The Tattooed Poets Project: Alex Dryden

Today's tattooed poet, Alex Dryden, shared his body art with us, displaying what to many poets, and fans of poetry, is a universal image:

That is, of course, a red wheelbarrow, a common item made famous by William Carlos Williams' iconic poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends 
upon 


a red wheel 
barrow 


glazed with rain 
water 


beside the white 
chickens. 

~ ~ ~

Alex elaborates:

"When we were kids, my mother made my brother and me memorize and recite poems. Though we didn't talk about it until we were adults, we were both stricken by the authority and presence of 'The Red Wheelbarrow.' 

For years we had thought about getting tattoos that worked together as a set but had never found a suitable subject. In 2010, he went back to school as English major while I was entering the first year of my MFA in creative writing. While visiting over the winter break and planning our mother's 60th birthday party, talk came around to the poems we memorized a kids and renewed our efforts to find a good set of tattoos. 'The Red Wheelbarrow,' with two perfect, ready made images, solved our dilemma. That night we drew up a pair of white chickens for him and a red wheelbarrow for me and the next day had them done. 

Because Williams made use of the rhythm and diction of the American vernacular, we choose a local tattoo parlor that seemed analogous. The website for Hell Bomb Tattoo, in Wichita, KS, displayed an index of, what we imagined to be, classic Mid-Western tattoo art." 

I asked Alex if he could send along his brother’s tattoo, as well, and he happily obliged:

And a shot of them together:

As for verse, Alex shared this poem:

Corpus 

—she was the kind of girl
you suspected

had something really sweet
written in

the braille of her
bikini line.

Something about flowers or
the uselessness

of melancholy and how good
things happen

to those who wait politely and say please. So,
I checked.

“Thanks,” it said. It was damp and difficult
to read.

 “I haven’t been fucked like that since I was an
alter boy.

Thanks.”  It was the second “thanks” that really
threw me.

When she woke, she smiled politely
I made

coffee politely and made my face look
sensible and clean.

I haven’t checked since. I don’t even read her e-
mail anymore.

Once, I held the door open for her mother, she said
thank you

and I stammered “sorry” pretty loud. It was really the second “thanks”
that threw me.

~ ~ ~

Alex Dryden is a MFA candidate in Poetry at The New School. His work was most recently published on The Best American Poetry blog.

Thanks to Alex for this contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Michael Torres

Our second tattooed poet of the day is Michael Torres.

Michael sent in photos of two tattoos, including this one:

Michael informs us that the set of words inscribed on his flesh

 "...is a poem called Oh Yes by Charles Bukowski. I got it done at Por Vida Tattoo in Upland, California. I got it done because at that time in my life poetry was becoming more of a hobby to me and I was beginning to see my world changing in front of me. Friends that got married and had kids right after high school were finding out that things weren't going exactly as they had planned. The poem represents the realization that there is much I have to do in life before I worry about settling down simply because I think I have to."

 He also sent us this piece:

Michael explains:

"The second tattoo in the same arm is of the poetry muse, Erato. I basically liked the image I googled. The original artist is Sir Edward John Poynter and it was done in 1870.

I had the tattoo done in Montclair, Ca at Skills for Thrills tattoo shop. Me being a poet wanted to have the muse with me all the time. Even though we believe we should be lucky to have her whisper those golden lines into our ears I thought, why not have her around all the time. I am not going to stop writing any time soon and I don't take for granted all I have been given because of writing so this was for her, the muse. Both tattoos were done on my lower left arm."

Michael sent us this poem, as well:

The Coltrane 

I am a
top-hat-black-tie-poetry-party ditcher
off wandering the
downtown streets of my mind with a
kool-aid pitcher in my hand, rice crispy treats in my backpack and a beach ball
somewhere
over everyone
like the dot to the letter i. I

am looking
for myself. And

rumor has it I was last seen standing at the edge of a woman’s heart facing tomorrow, screaming
I’LL DO IT. I’LL JUMP      before turning around
to see that she
was already long gone, leaving only a note that read 
“please, just clean up the mess." I guess I would then
 head in the direction of the park because
poetry is nature
and sheets of paper
walk the same way leaves do when the wind calls
and pens click December raindrops.
Aha,

my imagination has left me trails of sheet music
so I walk to the jazz notes waiting
for the next Coltrane to take me
home.

