#ignore him snogging sharon

[liquorwrist]

bucky: whats more important peggy or us

steve: peggy (leaves for the past)

sam: man he didnt even think about it

[52murders]

5 - One In, One Out

On the 1st of January at 12:02 AM, the following took place at The Wash nightclub in Dalston. 

On the roof terrace:

Graham shuddered to the first orgasm he had ever shared with another person and thought that this was going to be the best year ever.

Florence suddenly wondered if she had remembered to take her pill. She was pretty sure she had. Almost definitely.

Paul was one of many people who were pretending they couldn’t see the couple shagging behind the azalea bushes.

Simone was wondering why there weren’t any fireworks.  Weren’t there supposed to be fireworks on New Years Eve? Where were the fireworks?

Fergus was considering throwing Simone off the roof if she didn’t shut up about fireworks.

Tammy was having her last cigarette before quitting.

Keith was trying to discreetly roll a spliff without attracting too much attention.

Georgina thought Keith looked like a young Jeremy Vine. Apart from the dreadlocks, obviously.

Maria was trying to get people singing and didn’t understand why no one was joining in.

Claudette was one of several people wondering why Maria was singing “How Much is That Doggy In The Window?”

Hadley wanted to go back inside.

Sandeep was wondering who his ex-girlfriend had kissed at midnight.

Tara thought she and Sandeep had a future together.

Harry was wondering who the fuck invited their dad out for New Year’s Eve.

Ron was talking about the pills back in the day and how you just had to take one and you were on one for the rest of the night.

Chas hadn’t felt old until he’d seen the expressions of amused contempt on the faces of those kids as they took the piss out of his brother.

Billy looked at the skyline and wondered what the year ahead would bring.

 On the upper staircase:

Caroline was crying.

Julianne had her arm around Caroline, was rubbing her shoulder and said “there, there” but wasn’t really in the mood to be going through these dramas so early in the evening.

Nicholas stood around awkwardly, wondering what – if anything – he could do.

Genovese was knocking on the office door, so Ken could reset the credit card terminal.

In the office:

Ken was busy racking up lines of coke. 

DJ Dan Diamond was promising himself that he would stop taking crappy bookings in these shitty two-bit clubs.

Chantelle was wondering if Ken expected her to shag DJ Dan Diamond.

Vicki wished she’d been able to get tickets for Ministry.

Pete was fairly sure he’d once had a handjob from DJ Dan Diamond at a festival in Berlin.

 In the stock cupboard:

A mouse was nibbling on a pistachio nut.

 In the first floor bar:

Sam was ignoring his boss’s previous warnings about drug use and necked two pills behind the bar.

Georgia thought that if Sam wanted to keep his job, he should either be more discreet or learn how to share.

Hamish still couldn’t get served, even when there was nobody else standing there.

Chris wasn’t sure whether to say Happy New Year to Pauline or Sabrina, so just stood there with his arms half outstretched to the room in general.

Sabrina was hugging Pauline and telling her that it was going to be their year. THEIR YEAR.

Pauline wished that Sabrina hadn’t eaten so much garlic before coming out.

Freddie was waiting for Sabrina to shut up so he could say Happy New Year to Pauline.

Tim was putting something in Pauline’s drink.

Kenneth wasn’t sure he wanted to hang around with Tim any more.

Michelle was wishing that she had stayed at home.

Tom was wishing that Michelle would take that look off her face and at least pretend to have a good time.

Carol hoped that she and Julius didn’t end up like Tom and Michelle.

Julius felt homesick.

Maxine was sick, but kept her mouth shut and was doing her best to swallow it without anyone noticing.

Jack tried to make a move on Maxine and didn’t understand why she wouldn’t kiss him.

Sharon watched Jack make a fool of himself and knew that she would be the one he went home with at the end of the night.

Andy thought he definitely was in with Sharon.

Penelope suddenly felt a sharp pain under her chin, like she’d been punched by an iron fist. She fell to the floor and was dead before reached it.

Kevin thought that Penelope was just staggering because she was drunk and was about to laugh at her. Then he saw the blood.

Jocasta was about to slap that fucking bitch that was bumping into her.

Coralina wished she’d worn better shoes. That heel was just about to snap.

