ANNOYING DIABETIC BITCH
Sharon Mesmer, Combo Books, 2007

[This review originally appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter.]



Days after Obama’s historic election I received an earnest e-mail from a Canadian poet who had spent most of the Bush era in the States. “I was intrigued,” she wrote, about “the future of flarf in a post-Bush world.”

She had a theory. Flarf—a kind of poetry that often involves suturing together the results of Internet searches, and which tends to be poly-vocal and often somewhat disturbing or offensive—seemed to thrive during one of the most conservative periods in our nation’s history. She mentioned Sharon Mesmer’s writing as a particularly “disturbing” example of what she called flarf’s “polyphonic disconnect.”

How would such writing fare under Obama?

I gave it some thought. Was it, I wondered, helpful to consider the Beats and the New York School as mere products of the Eisenhower years, a poetic response to a conservative ethos whose most famous product was McCarthyism? “Howl,” the most celebrated American poem of the ‘50s, certainly seems like a direct hit on the times. But what about Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air,” written a year after “Howl?”

“The literary magazines in America and England were controlled by academic and conservative poets,” Koch explained in an interview with David Shapiro published in Jacket #15. “I thought I was a good poet, and I knew John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were, and it was extremely difficult for any of us to publish anything. Meanwhile there was all this terrible, structured, elegant, mildly ironic drivel being published....I wrote ‘Fresh Air’ out of feelings of rage and excitement.”

If a quick glance at Mesmer’s poems like “I Chose the Wrong Power Animal,” “I Am So Over Fucking,” and “Sonnet in Favor of Literary Narcissism” do not strike one as direct responses to the political times, we might want to adjust our notion of “the times” to include the poetic landscape.

In this light, Mesmer’s poem “Mary Oliver vs. Cyborg Prostitute” might well be the “Fresh Air” of the Internet age:

Mary Oliver is the dead people who live on our eyelashes
Cyborg Prostitute is what could happen if the dissolved remains
of an evil Cyclops goes looking for his next meal beyond the boundaries
of the wordless novel
Slouching towards Mary Oliver is an Olivetti laughin’ cryin’ to Olivia Newton
John massage music
The eager note on my door said ‘Cyborg Prostitute is a formless Sioux rowboat
trader in a Christian school videopoetik and strangely repellent’

Kenneth Koch again: “Although ‘Fresh Air’ was an attack on academic poetry, I also wanted it to be a celebration of good poetry.” While Mesmer affronts the “structured, elegant, mildly ironic” poetry of our own age—qualities that bring to mind more academicized strains of post-avant writing as well as the quietist poetry of a Mary Oliver—she also celebrates her own sense of “good poetry.”

Mesmer’s language is charged, electric, wildly funny, with passages as twisty as anything from the NY School:

Spatchcrocked, ectopic,
modified and sebaceous:
Monkey Penis Sausage
and Schmookums on Thanksgiving
arriving with their children,
J. Penis, Scrotum,
Doodiekins and Debbie
singing “Happy Birthday, Cowboy Sally! /
Your penis is three inches /
And leaves a short flavor.”

But all is not Elmslie-like zizzing and popping in Mesmer’s world. There is social as well as literary engagement, in poems like “Fascist Girlfriend” and “Compassionate Conservative Girlfriend.”

In some cases, the work might be so engaged as to invite controversy.

The post-avant, poetic landscape has been dominated in the last decade or so by well-meaning but fairly dry writing that carves out idealized, if not exactly utopian, space. A poetics, one might argue, of avoidance. In this milieu, where poets have refrained from direct engagement with some of the uglier aspects of the social, poems that have foregrounded their author’s refusal to whitewash their poems of ugly human nature have been met with strong resistance.

A poem like “Juan Valdez Has a Little Juan Valdez (I.e., Energy Cannon) in His Pants” seems a strong candidate to spark some future controversy, given its uncomfortable use of an exoticized icon. Whereas other poets might have written a book-length serial poem deconstructing the fictional character, tracing him back to his ‘50s ad agency origins, with feints and dodges into poetic explorations of ethnicity and U.S.-South American power relations, Mesmer’s approach is to simply pour the icon into the blender with a lot of caustic found language:

It’s a true dichotomy, hauling beans on a mule.
Beans take exactly the same amount of time to decompose
as road apples.
Juan Valdez, Java Man, you should be neither slandered nor lionzed.
I shall personally make the wolf parade apologize.
Juan, let me take this opportunity to embrace,
as per the washing instructions on Camilla Parker-Bowles’ underpants,
the following idea:
Juan Valdez + love machine = bovine sex club.
Boy, you rocked me so hard I peed my pants.
You are so a varied artist!

Is the appropriate response to the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency’s creation, to the countless minor and major horrors we’re confronted with every day, another book of slack, dry, barely readable poetry? Mesmer argues “no.” Despite the insane energy of its surface noise, the resulting poem ranks among the funniest and most upsetting in recent memory: a genuinely sane response.