On September 13 for two years running members of a New York writers’ collective have lined up along the Brooklyn Bridge and recited erotic poetry to passersby. “Once you get past the first two poets you get used to it,” says Sharon Mesmer, a former Chicagoan and member of the collective. “Most people are pretty open to it. Nobody throws anything.”
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“It’s a gentle kind of terrorism,” says Mesmer. “The main point is that we’re not just a bunch of idiots. We’re really good writers, and we’re not finding a forum for that.” So they’ve staged protests in front of the offices of the New Yorker and a public seance where they attempted to channel the spirits of famous dead writers.
While she was a student at Columbia College in the 80s Mesmer, along with Deborah Pintonelli and Carl Watson, started a couple of poetry zines, the erratic B City and Letter eX, now in its tenth year. Increasingly dissatisfied with the Chicago literary scene, Mesmer and Watson left for New York in 1988, and Pintonelli followed a year later. “There was no interest in the literary scene outside of the writers,” Mesmer says. “We loved Chicago, and we were writing about Chicago. But Chicago wasn’t interested. It was a lot less happening than it seems now.”