Patti wasn’t going to be able to take her top back tomorrow. Not with Bacardi spilled down the back and sweat in the pits.

Carl had his hands on the skinny arse of some girl he had been introduced to twice, but whose name he had forgotten.

Jemima wondered if wanting to get off with a black guy - any black guy - was racist.

Callie had never seen what happened to Jemima when she drank and now understood why she generally only had lemonade at their works do’s.

Samson wanted to know why this one wasn’t as much fun as her friend.

Roxanne wondered what the point of wearing makeup and putting on nice clothes when guys went for scruffy old tarts.

Jack thought seventy-five a gram was extortionate, even for New Year’s Eve.

Toby would have given the gear away for free if it meant he could go home and be with Joy and the baby, but Ansell needed his money and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Sandra watched the deal go down and reminded herself that she was off-duty.

Bea was only pretending to be drunk. It was the only way she could justify acting the way she did.

Kayleigh wondered why Bea had to get so wankered every time they went out.

 On the lower staircase:

Kyle was explaining this theory about a universal consciousness and how we are all different vibrational frequencies of the same energy.

Sharon had no fucking idea what this guy was on about.

Pauline was just pleased that she had found somewhere to sit down. 

Derek had surreptitiously bombed a load of speed and wanted to head back to the dancefloor.

Rose made a joke about ants in the pants, then blushed furiously for no discernible reason.

Luke had no idea that the woman he was snogging would be his wife by this time next year.

Cora was glad she had brought mints and condoms out with her.

Dave skipped down the stairs two at a time, keen to get back to the serious business of strutting his stuff.

 In the gents toilet:

Bill was completely missing the target and pissing all over his shoes.

Kamal couldn’t go.

Wendall was thinking that if he didn’t pull tonight, he might try being gay for a bit.

Nigel was remembering the time he ate a urinal cake for a bet and had to go and have his stomach pumped. Why didn’t he have nights like that any more?

David didn’t notice that there was blood in his piss, but could feel the stinging sensation.

Pete was trying not to be rude as he knocked on the cubicle door, but he was about twelve seconds away from shitting his pants.

Clyde told whoever it was outside knocking to fuck off and die.

Jacques was tapping his arm, trying to find a vein.

Andre hated toilet men and tried not to make eye contact.

Keith smiled as he held out a towel to the guy washing his hands.

Idris waited patiently for his turn and was careful not to make eye contact with anyone or any thing.

In the main room:

DJ Cheddar didn’t care if it made him a sellout - this year he was definitely going to produce a mash-up version of “Auld Lang Syne” and make a fortune.

Cheryl had dropped a contact lens and was weighing up the pros and cons of trying to find it versus spending the rest of the night winking like a pirate.

Liz wished she wasn’t on her period.

Kevin thought Liz smelled funny.

Theresa had dropped six pills and didn’t feel a thing. If she saw that scrawny fucker that had ripped her off, she was going to rip his tits off.

Dreamer was just there for the music. He didn’t hold with this new years shit.

Christos had been dancing for over and hour and hadn’t moved his feet once.

Sami thought house was for poofs and hairdressers, but these girls seemed to be into it, so… 

Hector made the box.

Charlene liked to dance, but preferred it if guys were a bit clumsy. For some reason, she found it reassuring.

Veronica had been saving the last few drops of her vodka and coke for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to buy her a drink.

Bettina wondered why she was getting funny looks.

Lewis didn’t want to stare, but couldn’t help but notice that girl’s dress had gone totally see-through.

Bernard didn’t mind staring at all.

Francis thought they didn’t make tunes like this any more, even though the song had, in fact, only been released three weeks ago.

Indigo would rather have been in Bali.

Karl couldn’t work out what that guy was so upset about.

Frank knew trouble when he saw it and was pushing Karl and Dayton away from the dance floor.

Dayton was pissed off they had to leave. That girl in the see through dress was hot.

Fiona saw the flash above the crowd and thought it was a firecracker.

Ben did his best to aim Stephan’s hand way from the crowd, but couldn’t stop him from pulling the trigger.

Stephen had got the gun from his uncle and would have used it on that pussyhole motherfucker, if Ben hadn’t smacked his hand upwards and sent the shot into the ceiling.