There! In the park I see
me, running towards the lake.

Piano keys ripple across the water like a tossed pebble
fucking up the order of time cuz now when I look at my reflection,       I see me
but he
is
a little boy
trying to dance
to the ranchera music moving across the back porch
at a neighbor's party he, I mean I, snuck into, all
the adults there speaking      Spanish,
cigarette tongues laughing ash onto my, I mean his,
head.

He is we, only 7, and I at 25
have forgotten what I was suppose to find
in the first place. He is happy and

I wanna be
me again.

I jump in-to

sky
           blue,

 break      water      skin,

 breathe out,
           breathe in.

~ ~ ~

Michael Torres was born and raised in Pomona, California. He was exposed to poetry at an early age, learning the works of William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson to name a few. He has been published in Beatlick News, The Chiron Review, Left Coast Review, and Solo Press. His first chapbook of poetry, The Beautiful Distraction was published by Finishing Line Press. Michael is currently in school pursuing a degree in creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He lives in Pomona, Ca.

Thanks to Michael for sharing his poetry and tattoos with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. 


The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Fred Schmalz

Today's tattooed poet, Fred Schmalz, resides in Germany, a first for the Tattooed Poets Project.

As you can see, he is also heavily-tattooed and, lucky for us, he sent us a lot of photos, so let's not waste any more time and take a look at his ink.

I'll let Fred explain:

"...a right arm upper half-sleeve related to a poem of mine ('I am here to tell you where I slept last night') which originally appeared in 6x6 - containing a lily with a naked lady petal, a sleeping figure, and a text excerpt from the poem.

This is intersected by half of a two-arm text strip (down the backs of both upper arms) with the first line of Charles Olson's The Kingfishers - What does not change / is the will to change. (the / which appears in the poem sits on the back of my neck).   

My right arm has the Harry Smith foot-of-the-Buddah three fish image which adorns all the later Allen Ginsberg collections,

and several staghorn sumac branches with fruit.

All except the three fish were inked by Stephanie Tamez at Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn."

Stephanie Tamez is an amazing artist, and she is especially renown for her "type" tattoos. I know that I, if I was getting a tattoo with a lot of words, would put Stephanie at the top of my wish list.By way of bio:

The following poem from Fred appeared originally in 6x6 issue 14 from Ugly Duckling Presse.

WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT

A woman who shared
half my last name
gave me the bed below our bed.
Ask me to explain.
Etude. A green field.
Mat inflated with lung air.
Smoke screen for privacy. Privy.
A thin door and three thin walls.

The bed hidden below our bed is our last bed.
Count back and beds become impossible
retrievals:
I may have slept
one summer in an Ohio hotel, my Saturdays
a fuck-fit carnage, dried palms
woven into the holy cross
you Polish Catholic

you denial of love.
Bed deemed worthy of our backs.
Bed along with the rest of our loneliness.
Bed born of necessary grammar.
Bed requested by a shirtless man.
Robbed in this bed.

My struggle is the struggle of men
and their otherness,
men without shame, men who are only
their small rooms.
Touch a hole in me and I seep water,
palms saffron and swollen–
my arms are ashen
and tremble like ivy.

I told myself
this would only marginally be
about fucking, that so many
beds are entered and left alone,
that my love is a maker and I am a man
who leaves and returns to a bed
as he finds it, who sleeps as continuance,
who clothes in pillowcases
an ongoing occasion: our bodies’
natural destination.

