Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Tattooed Poets Project: Emily Harrison

Today we have another tattooed poet from "across the Pond".

Emily Harrison sent us this lovely tattoo from the United Kingdom:


Emily explains:
"It was the first appointment of the day on my 18th birthday at Sinking The Ink in Swindon and I finally got to get the tattoo. I ignored friends and family warning me not to commit to such a lifelong commitment at such a 'young and impressionable age' and, being quite the goody-two-shoes for most of my life, went for it. My inspiration is Ted Hughes' collection of work, Crow (sometimes I can bend the truth slightly and give a nod if anyone asks Edgar Allen Poe) and I now have a perching taxidermy crow to match it."
By way of poetry, Emily has offered up this item for our enjoyment:

Instantly Your Biggest Fan

I want to hear you describe my look
as blood in the sugar bowl
my attitude as the paddling pool
blown onto the M4 causing a pile up
you don’t
love me
you should
when we go to the seaside
I wont even moan
when I drop my ice cream
and when you offer me yours
I wont accept
I’ll make your tongue ache
until its like you’ve been
sucking on fudge
you’ll have dreams
where you save me
from wreckages
burning freak accidents
the one you love
and the one who loves you
are never ever the same person
now fall in love with me
as if I were a French girl
on a postcard
~ ~ ~

I generally don't comment on the poems, but I like this one very much and am thankful Emily sent it our way.

Emily Harrison won the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2010 and is set to be published in the April edition of Popshot Magazine. Her poetry is scarlet, penetrating, funny and honest. Emily does beautiful, stark and memorable words. She has red hair, perpetual lipstick and high heels. She adds, "I find inspiration from the men in my life; some painfully thin, most aggressively passionate, all with strange hair cuts."

Thanks to Emily for her 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.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Tattooed Poets Project: Sammi Skolmoski

Whenever possible, I try and correspond our posts with corresponding dates. So, when Sammi Skolmoski sent this tattoo in, April 11 seemed appropriate:


Why this tattoo today? April 11, 2012 marks five years since the great Kurt Vonnegut passed away and, as Sammi explains:

" 'Goodbye, Blue Monday' is the alternate title of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. It is my favorite book - one in which Vonnegut’s masterful use of satire and science result in a climax where he, as author, enters the pages as master/manipulator supreme, to indefinitely release his indentured characters from narrative confinement. The 'meta' relationship between writer and character — that they answer to, and are, the same person — changed my attitude toward writing, and rid me of the dreadful seriousness I often assigned it.

And, I just adore sunflowers. The floral manifestation of a ruling cosmic entity! The perfect warrior to bid goodbye to any blue Monday’s to come."

Sammi credits this piece to Mario Desa at the Chicago Tattooing & Piercing Company.

Not only do we get this tattoo from Sammi, but she has also provided us with one of her poems:

ALCHEMIST’S LAMENT

He is monochromatose
transmuted by kaleidoscope
inherent in his daily dose
of bioluminescent dope.

A regulated water bath
that leavens into churning gas
facilitates the stoneward path
of drowning yellow jars of glass