Jason felt his eardrum burst as something loud exploded near his head.

Isaac knew what that pop meant and started running for the door.

Jen wanted to know where the fuck Isaac was going.

Freya didn’t know what the fight was about, but felt certain that her stupid little brother had been the cause of it.

Gemini thought it was typical. You couldn’t go for a dance without stupid men ruining everything.

Inga wanted chips.

Marco was feeling self conscious, but didn’t want anyone to know it.

Heidi was never drinking Jagermeister again.

Delores was considering a round of Aftershocks.

Jacqui thought she might go blonde this year.

Krystof kept one eye on his rucksack, which was in the corner of the room.

 In the ladies toilet:

Kirsty had noticed that one of her pupils was larger than the other and couldn’t stop staring at them.

Petra was wondering if her top made her look too slutty… or not slutty enough.

Christine was systematically washing every square centimeter of her hands while counting to five hundred and fifty five.

Jessie was using her lipstick to write “Cora is a big fat slag” on the cubicle wall.

Verity was wondering whether she could ask the girl in the next cubicle if there was any loo roll in hers.

Kat thought she felt something snap in her nose as she took that last bump.

Gina didn’t like the way Kat was scratching.

Louise had totally emptied her stomach, but still had the dry heaves.

Clair was holding back Louise’s hair and wondering whether putting her in a cab and sending her home alone made her a bad person.

Joe was having his first night out as a woman and apart from a couple of odd looks here and there, was actually starting to have a good time.

In the cloakroom:

Petra realised that she’d forgotten to put any tickets on hangers and was looking intently at items of clothing to see if she could remember to whom they belonged.

Paolo slid an iPhone out of a coat pocket and put it in his bag.

 On the door:

Ansell was telling a pissed student to fuck off home.

Miguel was laughing.

Donald didn’t know why these guards were outside his hall of residence and wouldn’t let him go to his room.

Tania was one minute into the New Year and had already broken her resolution to stop smoking.

Heidi was wishing she’d worn tights. It was freezing out there.

Donna thought that drunk guy went to her university and might be on her Introduction to Economic Theory course.

Marie was trying to get a signal on her phone to send messages to all her friends.

Penny had a signal, but no messages.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: She Makes the Dirty Work Look Like a Degas

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, prose writer, essayist and professor of creative writing living in Brooklyn. She was born and grew up in Back of the Yards, a Chicago neighborhood named for its proximity to the Union Stockyards. After moving to New York she received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Allen Ginsberg.

From 2003 to 2010 she was a member of the Flarf poetry collective, whose practitioners used Google to mine the internet for content, collaborating daily via an email listserv. Mesmer co-edited the anthology, Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, forthcoming this Spring from Edge Books.

Mesmer’s poetry collections include Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof, 2015), Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo, 2008), and The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013).

Sharon Mesmer (photo by Esther Levine)

Fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Purple, and The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches at NYU and the New School.

This interview was conducted in person and by email.

*   *   *

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle: You’re a witch.

Sharon Mesmer: Thank you. Yes, I was in a coven for two years in the ‘90s. Well, everybody was in a coven in the ‘90s.  We never hexed, but we divined. The meat locker doors to our hearts were open, and the chains of the law were broken.  I believe that all that witchy work was the main practice that opened my nadis  [network of yogic energy channels]  to  Flarf. That, and the czarnina  [duck blood soup]  my Polish grandmother used to ladle out when I was a kid.

For me,  Flarf was a daily practice like any other. Constantly responding to the constant inflow of the political/cultural/social absurd. A filtering and a distilling. Of course, nothing is as absurd as what we’re seeing now, but we rose to the challenge as we saw it then.

That kind of work was also a way into personalities not my own: I was able to compose in other modes, speak with other mouths, often mouths attached to personalities I didn’t like or agree with.

There was, too, the collaborative aspect: filtering and distilling the words of the other poets (at one point there were 30 + on the flarflist) into my own poems, and then seeing my words in their poems. We were a meta-mind. I miss that intensity, especially these days when there’s so much more to conjure with. But I’m a deep believer in the via negativa:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

T.S. Eliot nicked that from St. John of the Cross. But good modernist poets steal from transcendent medieval saint-poets. (SJC sounds like self-help from the past, especially as Rough Orange Beast, his hour come at last, slouches toward daughter-wife to be born.)

