Craft: Sotère Torregian

A legend says that one night in or around 1965 Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett invented a collaboration, Sotère Torregian: he is a multiracial, Newark-born, Négritude Surrealist New York School poet.

But Sotère Torregian was not a legend made up by Ted Berrigan after ingesting a sampler’s platter of pills and Pepsi. Sotère Torregian (b. 1941) is a real poet, though probably obscure.

Torregian, around 2013, “smelling the beach without the beach”

Torregian’s native languages were Greek and Arabic, then Italian. He learned English only when he went to school. Like Ireland, New Jersey is a small place, but produced a comparatively high number of writers (e.g. Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, William Carlos Williams, Lynda Hull, Philip Roth, John McPhee, Valerie Wilson Wesley, C.K. Williams).