Patient once. Stained. I shove
lover. Shovel over. It all ruptures,

the groan where we come to rest,
one leg’s shudder before passing out.
Trap door clap.
Conception’s sudden pinch.
Meet mother.
Meet father.
It wasn’t supposed to
happen this way, but ten years earlier,
when the notion held a romance,

you flew and I shattered a little
Blue vial in the sink.
What will my body do?
My replaceable body…
Tornado, be quick and pass.
We have spoken of the surfaces of things
but not their natural environment.
Morning’s minor reflections pass
without elucidation. We maze

the new route home, resting as relatives.
Red hair, red socks, for miles
you draft the come-back of good news,
clean living, moon creeping into a skylight.
Who washes over me?
Your hip joints

loosen like rain clouds over mountains.
That pair of lost slippers–the furry pink ones
I see under the door or peeking
through laundry at me.
I guessed the light, which was
our old apartment two in the morning
after a heavy snow.
I suffer no physical realignment
and thus lack chemicals to warn me of fatherhood.
No hemorrhaging in the spoils of joints.
But I find that I am unusually hungry.

I could have gone on loving
without my shirt, could have
asked that your hand warm
my skin, heat radiation, radiance.
You stood in the kitchen and told me you love me
more today, that it grows in you–


pause of a woman
lost between synapses–
idea derailed on the stretch to dinner.
The coarse fabric you knit drops stitches.

The bed borrowed from the landlord
is almost too small for one,
or too narrow, the length
sufficing since neither of us is long.
Beds turn on us.
We sicken of comfort.
Homebound, practicing loneliness,
six hands surround me. They pin me
in my fever. They hold the sheet.
Modesty, honestly.

The room we’re offered is a fuckless marble hull.
The fireplace only works
if I break up the furniture.
The television works.
The refrigerator does not work.
The stove works.
The blankets work.
The rug underfoot doubles as a bed–

already it has been rolled up.
We are alive with our calcium deposits.
Our chipped plates
returned to the top cupboard
breathe out a scent
I associate with you, the meal
fed me from that part-life
where we camped in the front room
of a condemned house,
lauding our insomnia, how morning
never seemed so remote. But here

rules loosen: run in snow and melt our feet.
Wake in a semi-truck state
full of chocolate milk and headlamp,
full of typhus. Mingle
among loves and recall a swallow
asleep on what I took to be a bed,
the broken hour set like a table
tracing the road’s curve.
Ground beneath us heaves east,

incandescent, the motions my hands make
grotesque, sanctimonious. Your
desire to feed me.
I eat a pear,
take a drink of water.

The sun outweighs us. It has no recollection,
blue in a tall shank of light.
This greets me
upon entering the house.
And the vinegar waft of the staircase.
Carpet pile flattened by feet
headed to bed ten thousand times. Or twenty thousand
feet knocking off at once:

here are my feet, ashen relics.
Tied to each arch is a bent branch,
the wood still warm. I walk with them
to the back door.
Then a dial turns and tiny notches align
with the moon. Resistance
attaches to every object in the house.
Our curtains haven’t kept the ocean out.
We are the peninsula’s only hum.

~ ~ ~

Fred Schmalz's first collection, Some Animals, is forthcoming in 2014 from Jackleg Press. His work has appeared in A Public Space, 1111, Zoland Poetry, LUNGFULL!, Spinning Jenny, Conduit, jubilat, Handsome, The Blue Letter, We are so happy to know something and The Bedazzler from Wave Books. His poems were included in La Familia Americana, a bilingual anthology of new American poets published in Spain by Cosmopoetica in 2010. An exhibition of contemporary German illustrators responding to his poems will be staged at Rotopol Press in 2012. He is founding editor of swerve magazine. He lives in Kassel, Germany.

Thanks to Fred for sharing his awesome tattoos and poetry with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Erica Mena

Among this year's Tattooed Poets' submissions, this is one of my favorite photos:

Photograph by Julie Chen

This was submitted by the poet Erica Mena, whose tattoo was inspired by the great Pablo Neruda.

Erica gives us the detail behind these wonderful tattoos:

 "This is my most intimate tattoo, my Neruda tattoo: 'Love is so short, forgetting is so long.' It's a full line (punctuation included) from Poem XX of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in translation by W.S. Merwin. The fish in concentric circles is the symbol printed on all of Neruda's books from mid-way through his career, and was drawn from the bronze statue at his most famous house in Isla Negra. The other two images were drawn by the tattoo artist, in response to two other lines from the same poem: 'The same night whitening the same trees. / We of that time are no longer the same.' and 'Write, for example: the night is shattered / and stars shiver blue in the distance.' The design and work were done by Ram at Fat Ram's Pumpkin Tattoo in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

