The Tattooed Poets Project: Bridget Lowe

Our next tattooed poet is Bridget Lowe, who sent us this photo:

Bridget explains:

"I got this tattoo rather impulsively in the fall of 2008 in Syracuse, New York, at the excellent Halo Tattoo. I had recently found out that my surname came with a motto, Spero meliora, which translates to 'I hope for better things.' I just thought it was hilarious and apt that the Lowe family motto pronounced to merely hope, while so many other family mottoes announce intentions to destroy, maim, annihilate, etc. The motto seemed like a weirdly accurate summation of my Irish Catholic ancestors, who were overall a suffering bunch, from coal miners to morphine addicts to alcoholics to religious fanatics to general melancholics. Better things--that’s not much to ask for, and they asked so nicely. It really killed me. "

Bridget was also kind enough to send us this poem:

Heaven

The villagers are reading hot guts
and drinking tonics. I’m relaxing
on a rock, sunning my midsection,
my delicate white legs.
The palm trees stand stiff
in the wind, archaic, shyly optimistic,
foreign. A Cuban boy
presents me with a muffin, his homeland
a mere neck’s-turn away.
My hair blows this way
and that, as if I’m the featured guest
in a music video from my childhood.
For every broken heart, one golf course.
Everything comes out even.
The birds call me by name
and while I’m distracted, fish heap themselves
into my basket. And the loaves,
the loaves! They multiply.

~ ~ ~

Bridget Lowe is the author of At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry (2011), and elsewhere. She has received a "Discovery"/Boston Review award and fellowships to attend The MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She lives in Kansas City.

Thanks to Bridget for sharing her poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2013 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: Kevin Patrick Lee

Our next tattooed poet is Kevin Patrick Lee, who had initially expressed an interest last year in our project, but we had to wait for 2013 to run his submission.

We're running this post on a Tat-Tuesday, because, as Kevin explains, he sent us "two poems ... regarding the subject matter of each [tattoo]." And because, "each poem gives insight into the respective tattoo," he adds, "...further explanation isn't needed."

First, the tattoos, side by side on Kevin's inner forearms:

We'll start with the tattoo on  the left (Kevin's right), which is a portrait of his father. Followers of the television series L.A. Ink might remember this piece, which was featured on the show and created by Corey Miller at High Voltage Tattoo in West Hollywood.

This is the accompanying poem:


The Reality

My father died in my arms
early on a Thursday morning.

I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t even sad.
there was no time or room for that;
that was my mother’s job.

At the time, my brother and I
worked in the same warehouse,
the same dirt, the same grime,
the same bullshit from corporate pricks.

The day after my dad died,
my brother was back at work,
and I made it in the day after that.
We probably worked harder those few days,
than we ever had before.

And we got a lot of awkward looks,
uncertain stares that said,
“Hey, what are you doing here?
You should be at home, wilting and weeping.”

But like our hard-working Irish father,
we are blue-collared through and through,
until one day we too kick the bucket
butt naked on the cold linoleum
of the bathroom floor
some unsuspecting morning.

And though we have a lifetime to mourn,
the truth is,
bills don’t stop for death
and rent is always due on the 1st.

===========================================================

The tattoo on the right (Kevin's left) is based on Frida Kahlo's painting "The Broken Column" and was tattooed by Brittan "London" Reese at Vatican Studios in Lake Forest, California. The poem accompanying this tattoo is "Hooked":

Hooked


When I walked out of our apartment for the last time,
I grabbed every roll of toilet paper.
I took the clips that tacked down the cable wire.
I picked up all the damn bobby pins that miraculously
flew out of my wife’s hair and onto the carpet.

I stripped everything, except 2 hooks on the wall.
The two hooks that held up a painting that brought my wife and I together;
It was Frida Kahlo’s Broken Column.
There is nothing romantic or sexy about the painting,
except perhaps Frida’s bare breasts,
which I’m sure weren’t as perfect as
Salma Hayek’s breasts which played the part of Frida’s breasts
in Julie Taymor’s 2002 amazingly colorful film.

I don’t know what my wife’s attraction to the painting was,
and I still don’t,
but I identified with the nails scattered all over her body
and the literal broken column of her spine.

There were times in my mid-twenties where I couldn’t
roll over in bed to turn off my alarm clock because the discs
in my back were angry over their current living situation.
My doctor asking me, “So when do you want to schedule surgery.”
I never took her up on her offer,
instead popping pain pills and muscle relaxants when needed.
Luckily I have never been the addict.

And I have nothing to complain about,
as so many people have it worse.
I know a woman who had something
implanted in her that would permanently
block the pain receptors going to her back,
because without it, she would have hung herself.