the philosophic red and white
beheld as sacred, even nigh,
rears ancient alchemistic plight
of whole salve dangling near his thigh.

~~~

Sammi Skolmoski is a writer and multimedia artist living in Los Angeles who curates a quarterly lit zine called “Madness, Barely” and is a frequent contributor to San Diego Citybeat. She surrounds herself with mystics, gazes at the sky, and plays her records LOUDLY.

Thanks to Sammi for her 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.

Monday, April 9, 2012

The Tattooed Poets Project: Traci Brimhall

Today's tattooed poet is Traci Brimhall, who shares this single word with us:


Traci explains:
"I got my tattoo last April during the Little Grassy Literary Festival at Carbondale, IL. I was in Carbondale to do a reading from my first book, when I got the email that my second book had been accepted. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, something both wild and permanent, and there was a poet and tattoo artist, Ruth Awad, at the dinner table who offered to give me my first ink. I spent that night celebrating in Ruth's kitchen getting my first tattoo.
I chose the word Duende, a word the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca said represented "a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought." A guitar maestro had once explained it to him this way: 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' When people ask me to explain it, I usually say it's an art that asks you to do battle with what is darkest in you, and what comes out is already baptized by black sounds."
Here is the poem Traci selected for us to read:

Aubade with a Broken Neck

The first night you don’t come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents
between his gentle teeth a twitching
nightjar. In her panic, she sings
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear
the cries of her young, greedy with need,
expecting her return, but I don’t let her go
until I get into the house. I read
the auspices—the way she flutters against
the wallpaper’s moldy roses means
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing
at the starless window, her body a dart,
her body the arrow of longing, aimed,
as all desperate things are, to crash
not into the object of desire,
but into the darkness behind it.

~ ~

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems (W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral associate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

Thanks to Traci Brimhall for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here 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: Gary McDowell

Our next tattooed poet is Gary McDowell. Here's what Gary had to say about his ink:
"I remember thinking as a teenager that I’d never get a tattoo. It wasn’t because I didn’t like them. I did. It wasn’t because I was afraid of the pain. I wasn’t. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had no idea what I would ever want permanently etched into my skin. But as I grew older and my obsessions and faiths and vocations started to align, I reconsidered, and now I don’t ever want to stop.
Both of my tattoos come from an artist, Blaine, at Baby Blues Tattoos in Bradenton, FL. My wife’s family has a condo on Anna Maria Island, FL, and so we visit every summer. In the summer of 2006 I got my first tattoo (the kanji for “poet/poetry” on my right wrist).
 
The impetus for it was simple: I’m right-handed and a poet, and so the thought of having poetry on my wrist appealed greatly to me.
Blaine did such a good job that in the summer of 2008, I went back and got my left calf worked on.
At the time, my wife was pregnant with our first son, and we planned to name him Auden; though his name was not totally derived from the poet W.H. Auden—my wife found the name in a baby book and dug it before she even knew it was a famous poet’s surname—I wanted to do something to commemorate my Auden’s impending arrival, and so I decided on two of my favorite lines from Auden’s 'The Question': 'And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain.' It’s a gorgeous reminder that we must conquer our fears, take a stance against what haunts us."
Gary sent us the following poem which, in his words, "exemplifies my work best":


THIS SUMMER WITH FISCHL

                                                       Waukegan, IL, June-July 2009

I must repent for this summer I’ve spent beyond creatures,

for the mysteries I’ve seen in a world

that thinks there are none, a world where we’ve named things—

garage, fence, robin, poem—so that we can feel

something when we destroy them.

I must repent for the chlorophyll in the leaves,

the time I’ve spent in the pool, no raft,

just my convexed back keeping me afloat,

for the hours wasted hoping the clouds above me

would form into something recognizable, something real

and weighted, so that I could be touched by something

other than a man begging for change outside the library.

I must repent for the sunflower, its aching, arcing

reach for light, for staring at the woman next-door,

her meticulous morning routine: compact the trash

in the can with a snow shovel, add a full bag from the kitchen,

return the lid to the can, and weight it with a ham-tin filled

with pennies. I too wouldn’t have believed it.

Every time I turn my head to look out the window,

