The Tattooed Poets Project: Jared Singer

Yesterday, we enjoyed the tattoos and poetry of Elliott D. Smith. Today, we get to check out the work of his roommate, Jared Singer.

I met Jared, along with Justin, last month at the Barnes & Noble flagship store. Like Elliott, Jared's tattoo is a work "in progress" inked by the incomparable Joy Rumore at Twelve 28 Tattoo in Brooklyn.

Check out Jared's upper right arm:

Jared explained that this tattoo has two origins. First, it was inspired by lyrics from a group called Living Legends. More specifically, the words "I'm so fly, even my shadow has its own friends."

The other motif in this piece comes from the lyrics in "9-5ers Anthem," by Aesop Rock, that proclaim, "I tend to underestimate my own average."

Jared says he originally conceived of the piece consisting of "shadows with other shadows". Joy drew up the design and said, "How about this instead?"

The rest is history. Well, sort of. As mentioned at the top of the post, this sleeve-to-be is still a work in progress.

Jared shared this poem with us:

The Last Love Letter from an Entomologist

Dear Samantha,

I’m sorry, we have to get a divorce.

I know that seems like an odd way

to start a love letter, but let me explain.

Its not you,

it’s definitely not me,

it’s just, human beings don’t love

as well as insects do.

I love you far too much to let what we have

be ruined by the failings of our species.

So instead,

I’m going to leave you now,

while I can still remember you fondly.

I saw the way you looked at the waiter last night,

I know you would never do anything,

you never do, but still I

saw the way you looked at the waiter last night.

Did you know that when a female fly

accepts the pheromones put off by a male

It rewrites the way her brain works,

destroys the receptors for pheromones.

Sensing the change, the male fly does the same.

When flies love each other,

they do it so hard,

that they can never love anything else ever again.

if either one dies before procreation

both sets of genetic code are lost forever.

Now that is dedication.

After breaking up with Elizabeth

we spent three days dividing

everything we had bought together

like if I knew which pots were mine,

like if I knew which drapes were mine,

the pain would go away.

When two praying mantises mate,

the nervous system of the male

begins to shut down.

While he still has control over his motor functions,

he flips onto his back

exposing his soft underbelly to his lover like a gift.

She then proceeds to lovingly

and I do mean lovingly

 dice him into tiny pieces

which she  shoves carefully into mouth

wasting not a single morsel,

even the exoskeleton must go.

She does this so that

so that when their children are born

she has a first meal to regurgitate to feed them.

Now that is dedication.

I could never do that for you.

So I have a new plan.

I plan on spending the rest of my life committing petty injustices.

I will jaywalk at every opportunity

I will steal things I could easily afford

I will be rude to strangers

I hope you will do the same.

I hope reincarnation is real.

I hope that these petty crimes cause me to be reborn as a lesser creature.

I hope we are reborn as flies.

So that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

~ ~ ~

We also have the good fortune of having video of Jared performing this piece at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009:



Jared Singer is a poet and audio engineer who lives in New York City. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were corner stones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He has been published by The Legendary, Union Station Magazine, The Spoken Word Almanac Project 2010 and has also appeared on the Indiefeed Peformance Poetry Podcast. He is the NYC Urbana 2009 Grand Slam Poetry Champion, The 2009 NYC Louder Arts Individual World Poetry Slam representative and a member of the 2010 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Poetry Slam Team.

Much thanks and appreciation to Jared for sharing his work with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

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: Elliott D. Smith

I met Elliott D. Smith at the Union Square Barnes & Noble last month and took pictures of his tattoos for The Tattooed Poets Project. I also met his roommate Jared, whose work will appear here tomorrow.

Elliott has quite a bit of work, including a sleeve-in-progress, which is being constructed by the wonderfully talented Joy Rumore at Twelve 28 Tattoo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Check out this composite of Elliott's right arm:

This still-incomplete tattoo is part of a sleeve based on a mural at the Morgan Street stop on the L train in Brooklyn.

Photo by Elliott D. Smith

The sleeve has the Alice in Wonderland figure at its center, but a lot of other images, like the banana as well. Elliott pointed out in the photo above that the banana (lower right corner) is much smaller. For the purpose of the art of the tattoo sleeve, its scale has been increased significantly.

Elliott added that he visually enjoys the image of the mural, and his "own little Alice in Wonderland dream land" is slowly taking shape on his flesh.

Also on his right arm with the sleeve is this quote from "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," by Audre Lourde:

The quote is "I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior."

There are times when a writer's words resonate so loudly in your ears, they shake you to your core. Elliott told me that he "read it [these lines] one day and the next day got the tattoo."

He offered up this interpretation of the line: "it's easy to think of yourself as victim," he said, but succeeding in life is about "surviving and fighting through victimhood".

Elliott also has these words on his outer wrists:

This is the third poet this month with "poet" inked on his or her flesh. However, the combination of "freedom poet" adds another dimension to the corporeal text.

