by Sharon Mesmer
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by P.J. Gallo

Once a Punk

My introduction to the work of Sharon Mesmer was a YouTube video in which she reads four invariably obscene poems, titled “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” “Ass Vagina,” “Squid Versus Assclown,” and “You Fucked Jimmy” at the Bowery Poetry Club for the 2006 Flarf Poetry Festival. I must admit I came to her newest collection, The Virgin Formica, with a sizable set of preconceptions.

While Mesmer still manages to disgust, she does so in doses bearable and often comical. These largely voice-driven poems are not groundbreaking—think Kathy Acker meets Eileen Myles—but they keep alive a vital, post-punk, feminine, American mode of speech. The book is not without moments of utter solipsism and gratuitous sexual explicitness—her poem “I’m Not Sorry,” for instance, describes the smell of male genitalia, “and that area between the dick and the balls / smells like that plastic stuff they sell way west on Canal Street”—but Mesmer’s voice plainly offers a raw and often refreshing sense of uncompromised subversion along with moments of sweet nostalgia.

Mesmer couldn’t have picked a better opening poem than “Canticle.” Not only is it one of the best-executed examples of her varied colloquial voice, but it prefigures the rest of the book. Early in the poem, Mesmer proposes a kind of manifesto for her work when she writes, “but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’.” Besides the obvious irony of this line being a part of a poem, we know what she means. “Rockin’” is an appropriate euphemism for Mesmer’s overtly “anti-intellectual” persona. Parts of these poems cannot be examined in the context of academic criticism (in which they would be too easily written off) because they specifically attempt to defy contemporary convention. But Mesmer seems conscious of the problems with this defiance and, in a later poem, her speaker adopts the name “Auntie Intellectual”—a handle that at once embraces and denies her own intellectual tendencies. Also, she is quick to leap from slangy crudeness into a more recognizable poetic mode. For instance, later in “Canticle,” she describes “rockin’”:

Oh Lucifer, light-bringer,
singer of our hymns to failure,
cut us loose from our tribal pieties,
our forebodings at what this new age means,
for we shall be known by new names.

These lines give the dual sense of silly, melodramatic irony and a sincere pleading for the detachment that only a more visceral art can provide, and their complexity affords a certain knowing smile in any reader who has reminisced about the once intoxicating effects of “rockin’.”

Irony is Mesmer’s weapon of choice, but she uses it with sporadic quality. In her flawed “Blue-Collar Typeface” for instance, she describes a series of people who inaccurately think or wish they are blue-collar. In the finale of the poem, she defends real blue-collar people against these poseurs:

I know lots of useless,
imperfectly complicated
blue-collar people.
And their line breaks
kick your line breaks’s
ass.

She is of course being ironic. Nevertheless, these lines immediately reestablish a duality between two classes of people, undermining the poem’s earlier and quite ingenious breaking down of this duality. The idea that blue-collar poets are in some way separate from poets of other-colored-collars, and that these poets somehow need defense against what can only be thought of as some ethereal intellectualist or academic force is philosophically backward. At one point she writes with sincerity, “Blue-collar people often don’t care about / academic poetry, / the breaking of the line,” and in one stroke belittles both blue-collar poets and the conventions of what she considers an academic poetry. This poem is the most obvious example of moral carelessness in the guise of self-righteousness throughout the book, but every dozen or so pages, her work requires a moment of pause, not in contemplation, but in dismissal.

It must be mentioned that the second section of Mesmer’s book is devoted to a poem/comic collaboration with David Borchart called “Madame Bowery.” Surprisingly, the language itself stands out from underneath the shadow cast by the overwhelming novelty inherent in the inclusion of a comic in a book of poetry. In a common and overtly post-modern way, the poem and the art successfully annex some of the themes of Madame Bovary, namely helplessness (at one point the character glides along a set of railroad tracks) and the potential of language (“but that was the golden age, before men figured things out and everything started sounding like Tonto said it”), but the comic’s strength lies in the heroine’s various analyses of self and society. At one point, this strangely drawn three-eyed female speaker provides another broad manifesto for Mesmer’s work saying, “I want to discuss continuity now, imposing chaos on order.” It is in these moments Mesmer realizes the great philosophical monsters hiding behind her post-punk, anti-intellectual aesthetic.

Because Mesmer’s poems are often self-interested, many of the strongest moments in her new book refer specifically to herself and her own voice. A few of the book’s best are “Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder,” “Retarded Aerosmith World,” and “Lonely Tylenol.” In “Stupid University Job,” she writes of her tragic flaw, “Mine is like that of the naked man / who holds up a sign that says I’m ‘naked.’” Of all her mini-manifestoes and moments of self-consciousness, this is her most accurate. The Virgin Formica is antipathetic and subversive, but Mesmer makes no bones about reminding us.

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