I read Merwin's translation of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems when I was fifteen, and had that conversion experience, the moment when you realize this is what you want your life to be about. Not the sentiment, but the poetry. These poems, and this line in particular, convinced me that poetry can move between languages, times and places, freely and with no loss, when put into the right hands. When getting the tattoo, I considered getting the Spanish line: 'El amor es tan corto, el olvido es tan largo,' but chose the English because that was how I first encountered it. Out of all my tattoos it also hurt the most to get, fittingly I suppose--there was a moment where Ram was outlining the circles where it felt like my entire leg was on fire. Totally worth it."

I would add that I concur with Erica completely and offer up, as proof, my post over on BillyBlog in April 2008 here. I was running down my favorite poems for National Poetry Month and #28 was any of the poems in the book, and it just so happens I pointed to Poem XX as one shining example. The original edition translated by Merwin and illustrated by Jan Thompson is a must-have in anyone's library. But, I digress.

Erica offered us two poems, one of her own and one she translated. We'll share both:

(no subject) (spam poem #3)

good evening websit
Stop being a nervous wreck

I will like you to accept this token
So hard you can break an egg

hoping you will understand my point
this is not a myth

Every person dreams about meeting someone

~ ~ ~ 

Deus ex Machina

Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has come and it is winter. The trident is cornered, the mountains covered with a skin of ash. Lord, behold light’s song here, your due, in the stillness of the sea and the pure discretion of the endless night. Behold your son, Fire, burning the whole surface with his touch and seducing the water with his gilded tongue. Look here, Lord, his stepsister Dawn, liquid hierophant, maker of shape. In their terrible language they tell of celebrations, obedience, sin. This time, Lord, throw to us the seed and the male of the healthier species. Don’t announce him by chance, because he will become a cry and rise up with the warm murmur of pavement, and once again be lost to us, punished, denied. Let none but you, oh Lord, wield the butcher’s knife this time; mature a chord when life ceases and rain unexpectedly cleanses the lovers’ yoked hips. Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has inevitably come. Cast them without fear from your wide hand, because luck’s twelve sides won’t wait, and the sky points towards multitudes and disaster. Throw them, Lord, your turn has come and it is burning summer.

Translation of “Deus ex machina.” From La invención del día [The Invention of the Day]. © José Mármol. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by Erica Mena. All rights reserved.
Published in Words Without Borders, November, 2011


Erica Mena is a poet, translator and print designer, not necessarily in that order. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Vanitas, The Dos Passos Review, Pressed Wafer, Arrowsmith Press, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Asymptote, Two Lines and others. She is the coordinator and co-host of Reading the World Podcast, a monthly conversation about literary translation. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.

Thanks to Erica for contributing this wonderful entry of the tattooed Poets project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Chris Siteman

Today's chapter of the Tattooed Poet's Project features the work of Chris Siteman.

Chris sent in this poem featuring these literature-based tattoos :

Chris explains:

"The pieces on my chest were my first two tattoos. I got them when I was twenty, and was working as a doorman at The Rathskeller, Boston’s now defunct rock bar better known as The Rat. The pieces were originally inked by Jason Sexton (Patience) and another tattoo artist (LABOR) whose name I do not recall, but who was then best known around the scene for the fact that he taught himself to tattoo by inking his own arm in a rendering of robotics from shoulder to fingertips. The work on the tattoos was performed before the legalization of tattooing in Massachusetts, and so the work on the word 'LABOR' was performed across the street from Fenway Park in an acquaintance’s apartment, and the work on the word 'Patience' was performed in the apartment I then rented with another doorman and a bartender who both also worked at The Rat.

The tattoo was inspired by something my older brother, William O’Keefe (the painter better known as W.O’K.), said to me often throughout my upbringing. He would repeat the phrase, 'learn to labor and to wait' at various moments during my childhood when I experienced some kind of setback or difficulty. As I entered my early teens it came to my knowledge that the line was from the last stanza of a poem, titled 'A Psalm of Life, or What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist,' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As I came to find out, our cousin (Richard Chetwynd, also a professor and a writer of poems) shared the poem with my brother years before. Some time in the year or so before the choice to get the words inked on my chest, a period of my life that seemed to be particularly lacking in answers of any kind, I came to the realization my brother had been whispering the 'answer' in my ear since I was very young."

