sharon Mesmer

Last updated

Sharon Mesmer (born in 1960) is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997, published to coincide with a month-long reading tour of Japan sponsored by American Book Jam magazine). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation by Daniel Bismuth, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism (or mesmerism) and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.

Contents

Career

Mesmer, the daughter of second-generation Polish and German immigrants, was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. [1] The area, named for its proximity to the infamous Union Stockyards, was the subject of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle . Her first published poems were “The Nordic Skull In Double Exposure” which appeared in Maureen Owen's New York-based literary magazine, Telephone and “The Anger of Animals” appeared in Intro 12, a magazine of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Mesmer received a B.A. in Writing/English from Columbia College, where she and other female students of the poet Paul Hoover, notably Lydia Tomkiw and Deborah Pintonelli, became instrumental in galvanizing the links between the Chicago poetry and punk music scenes (other prominent local poets at that time included Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala). Mesmer, Pintonelli and poet Connie Deanovich published the literary magazine B City, and later Mesmer, Pintonelli and poet/fiction writer Carl Watson published the broadsheet letter eX. They were frequent readers at the Get Me High Lounge in the Wicker Park area of Chicago, and early poetry slam competitors (Mesmer was later a slam semi-finalist at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York).

After Mesmer left Chicago for New York, she became a student of Allen Ginsberg in the Brooklyn College MFA poetry program. Through Ginsberg's nomination, she was awarded a MacArthur Scholarship (given through the college from a gift by John Ashbery) and represented the college in the Poetry Society of America's “Best of New York Writing Programs.” Writing about Mesmer's first book, Half Angel, Half Lunch, Ginsberg characterized her work as “always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern.” [2] It was through the poet that Mesmer was introduced to Buddhist practice. Because of her association with Ginsberg, she is considered a post-Beat poet (see Beat Generation). Her early work also evinces ties to the New York School and post-Language poetry. [3] By 2003 Mesmer was one of earliest practitioners of flarf poetry, the first poetry movement of the 21st century. She performed with other members of the flarf collective at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN in 2008 [4] and at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2009, as part of the “Flarf Versus Conceptual” event. [5] Four of her flarf poems appear in the Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013).

Mesmer lectures and performs her work widely: at the 2010 Iceland Wave Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland; at a reading and panel discussion sponsored by the Danish Writers' Union in 2010; and at the Ovidius Festival at Neptun Beach, Romania, in 2009. [6] Her work has appeared in Poetry, [7] the Wall Street Journal, [8] New American Writing, the Evergreen Review , [9] Eleven Eleven, [10] and the Brooklyn Rail, [11] [12] among others. Anthology appearances include I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (Les Figues, 2012), Poems for the Nation: Edited by Allen Ginsberg (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999). Her awards include a Fulbright Specialist grant (2011), an Alumna of the Year Award from Columbia College Chicago (2009), a Jerome Foundation/SASE award (as mentor to poet Elisabeth Workman, grantee, 2009) and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships (2007 and 1999).

Works

Poetry
Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997)
Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998)
Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006)
Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008)
The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)
Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015)

Fiction
The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000)
Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005)
Ma Vie a Yonago (Hachette Litteratures, France, 2005)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beat Generation</span> Literary movement

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Corso</span> American writer (1930–2001)

Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Waldman</span> American poet (born 1945)

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Wakoski</span> American poet (born 1937)

Diane Wakoski is an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon Olds</span> American poet

Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

Flarf poetry was an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term Flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email mailing list, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, invented by Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays and other texts.

William Corbett was an American poet, essayist, editor, educator, and publisher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Adam</span> American poet

Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was part of a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Though often associated with the Beat poets, she would more accurately be considered one of the predecessors of the Beat Generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hettie Jones</span> American poet

Hettie Jones is an American poet. She has written twenty-three books that include a memoir of the Beat Generation, three volumes of poetry, and publications for children and young adults, including The Trees Stand Shining and Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music.

Jack Warren Anderson was an American poet, dance critic, and dance historian. He is well known for his numerous reviews of dance performances in The New York Times and Dance Magazine as well as for his scholarly studies in dance history and for eleven volumes of poetry.

Paul Carroll was an American poet and the founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago. A professor for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago and professor emeritus, his books include Poem in Its Skin and Odes. While a student, he was an editor of Chicago Review. In 1985 he won the Chicago Poet's Award, and the city published his book "The Garden of Earthly Delights". His papers, The Paul Carroll Papers, are archived in the Special Collection Research Center at the University of Chicago Library. Among those papers are documents between Carroll's buddy, fellow poet and critic James Dickey, where Mr. Dickey states that Paul's late poetry was his best. One of these late poems, "Song After Making Love" was published in 2008 by Cold Mountain Review at Appalachian State University.

Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.

Lydia Tomkiw was an American poet, singer, and songwriter, best known for her work with the new wave musical group Algebra Suicide, along with her husband Don Hedeker.

Chicago Review is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and special features in double issues.

Paul Randolph Violi was an American poet born in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Splurge, Fracas, The Curious Builder, Likewise, and most recently Overnight. Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972–1974, worked on free-lance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions and as chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, he organized a series of readings at the Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, anthologies, and a magazine called New York Times. His art book collaborations with Dale Devereux Barker, most recently Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting, have been acquired by major collections. The expanded text of their first collaboration, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes, a collection of non-fiction prose, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joanna Fuhrman</span> American poet and professor (born 1972)

Joanna Furhman is an American poet and professor. She is the author of six collections of poems and her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals, as well as in anthologies. Fuhrman is a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board, and poetry editor for Boog City, a community newspaper for the Lower East Side in New York.

Brenda Coultas is an American poet.

Nada Gordon is an American poet. She is a pioneer of Flarf poetry and a founding member of the Flarf Collective.

Olivia Gatwood is a poet, writer, and educator on topics that include coming of age, feminism, gendered violence, & true crime.

References

  1. ↑ , "Back of the Yards," Encyclopedia of Chicago.
  2. ↑ "Half Angel, Half Lunch - Sharon Mesmer : Small Press Distribution". Archived from the original on 2014-01-08. Retrieved 2014-01-07., Allen Ginsberg on Half Angel, Half Lunch.
  3. ↑ , See entry in Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, edited by Terrence Diggory, Facts on File, Inc, 2009.
  4. ↑ , "Free Verse: The Flarf Collective," Walker Art Center, 2008.
  5. ↑ , "An Evening of Contemporary Poetry: Conceptual Writing and the Flarf Collective," Whitney Museum of American Art, April 17, 2009.
  6. ↑ "Buna Ziua from Romania," The Best American Poetry blog, June 8th, 2009.
  7. ↑ , "The Swiss Just Do Whatever," Poetry, July/August 2009.
  8. ↑ , "Search for a New Poetics Yields This: 'Kitty Goes Postal/ Wants Pizza'," The Wall Street Journal, May 25th, 2010.
  9. ↑ "Evergreen Review » This Gorilla Called Philip Sidney (For Roy Scranton) by Sharon Mesmer". Archived from the original on 2014-01-08. Retrieved 2014-01-07., "This Gorilla Called Philip Sidney (for Roy Scanton)," the Evergreen Review, Summer 2013
  10. ↑ , Eleven Eleven, Issue 15.
  11. ↑ , "Revenge," The Brooklyn Rail, April 1st, 2005.
  12. ↑ , "I Wanted to Compose a Canticle of Exaltation and Praise, Stupid University Job," The Brooklyn Rail, July 1st, 2005
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.