SHARON MESMER AND EDWIN TORRES
Oct 4, 2013
7 PM
Berl's Poetry Shop
126A Front Street next to Superfine
DUMBO, Brooklyn
Sharon Mesmer was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, four blocks from the Union Stockyards. She is a descendent of Franz Anton Mesmer and a two-tailed, sword-wielding visionary mermaid named Meluzina from the Vistula, the longest river in Poland. Many of her published poems — which have appeared in magazines like Poetry, the Wall Street Journal, New American Writing and Women's Studies Quarterly, as well as the anthologies Postmodern American Poetry—A Norton Anthology (second edition), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women — retell the ancient Slavic legend of how Meluzina courageously led Prince Zbigniew the Short to a smelly old fishing village devastated by exploding unicorn boners and ordered him to found the city of Warsaw in about 1294. Sharon, like her vatic ancestress, always urges us courageously forward, for example in essays written for her column, "Seasonal Affect," which ran for three years in the French fashion magazine, Purple, and her flarf poems, which are universally despised by defenders of the sacred art of poetry the world over. She is considering changing her middle name to Youcallthatpoetry? because of two identical protests that occurred after her readings with other members of the flarf collective at the Whitney Museum in 2009 and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 2008. But in spite of all that, no one can deny the truth of her famous pithy aphorism, emblazoned on her Polish family's coat of arms: Ne iterum capitur caudam porta tincidunt ("Don't let your second tail get caught in the door"). She teaches at NYU, the New School and online for the Chicago School of Poetics. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities and Half-Angel, Half-Lunch. She has three fiction collections, including one from the French publisher, Hachette, in French, but since this is a poetry reading she won't be telling you about those. She met Edwin Torres during their time performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the glorious 1990's, and they later collaborated on the "WITS" ("What Is This Shit?") portion of his PS1 radio show, "Live Nude Radio Theater." Sharon is also a Fulbright recipient and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. While in the Brooklyn College MFA program she was awarded a MacArthur Scholarship through the nomination of her teacher, Allen Ginsberg.
Edwin Torres is a ‘lingualisualist’ rooted in the languages of sight and sound. A native of New York City, his poetic birth came via The Nuyorican Poets Café as mid-wifed by The St. Marks Poetry Project. He toured worldwide as a member of the groundbreaking poetry collective "Nuyorican Poets Café Live" that helped revitalize Spoken Word in the early 90's. His books include, Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function Of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books). Fellowships include, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performing Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Poetry Fund among others. Anthologies include Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2 (Norton), Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion: A Coney Island Reader (Columbia University Press), and Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays and Songs For Children (Black Radish Books). Recent projects include, poet-in-residence at Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument in the South Bronx produced by The DIA Foundation and guest blogger on the Poetry Foundation’s website, Harriet. He has a new book forthcoming from University of Arizona Press entitled, Ameriscopia.