The last stanza of Longfellow's poem proclaims:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.
          ~H.W. Longfellow (1838)

Chris offers us the following poem, "The Father of All Lies," which was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and then subsequently published in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011:

The Father of All Lies

1.
the murder

My father ghosts onto the trail, moon-lit sand—

                                                                         Darkness the distance he hears them yell,
but he glides, burns in moon fire, & her old woman eyes open wide, shrink at the same time;
her tracheal cartilage fractures the air.

After he drinks so he cannot feel her last breath against his cheek, his grip
on her boney neck, can’t hear her gurgle.

Taut as strings on a lyre, he sees our mother’s silhouette in green
alarmclock light. Arm’s distance, she gasps—

She walks where the moon woman died. He’s a young man, her throat under his hand.


2.
complicity

I remember a black trunk at the foot of my parents’ bed, five stacks of letters tied with red
string, black & white photographs scattered in the removable drawer
where a short sword, flat across the toes of his boots, shone.

How the glint of steel caught my eye—

Running a finger along the edge, I sensed that blade deep in my marrow.
I heard steps on the stairs, but burned with the image of a young man standing like a cross,
smiling, head dangling from each hair-clenched fist—

Their two faces looked asleep forever.


3.
childhood

A seven-year-old I saw a hero in my father, though I didn’t know his name, & my father bound
his life to lies, a story-line, ideas how that hero’s name should sound—

Home, a mother who didn’t send him to a workfarm at eight, a life where he escaped sentencing,
where he never hung on the corner of Somerville Ave. in Winter Hill, never—

He attended Saint Mary’s for boys run by Jesuits & nuns who measured Christ’s love
with yardstick & ruler edges, & Father Mike’s marred knuckles
dealt penance enough.


4.
his whole life

At dances, my father kissed girls in plaid skirts until the Holy Ghost gave way to canned beer
fistfights with public school boys from Cambridge.

His father lay dying as they held hands in a disinfected hospital room.

He played guard for his high school’s basketball team, before that book binder’s job
to support his mother, before friends died for God & Country,

rather than having skulls caved in with a sixty-five pound barbell in the yard mid-day
over smokes, a fuck, skin color, a look—


5.
elegy for a fallen comrade

He died there, same as we all did. His dying just showed more, killed him faster.
Sure as I speak now, saying this: in a field of fear & steel, fists clenched in mud,
writhing through stench, through mortar-churned graves, more bullets than bees
in spring, poppies everywhere, larks sang for sunset—

His body lies under grass, while brambles of razor-wire, forgotten toe poppers & I persist,
unholy love poems to those who died for reasons of which they spoke
no knowledge.


6.
inertia

A cold lung of air strikes me how close one never gets to a man whose shadow stands that tall;
there’s a black & white photograph from which my father grimaces.

When I was a child at the kitchen table we laughed together over funnies,
his steel bones softened & he turned his face away from his stone face—
Sometimes I see his crook-tooth smile, still hear him laugh,

                                                                                               but then a memory— Him breaking
a boy’s knee with a bat in front of our house; the boy crawls, blubbers; father whispers
before each blow: Time to pay the piper, kid. Time to pay.


7.
the long stare

My father told lies to soften his stare, to frighten me less & help me remember—
A black trunk of war memorabilia & other lies I wanted to be true.

He never told the shape of his loneliness:

Hatcheting heads from geese under January’s granite skies, hanging their little corpses on hooks
to bleed out, tenderness named the ache in the old farmer’s bones on the bitterest of days,

and the streets of Winter Hill before he killed.

~ ~ ~

Born in Boston, Chris Siteman grew up in a blue collar, predominantly Irish-Catholic, family. He’s traveled widely in the US and Europe, and worked extensively in the trades. In 2007 Chris received his MFA from Emerson College. Since August of 2010 he’s been pursuing his JD at Suffolk Law. He has taught in Boston University’s undergraduate writing program, Lesley University’s Humanities Department, and currently teaches in Suffolk University’s English Department. While the poem here was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and subsequently in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011, his work has otherwise most recently appeared in Anomalous, The Fiddleback, Borderline and Poetry Quarterly.