In our end is our beginning? Hopefully. Eliot stole that line from Mary Queen of Scots, you know. She had it embroidered on the inside of the dress she wore to her execution. That’s being optimistic: she was in prison for 19 years. He’s more pessimistic: “In my beginning is my end.” I’m trying to find the middle way.

G C-H: Your blood relations include Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer,  magus of animal magnetism, and Otto Messmer, the creator of Felix the Cat. Mesmerism later became known as hypnotism. Felix was the first image ever broadcast on TV! Do you bend spoons? Cozy up with these cuckoo birds in your family tree?

SM: Felix on TV / cats on youtube is a trajectory to conjure with. Do what thou wilt, kitten, is the extent of the law. The chains of the canine have been broken.

In a great review of Lisa Randall’s Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2016, Lawrence Krauss noted that every cubic centimeter of space teems with photons left over from the Big Bang, particles that last interacted with matter when the universe was 300,000 years old. And every second, 600 billion neutrinos — which emanate from explosions inside the sun — penetrate our bodies and Earth’s. He says, “Without this invisible background of cosmic material we would not exist.” So, how old are we, really? How permeable? How can we possibly speak with only one voice?

Great-Great-Great-Great Uncle Franz’s “magnetic fluid” was, I believe, something akin to chi/qi or kundalini — as mentioned above. He  knew that nadis make a universe of us and vice-versa. How did this 18th -century Swabian know that? He probably stole the idea from some traveling mystic/guru/swami/qi gong master that he ran into in Vienna in 1768, possibly inviting him (or her) to the performance he’d arranged in his garden  of Mozart’s one-act singspiel about a duped shepherdess. Like Eliot he pilfered, though not from Mary Stuart’s dress.

By the way, the kundalini serpent is female. So we all have a girl snake coiled up somewhere in our coccyxes.

G C-H: You complect a contemporary lyric with magic, rigor, and grace that snaps my head around. (Caught kissing on top of a grave, 16th-century Spain’s Luis de Gongora compelled the fourteen-line severity of the baroque sonnet to encompass both diamonds and doom.)

We all know Russia’s Futurist Zaum, that trans-rational language, Khlebnikov’s nonsense called “Beyondsense.” But beyond good and evil, where good enough just ain’t good enough, Sharon, you push on to Beyoncésense…

SM: Beyoncésense informs us that Gongora’s culteranismo  (culto, cultivated + luteranismo, Lutheranism) was a word created by haters to ridicule it for not being “real” poetry.  Plus ça change. And thank you for using “lyric” in describing my work. It’s been suggested that there is no poetry — and no mind, either — at work in my work. There are a few minds, actually.

The closer Orange Beast slouches, the more I turn to VelKhleb, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Danlil Kharms. Especially Kharms. Northwestern University just published, last month, Alexander Cigale’s wonderful Russian Absurd (a translation of Kharms’s selected poems). The title itself describes the situation at hand.

G C-H: The  untamable painter Walter Robinson gave me your book, Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place last Christmas Eve. Since then, I’ve read nothing else! Potty mouth. Shit chat. I caught your act at Le Poisson Rouge. You delivered like a bacchante, bare-back on a beer truck, with the devil of love at its wheel. Would it stun you next to learn that my companion, the photographer Seton Smith, finds your oeuvre “intimate”?

SM: Not at all. I expose myself for love of the people.

As for Le Poisson Rouge, it really was a hell of an evening. My gynecologist was there.

And for GFMGLP, thank you. Take another look at the cover image and you’ll see that, thanks to my editor Shanna Compton’s genius for design, one of its rosy polka dots falls squarely upon a kitten’s mouth.

The I Ching says, “Everything serves to further”; I say everything serves to further the desire of a rosy polka dot to fall squarely upon a kitten’s mouth, creating the look of a party girl with lipstick smeared after her long night of raving/snogging.

The kitten is confident, and stares at the skittish puppy (who cannot meet her gaze), much like Kristen Visbal’s newly situated “Fearless Girl” sculpture stares down Di Modica’s Wall Street bull, but way more successfully. I totally agree with what Jillian Steinhauer wrote about fake corporate feminism facing off against entrenched corporate aggression, and everyone going gooey for it.