This was our favorite painting separately before we met,
and perhaps it just goes to show that sometimes
pain and suffering leads to extraordinary things.

I left the apartment and those two hooks,
and wanted to beg the landlord to keep them there,
so that perhaps it would bring inspiration to two more people
to hang something on the wall together,
the walls that hold them together,
the walls that keep them safe together,
so that they could fall in love here,
make a family here,
so that they could one day move on
and beg the landlord to leave the hooks in the wall.

===========================================================

Kevin Patrick Lee is the husband of a beautiful blue-eyed woman, and the father of a cool blue-eyed boy. He hosts a monthly poetry series called The Hump Readings, was a founder of Beside the City of Angels: a Long Beach Poetry Festival, and runs Aortic Books. His work has appeared in book collections and many great small press mags. A book is forthcoming in 2013 by World Parade Books.

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

This entry is ©2013 Tattoosday. The poems 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.

BRETT.

My long time and very humble client Brett was in the house today. We finished a Moses piece we started a little while ago. Man! Brett has tough skin to work on but he sits like a champ, never moves and always keep his body relaxed and in the right position. I might do a couple minor touch ups on it as we add more to his leg sleeve.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kazim Ali

Our next tattooed poet is Kazim Ali.

When I reached out to Kazim at the beginning of the year, he commended me on the "prescience" of my inquiry, stating "I am as yet unwritten upon but am planning said writing in the next week or two...".

So, when Kazim sent us this photo, the ink was still fresh:

It's a great shot and when I first saw it, I was interested to hear what these lines of text were all about. Kazim didn't disappoint with this history:

"I have practiced yoga since 1999, never feeling more than a strict beginning, knowing less and less about yoga with every passing year. With poetry it feels the same. Though raised with traditional Muslim values, I struck out on my own to try to figure out God after encountering the work of Fanny Howe. From 2009-2011 I worked on my own book about yoga and Islam, called Fasting for Ramadan. While working on that book I came across and began translating the work of 20th century Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri. One of his lines that resonates for me the most talked about the qibla, the direction of Muslim prayer--the direction toward which one must turn to face Mecca.

Sepehri's line (in translation) is roughly: I am a Muslim. My qibla is toward one single bloom of a rose.

Needless to say, my yoga practice taught me to always strive, to always try to know, that living (with or without a spiritual practice) is that exactly, a 'practice,' meaning 'process.' To write on the body is not permanent at all because the body is not permanent. To inscribe is to strive. The Farsi script runs right to left and the Sanksrit runs left to right. Each attempt at knowing oneself starts in the world, with others, in community, something I learn from both Islam and from Yoga.

I wrote on my left forearm: Man musulmanam. Qiblam yek ghul-surg.

I wrote on my right forearm the first line of the Yoga Sutras: Atha Yoganusanam. [in translation: Now (here, at this very moment in this very place) begin the teaching of yoga.]"

Kazim described how he came to know his tattoo artist:

"I met Sam McWilliams through my friend, Genine, also a poet. I wanted someone to write these sacred scriptures onto my skin and I wanted someone who would understand, if not the power of the scripture itself, then for sure the sacred quality of writing and of bodies. Sam had lived with Genine for a long while at the San Francisco Zen Center.

I went to Mermaids Tattoo, a special place where all the tattoo artists are women. We talked about the scripts and Sam said that while she had written Sanskrit before she had never written Farsi. I liked the idea of being in the hands of someone who knew her scripts but would be writing one for the first time. It felt like an occasion in the universe."

Kazim sent us this poem, which is an excerpt from a longer poem, which appeared in his book SKY WARD (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)

from "Journey to Providence"

but will I broken will I undone
at the water ask to go deeper a boat
dusting lindern clears away envy

wandering like lilac snow in dunes
never the water enter the duskwarm room
will I let you wing me will I have leapt skyward

~ ~ ~

Kazim Ali is the author of four books, most recently SKY WARD. He has also published two novels Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth, two collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, and translations of Sohrab Sepehri, Marguerite Duras and Ananda Devi.

His poems and essays have appeared widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He edited the essay collection Jean Valentine: This-World Company and serves as co-editor of the Poets on Poetry Series and the Under Dicussion Series, both from the University of Michigan Press, contributing editor of AWP Writers Chronicle, associate editor of Field, and founding editor of Nightboat Books.

He is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College and has served as visiting writer at many colleges and universities including Naropa University, St. Mary’s College of California, New England College, Texas State University, Western Illinois University, University of Michigan, University of Wyoming, the University of Southern Maine and Idyllwild Academy.

Thanks to Kazim Ali, not only for sharing his tattoos and poetry on the Tattooed Poets Project, but for taking the time to expound so thoughtfully on how he came to have this work done.