I see a harsh light through the blinds, striping everyone with shadows,

I see Bad Boy: a teenaged boy, a purse full of money,

a nude woman (his mother?) on her bed, her leg bent, arched

toward her mouth—is she hungry, dreaming, bored?

John Yau says it’s the tiger stripes of light and dark

splayed across the woman that make her an animal, but I’m glad

she’s uncaged. What it must feel like to be stitched together,

thefted-after like a bowl of apples and bananas in a Freudian dream?

In another painting, a woman crawls naked through a backyard,

huddles against a row of hedges. While I haven’t seen that,

I must repent for the squirrel that fell from the tree,

for my dog who wouldn’t let go of its neck.

The hours I spent looking at beach scenes: I repent.

The incest, the drinking, the affairs, the nudity: I repent.

The thinking beyond line, beyond shape: I repent.

I repent: the patio tomato plants, watercolors, prints,

maquettes of the neighbor’s new garage, king crab legs

for dinner, a nude sunbather on her belly, her back damp,

her boombox sweating Shakira, Marc Anthony, and then silence.

The eavesdropping, the baseball on the radio, sweet peas and carrots.

For the old man across the street, his bad hips, his garbage can

that I move to the curb, his cane, too short for his arms: I repent.

In many of the paintings, I imagine a dialogue between

two quarreling lovers—or is it a monologue, a palette of yellows and reds

through the kitchen window each morning, their cups of coffee

barely settled on the counter before they begin. I must repent

for the unneighborly innuendos, the pile of dog shit

on the driveway that someone will surely step in, unaware that they have

until later, much later. I must repent for repenting, for repeating

myself, but this summer of recycling bins and large paper bags full

of lawn clippings has named me differently, and Fischl, his naked

eyes, have given me a hard-on for all things domestic:

gossiping, love-making, dog-walking, putting myself ahead

of myself only to find myself lost in myself, lost because

nothing is what it seems here. I must repent for spending so much

time with the mysteries of texture, with a book that weighs more

than my son, with my neighbors as if my neighbors were paintings,

as if their lives were canvassed, colored, hung on my eyelids.

The streets, the beaches, the neighbors: all starkly lit scenes,

a robust sense of everything having been played and replayed,

rehearsed like Sleepwalker, that skinny boy in the porch light, cock in hand.

The lawn chairs empty, and we watch him like we want to help him,

like we can touch him ourselves and make him stop, but he won’t stop,

not until the lights go out or the sun rises or we fall asleep watching.

I must repent for not watching more closely the bagpipe-lined

streets, for the way the doves peck at the window when they’re angry

or confused or cold or hungry. Perhaps I haven’t been

completely beyond creatures. Perhaps my creatures, destroyed,

I thought, before I started here, are merely lost in the lines,

the colors, the textures of a painting I have yet to encounter.


--originally appeared in Indiana Review, Vol 32, No 1

~ ~ ~

Gary L. McDowell's first full-length collection of poems, American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry. He's also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005), and he's the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, The Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, and Quarterly West. He lives in Nashville, TN where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Belmont University.

Thanks to Gary for his contribution to this year's 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.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Celtic knot stuff

This was done quickly, that's probably with it's not very regular in shape. Oh well, even when I spent hours it's not much better :]
 
Celtic tattoo design

(Oh, and to the guy from hannalovinda.blogspot: I have no problem with you republishing some of my stuff, but at least keep the "This work by tattoos-and-doodles..." untouched.  Rebloging it does not make it a "work by hannalovinda". Thank you :p )

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kayla Sargeson

Often people winder where I find all of our tattooed poets. Many come to us via word-of-mouth and through social media. This year, I found an anthology of poets "under 25," and figured that would be a good resource. Today's post, along with a few others, originated from that volume.

Today's tattooed poet is Kayla Sargeson. She is sharing this whimsical tattoo, which is her ninth:



This is Kayla's tattoo of an alien head that proclaims “I like chicken.” The artist is Pete Larkin at Kyklops Tattoo in Pittsburgh, PA.

I'll let Kayla explain the rest:
For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been pursuing my MFA in Chicago, a city I’ve grown to hate. I feel like I don’t fit this city, or maybe it just doesn’t fit me. Regardless, I feel like an alien here that had to leave her home planet. Thus the alien tattoo. I go back and forth between Chicago and Pittsburgh often and during one of these visits, my mentor Jan Beatty was dropping me off at Kyklops [Tattoo]. She said “why don’t you have your alien say ‘I like chicken.’” I thought this was the funniest thing in the world, so I said “okay.” I walked into the shop where Pete was working on the alien. He showed me the sketch and I said “It looks perfect, except can the alien say ‘I like chicken’?” “Absolutely” said Pete and we were both standing in his little work station, cracking up. Because I have so many tattoos, I quit going for ones that have some soft, sentimental back story. I love to laugh and I like to be amused. I wake up to my alien every day and every day he makes me laugh.
Kayla sends us this poem:

Hellwave

Eleven tattoos and can’t stop
want my body covered/
no space for that night at the fraternity house:
body cracked open like glass.
I want a needle in my skin.
I’m the queen wasp thick and pissed off.
My friends say girl you’re on the fringe/
father likes to get me drunk/show off:
This is my smart daughter. The pretty one’s at home.
I know the push of a hand on the back of the head/
faceful of cock/baby no teeth
do what I tell you/stepfather’s raised fist: bitch I’ll hit you.
At the Rock Room, for a tit grab
it’s all-you-can-drink-all-night.
I’ll suck you off for a joint.
I’m looking for my studded Sid Vicious cliché:
skinny punk with the bass guitar.
He’s got the chain wallet, leans
against his amp and almost looks alive.
He rides a Fat Boy/he’ll get me out of here.
We’ll ride the hellwave screaming.

~ ~ ~

Kayla Sargeson earned a BA in creative writing from Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Award for Excellence in Creative Writing: Poetry. Her work has appeared in the national anthology, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as Voices from the Attic Volume XIV, and Dionne’s Story. Her poems also appear, or are forthcoming in, 5 AM, Columbia Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Paper Street, Ophelia Street, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and phantom limb. She is attending the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago, where she is recipient of a Follet Fellowship and serves as an editor for the Columbia Poetry Review.

Thanks to Kayla for her 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.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Tattooed Poets Project: Jo Langton

Say what you will about the Tattooed Poets Project, but it has been dominated by Americans these past four years. Unless I'm forgetting someone, we've only had one poet featured from outside the U.S., and that was Claire Askew, whose ink appeared back in 2009 here.

Well, this year we are expanding a bit more, including a few more poets that reside outside of the States, and our first such shining example is Jo Langton.

Jo is sharing two tattoos, both of which were done by artists at Affleck’s Palace, in Manchester UK. She doesn't remember the artists' names and explains,
"I got both of these tattoos in a bit of a grief stricken haze. I did not form a relationship with the artists in question, I turned up on the day and they slotted me in there and then. I didn’t want the artist or the tattooing experience to overshadow the meaning."
This first tattoo was done in the spring of 2008:


Jo elaborates:
"The inspiration for this tattoo came, in part, from my over-indulgence in the song 'Let Go' by Frou Frou (featured on the Garden State soundtrack) and equally from the death of my Grandad. I wanted something visual to remind me to let go of my past misdemeanours and lack of motivation, and to signify a push forward in my life that sprung from my Granddad’s last words to me 'keep on keeping it up' in relation to the study of my degree."
She also shared this tattoo that was inked last summer, in 2011:


Jo Continues:
"When my Grandpa died a couple of years later, it felt only natural for me to once again, signify this time in my life. I had completed my degree and achieved a First Class Honours. Neither of my grandfathers were around to see this, but I know they both would have been proud to know I had made it. I was proud of myself, and proved that holding on to what I wanted from life would have fruitful effects, just as my Grandad had said three years earlier."
Here's a poem from Jo:

SAY IT W / POIS [ON]

she tried
silent
He pursed

‘Perhaps’    crisply,

pressing it against her        and resentful        unexpectedly

found another, eh ? you say, we go inside.

Indoors he bent over the doll
seemed singularly loath to touch
kind of stuff before the ox heart
answer and

surprised, you know
know anything about these horrible things
[I haven’t told her / if that’s what you mean]
admitting ?

folding his pale soft hands together
them on his turquoise knees
see the doll
its chief disfigurement
deliberately inflicted

either / a / sharp / knife / or / scissors

the human shape of the thing made it particularly sinister.

~ ~ ~


Jo Langton is a poet from Manchester, UK, currently studying her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Salford. She had her first chapbook published with Liverpool-based small press Erbacce and it can be found here. She has since gone on to be published online in Bare HandsThe Railroad Poetry Project, Streetcake and 3AM Magazine. She has a set of hand sew tea bags with word-leaves forthcoming from Zimzalla. 

Thanks to Jo for sharing her poem 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.