Thanks to Chris for his contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Brian's Literary Chest Tattoo

The weather here in New York has been turning autumnal and visible tattoos have been disappearing from the streets, but fear not, Readers, we still have material to get us through the end of the year, thanks to a backlog of photos from the summer!

Case in  point is this tattoo from Brian:

I met Brian at a drugstore in Bay Ridge, back in the beginning of August. He told me he had just started working as an apprentice at A-List Industry Tattoos, a few blocks away.

At the time, Brian had seven tattoos, including this chest piece, which is comprised of two parts.

The top section reads "Incomplete - Imperfect" and is an allusion to lines from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club:

"May I never be complete.  May I never be content.  May I never be perfect.  Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete."

Brian credited this piece to Paul Ilardi, the owner at Monster Tattoos on Staten Island.

The bottom section of the tattoo features a banner that reads "Death steals everything but out stories."

Brian explained that he took this to mean that "what outlives us is the memories we have, the stories we have".

It's actually the final line in a short poem by Jim Harrison:

Larson's Holstein Bull

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories..

Brian credited this part of the tattoo to Cesar at Bullseye Tattoos, also on Staten Island.

Thanks to Brian for sharing his ink with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday, with the exception of  "Larson's Holstein Bull" by Jim Harrison from In Search of Small Gods. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Rilke On the Flesh

It's February 1, which means we are only two months away from the start of a new edition of The Tattooed Poets Project, and I have begun assembling the first posts for this annual extravaganza.

What better way to acknowledge this looming event, but to post a poetic tattoo?

The following piece is one that I spotted at the end of last summer on Penn Plaza. Belonging to a young lady named Rosa, it has been one of my few remaining 2010 leftovers:

What I noticed first was not that this was a line of verse, but that it was placed on the body in an unusual way. Most lines of poetry, when manifested on flesh, are on the arms and wrist, or the lower legs and occasionally a back. This tattoo runs from the front of to her back, vertically climbing and descending from her shoulder.

The line is in German, and represents a piece from Rainier Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich

Or, in context:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
Hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

 Those are the opening lines of the first elegy, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Rosa didn't give me much insight as to why she had the line tattooed, but it is quite a powerful statement.

When I asked her who the artists was, she replied only that it was someone in Brooklyn that went under the name "The Milk Maid". This sounded familiar at the time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Of course, I came to be reminded that The Milk Maid is the moniker of Joy Rumore, at Twelve 28 Tattoo, quite a wonderful artist, whose work has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

Thanks to Rosa for sharing this lovely line of verse with us here on Tattoosday!

Under One Small Star - Two Tattoos from Anna

I met Anna earlier this month in Penn Station. I felt compelled to stop her when she walked by and I caught a glimpse of this amazing tattoo:

I love seeing ink that is new and original, and I had never seen a line of anything run up the length of a leg like this.

Anna explained that this was a line of poetry that reads "My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second" that she heard on a trip to Cambodia. Her group leader, Jan, had shared the poem, "Under One Small Star" by Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, and the verse meant a lot to her during her trip there. This one specific line really resounded with her, so she first "paid a Khmer translation site and then had a friend [she] made in Cambodia, Ponheary, check the translation just to make sure it was correct".

I love the international flavor of this tattoo - a poem originally in Polish, translated to English, then re-translated to Khmer, transcribed in flesh in America!

The line runs from top to bottom and was inked by Jason at Powerhouse Tattoo Company in Montclair, New Jersey.

The poem is reprinted in its entirety at the end of this post.

Since it is Tat-Tuesday, let's look at a second tattoo from Anna, this one on the back side of her right arm:

This is Joan of Arc, "a hero of mine," says Anna, who admires her from the feminist perspective and finds her an "unbelievably inspirational" historical figure.

This piece was tattooed by the wonderful Stephanie Tamez at New York Adorned. Stephanie's work has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

Thanks again to Anna for sharing these two of her seven tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep
today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread
from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

--Wislawa Szymborska