I swear to god, if I were Jesus, I would have killed that unicorn every time he directed An episode of the A-Team.

(Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place)

G C-H: Uh-huh. GFMGLP’s a relentlessly demented plaster bath laid on with a trowel. Word choice like “moiety” and “propinquity.” Your Annoying Diabetic Bitch sells for $1,872.21 on Amazon. Plus shipping.   You pound reality into submission…

SM: I swear to god, if I were Jesus, I would kill Amazon every time it tries to sell a copy of ADB for that price. I may just write to the seller and say that, while I’m flattered, I would like to know  WTF.  On the other hand, maybe it’s better not to know. Via negativa and all.

I love it that you see my meek efforts to poem as beating reality into submission, which is indeed my goal — a personal revenge on reality for robbing me of a golden childhood which could’ve continued indefinitely had it not been for my anterior pituitary gland secreting somatotropin and lutropin, then releasing them into my bloodstream. But I heard that happens to everybody.

To go back to something I said earlier, when I joined the  Flarf collective, just after the commencement of Gulf War 2.0 in ‘03, I had no idea that the absurdity of  Flarf  — a fitting reaction to the relentless dementedness we were witnessing — would be divested of prescience by the total fucking dementedness that we’re witnessing now. It’s tough to try to go back to  Flarf to respond, because our current condition has rendered  Flarf quaint, though some may say it was quaint before. My hope is that, with the forthcoming release of the long-awaited Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books), readers will at least laugh and feel reprieved.

G C-H: Social Realism, conscience and content, the literal not the literary, seem to be “in” with a vengeance. I once dated a transexual so lovely she was undetectable. Together we met Peter Tork. A consummate shoplifter, she painted her apartment black by splashing paint out of open gallon cans. Carried a sword cane, never went out before midnight. Drew painfully accurate renderings of hand guns in mechanical pencil, decorating her lair with  snapshots of executed female anarchists and horror movie posters to which she had added her own name.

I met her in the graveyard at St. Marks Church during one of her stints outside psychiatric institutions. I later asked if surgery had helped. Insouciant, she replied, “Well, if I only have $5.00, I can buy a book or a sandwich. Either way, I lose.”

SM: Most loveliness is undetectable. Maureen Thorson wrote a detectably lovely chapbook called the Woman, the Mirror, the Eye (2015), after she was diagnosed with AZOOR, acute zonal occult outer retinopathy. AZOOR’s most salient characteristic is that it can’t be seen/detected; the sufferer’s retina appears normal. The condition can only be inferred. Her chapbook is a beautiful mediation on seeing:

The blind poet is a romantic notion — we ascribe a clairvoyance, literally a kind of ‘clear seeing’ — to Homer and Milton. But the only insight I’ve received from my eye problems is into how unclearly we see everything, even ourselves, and how fitful are our illusions of control […] All hail the vanishing point.

Things are always disappearing — objects, but also ideas and ways of being. Remember when a phone stayed in one place? Unless you were breaking up with someone, or waiting for news of a birth or death, your connection (pun intended) was tenuous. That changed after June 29, 2007 — the rollout of the first iPhone. Everyone’s attention span, which was pretty attenuated to begin with, disappeared. Or became fragmented.

I noticed this with my own work: I used to collect ideas for  two or three months, and then write. Now, I wonder what happened to the things I was thinking about two weeks ago. There are small stacks of books next to my bed and my reading chair, and when I look at the books on the bottoms of those piles, it’s like a trip down memory lane: Oh, that’s what I was thinking about. So, nostalgia is different, too.

Social realism: I grew up in a neighborhood on the  South  Side of Chicago called Back of the Yards, named for its proximity to the Union Stockyards. Our house was four blocks away from the stockyards’ 47th Street entrance. Yes, the same stockyards of  The Jungle. The hideousness that Upton Sinclair described in that book  prompted food inspection reforms. For instance, did you know that our FDA of today allows “only” 136 insect fragments and 4 rodent hairs in a jar of peanut butter? Ever wonder what those dark specks in your cornmeal are? That’s not rat hair. Worried there’s not enough protein in beer? No worries. Imagine what people were eating before.

