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.