This entry is ©2013 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.

OS GEMEOS.

Today we are gonna check out some of Os Gemeos' s work. The two twins are from Sao Paulo Brazil where they started graffiti in 1987. You can see the brazilian style through their art and each of their pieces is so unique you instantly know that they are the ones that did it. From Tags to character paintings and representation of social injustice, the Os Gemeos became the main influence in the local brazilian scene. Enjoy...

The Tattooed Poets Project: Virginia Chase Sutton

Our next tattooed poet, Virginia Chase Sutton, is no stranger to tattooed poets projects - she appeared in Kim Addonizio's wonderful anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos.

She sent us this photo of one of her tattoos:

Virginia offered up this story about the birth of this tattoo:

"It may sound silly, but the symbols came to me in a dream. I was lightly dozing one afternoon and the symbols were behind my eyelids. I opened my eyes and knew what I had to do---get the symbols for Suffering, Ecstasy, and Death tattooed on my back.

The shop is called Rising Phoenix Tattoo in Addison, IL and the artist is Dave. I have been to Dave several times, even though I live in Arizona. This particular time, I was at a writers’ retreat in Illinois and knew I had to get the tattoo. I went with my god-son, Josh, who is in his late twenties. It is a long wait there as only Dave was there to manage the shop (we arrived at opening, noon). He had to answer the phone in mid-tattoo, pull off a glove, say 'Tattoo' and answer some basic question about hours, etc. then re-glove. If someone came in and wanted a piercing, he stopped the tattoo and did the piercing. So it took many hours to each get a tattoo. But it is worth it because Dave is a true artist."

She also sent along a poem related to this particular tattoo:

TATTOO AFTER KAWABATA’S SNOW COUNTRY

Out of town, on a new medication, a spill

down a flight of stairs,  strange bird

not quite flying. Limitless space. Off

to the ER. Careful, I tell the doc listening

to my lungs, here is a fresh tattoo. He steps

to the counter, back to me, says Do you have

any medical conditions? He already knows

from my forms but I reply I am bipolar.

He asks Do those lines mean anything? Three

symbols in Japanese are stacked on my back

in black lines with pink and purple wisps.

Suffering. Ecstasy. Death, I tell him. He turns,

startled. Why, he asks. What else is there, I say.

Bored with this discussion, I am thinking of Kawabata’s

poetic fiction, emblems I now have engraved

on my back. Influence for decades. What

is your psychiatrist’s phone number back home?

I bet you know it by heart. And I do. He pulls out

a cell phone, moves to the hall where I listen to

his take on my new tattoo. It is not a rave review.

I am miserable, wondering why so many docs

reject beauty, reject art. I think of the novel’s

main female character---there are only three---

a geisha and prostitute, Komoko. Of her traditional

loveliness, her isolation, her pain in a land of dense

and white-out snow, a forever landscape.

The ER doc hands the phone to me---my shrink

has a few words. You are on a long road, with

nothing but trouble ahead, he warns me, and changes

my med. He does not require a response.

The ER doc takes back the phone and there is more

chit-chat between them. Shimamura, the male character,

a dilettante, wants pure beauty and finds it in Yukio’s

reflection. In his brain, she is perfection. My back

burns, blurry as gathering rain. I am dismissed.

Standing outside the hospital, waiting for a ride

this winter night, I look up at the cluttered sky. Stars flare,

popping their skins. In the book, the Milky Way is

a living thing. Shimamura becomes incandescent

as he observes Komoko rescuing Yukio from a fire.

Komoko staggers; Yukio’s leg is burned by flames.

In the last image, the Milky Way slides down

Shimamura’s throat. It is what I look for in tonight’s skies.

Constellations rise, gleam, illusion I am able to capture.

I know it is not the Milky Way, but it will do as part

of my own mythology, the puzzle of existence:

Suffering. Ecstasy. Death.

~ ~ ~

Virginia Chase Sutton tells us:

"My first book is Embellishments (Chatoyant) and my second is What Brings You to Del Amo (University of New England Press). I’ve been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Antioch Review, Quarterly West, among other magazines, journals and anthologies. I won the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, Writers at Work, and others. Six times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, I have also received three grants from Poets & Writers magazine."

Thanks to Virginia for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday! For more of her poetry, head over to her website.

This entry is ©2013 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.

PETE BYSH.

Pete Bysh flew in all the way from London to get his very first tattoo. We went at it until 3 in the morning to finish the tattoo before he flew back across the pond. This past week was very draining at the studio.. in a good way of course. A lot of people are coming from all around the globe to get work done. I really appreciate it and try my best to make sure they go back home happy. Also shout out to my brother LT for staying up with us, those long nights and keeping me laced up on them coffees haha!