Anyone for cold cuts? Hopefully your friend’s $5 went toward a book.

Kate Beckinsale has her fat ass days, and thatʼs why I called my compassionate conservative girlfriend a lard ass and tied her to the treadmill. Sheʼs still there. Go ahead – bang her.

(Annoying Diabetic Bitch)

G C-H: Wherever do you get your inspiration? PTSD? Accelerants? Goat’s meat chili with peyote buttons? You say you can’t sleep because your thinking cap’s always on. Anagrams = Ars Magna. Does this guck gush straight from your Orphic maw? Do you edit? Sample? Steal? The poet Brandon Brown maintains he only truly enters the Rapture when revising.

SM: I sample, steal and edit A LOT. Allen Ginsberg was my teacher and friend, but we always mock-fought over “First thought, best thought.” I disagreed. He was a deft  present-moment Buddhist improviser and I’m an afflicted backward-looking Catholic (despite having taken refuge vows in 2010). So, yes, there is a rapture to enter via revising. But Brandon, whose work I really like, will no doubt agree with me when I say that remaining at ease with one’s preoccupations requires a constant friendship with the  Odradek-of-one’s-own-being. Revising is good, but I like being permeable at the beginning. Inspiration is everywhere. Admittedly, it’s a gamble with sanity, especially if you ride the subway every day. The negotiation requires discernment. I’m still learning that.

G C-H: C’mon, shoot the geek. Paintball gun a picture of the ob-literate poetry scene.

SM: Pretty much my entire focus right now, at least with regard to poetry — specifically reading it — is work from outside the US, particularly in translation. I’ve reviewed books in translation for  The Paris Review, American Poetry Review,  The Brooklyn Rail. The work I’ve found is spectacular: epiphanic, revelatory. Eunice Odio, Mircea Eliade, Phillip Meersman, Anise Koltz. (Meersman writes in four languages, including Morse Code.)

My current project, a collection of poems called Even Living Makes Me Die, responds to these works that I’ve been reading. The idea came about when I discovered the work of the late Costa Rican-born poet Eunice Odio. I wrote an article on Odio and her book, The Fire’s Journey, for American Poetry Review.

As I did research for that piece, I became frustrated by the dearth of available information. I emailed one of her translators, Keith Ekiss, and asked: “These little bits of her life create a very ‘glamorous and doomed’ image of her — the woman visionary, dying alone — but is that true?”

I was hoping not, because that myth of the doomed woman poet is just so absolutely played out. He replied that not a lot is known about Odio’s life. Despite an exhaustive search, I came up with only two anthologies containing a few poems, and a bio-bibliographical source book on Spanish-American women. Those three publications introduced me to a group of 19th- and early 20th-century women writers, from throughout the Americas, whose work I’d never read before. They were modern, visionary, sexually frank. As I read their work I began to write “to” them. I researched each as fully as possible. The more I wrote, and read, the more I began to wonder about other “under-known” female poets of the Americas, and this became my goal for Even Living … to learn about their lives and write “to” them.

The title of the collection itself comes from a line by the fabulous 19th-century poet Delmira Agustini: “Already living and dreaming makes me die.” Sometimes their life information was easy to attain, as in the case of the Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart, who died in 1986. Smart published only one book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, in 1945. It went out of print soon after it was first published, was then brought back into publication in 1966 and 1992. The book, which she called a “prose poem novel” (and which is quite ahead of its time as a hybrid text), chronicles her affair with a British poet named George Barker.

Almost nothing was known of Smart in this country until her son, Christopher, published a biography, The Arms of the Infinite: Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, released in the US in 2010 (I reviewed it for Rain Taxi). I need to do more research on, for example, Martha Wadsworth Brewster (1710 – c. 1757,  the first US-born woman to publish under her own name); Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812 –1848, American Transcendentalist published in The Dial ); Sarah Helen Power Whitman (1803 –1878, Transcendentalist and, very briefly, Edgar Allen Poe’s fiancée); and Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

G C-H: In the wins, I “heart” this Godot by Sophia le Fraga.

SM: I <3 it 2! Srsly. Not being sarcastic.

The post She Makes the Dirty Work Look Like a Degas appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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