This was a "spur of the moment" tattoo, Elliott told me, elaborating that aside from the obvious "poet," he is "holding freedom in his hand and facing out".

Finally, we don't get a lot of lower back tattoos here on Tattoosday, but when we do, they are extraordinary:

Elliott took a couple of photos into Joy and she crafted this design. The concept is a spin on the "power to the people" idea, but with an emphasis on urban people. "Most Americans live in cities," he explained, "but [they] don't have power". This is a spin on the frustration that many feel, that the values of the citizenry of the American cities are not represented by the government.

As for poetry, Elliott offered us this work:

EARNING STRIPES

I own thirteen striped shirts.

I have known the misfortune of wearing lines on skin,

stretch marks and self-hate carve flesh in convincing fashion.

No lover has ever asked me why

I have known the misfortune of wearing lines on skin,

razor blade reminders tattoo thighs with teenage dreams.

No lover has ever asked me why

it was so easy to steal from myself.

Razor blade reminders tattoo thighs with teenage dreams,

this belly, a thanksgiving turkey for carving--

it was so easy to steal from myself

when I didn’t believe I had anything to give.

This belly, a thanksgiving turkey for carving.

Sliced up white meat

when I didn’t believe I had anything to give.

Mother doesn’t know there’s blood on the stairs.

Sliced up white meat,

stretch marks and self-hate carve flesh in convincing fashion.

Mother doesn’t know there’s blood on the stairs.

I own thirteen striped shirts.

~ ~ ~

Elliott D. Smith reps Louisville, Cincinnati, and Brooklyn. When he's not  working with formerly incarcerated people or conducting research on masculinity, he drinks whiskey and talks too loudly. He believes in the power of tattoos, reference books, and matching music with the weather.

Thanks to Elliott for sharing his ink and his poetry here with us on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

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!

Renee's Feathered Serpent

I was walking down 31st Street in Manhattan when a woman walked by with a hummingbird and flower on her left shoulder. I turned back to talk to her and I was stunned to see a bright colorful tattoo spanning the top of her back> I called after her and had a nice chat.

To my delight, Renee was my familiar with the site, as her artist, Joy Rumore, had just been featured on Tattoosday here. Taking a photo of the tattoo in question was not possible due to the presence of clothing covering sections of it, but I gave Renee my card and asked her to keep in touch. However, after a few messages on Twitter, not only did I have the link to photos of the tattoo from the artist's blog, I also had an open dialogue with Renee, who explained the tattoo for me.

As Joy says on her original post here, "All hail the mighty Kukulcan!":

I asked Renee to elaborate on why she got this incredible tattoo across her back. I'll let her words speak for themselves:

"I got this feathered serpent tattoo when I advanced to candicacy in my doctoral program where I study Aztec art. I think we did it over three or four 90-minute sessions ... The feathered serpent was an old Mesoamerican god, a version of which dates back to the Olmecs (about 400 BCE) and is seen at a number of Mexican sites like Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, Tula, and the Templo Mayor in Mexico City. The Aztecs called him Quetzalcoatl which translates from Nahuatl (their spoken language) into bird-snake. Joy refers to him on her blog as Kukulcan, which is the version that is seen at Chichen Itza in the Yucatán.

I wanted a tattoo of a feathered serpent because he so relevant to the Aztecs and they took great care in carving beautiful stone images of the animal.  I also knew of Joy's penchant for amazing feather work, and I knew this would be a good match.  I brought Joy a series of images, one from a mural at Teotihuacan, one from a Mixtec manuscript and another of an Aztec stone carving of a feathered serpent.  She used those and her knowledge of imagery from the Yucatan to create a more composite image of the god."

 A huge thanks to Renee and to Joy at Twelve 28 Tattoo for their cooperation in making this post possible!

Kat's Mucha Tattoo, With a Twist of Lemony Snicket

At 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I stopped Kat to ask about her ink.

She was happy to see me and had been wondering, having previously read Tattoosday and knowing she worked in the same area as I did, if our paths would ever cross.

She has seven tattoos (and a cool blog here), but we focused on the large tattoo on her upper right arm:

 Or, looking at it as a whole:

The art is based on the work of Alphonse Mucha, who has inspired a couple of other tattoos appearing previously on Tattoosday here and here.

If that second link looks familiar, it is because both Kat's tattoo and Delissa's are inspired by the same work, "Monaco".

 

Kat's tattoo is interpreted a little differently, translated with brighter colors, which, in Kat's words, were "amped up to be on my arm".

The plan is eventually for this tattoo to expand to be a half-sleeve.

The phrase "the world is quiet here" is a nod to a motto for a secret organization known as V.F.D. in A Series of Unfortunate Eventsby Lemony Snicket. These books are favorites among Kat's list of much-loved titles.

Her work was created by the artist Joy Rumore at Twelve 28 Tattoo in Brooklyn.

Kind thanks to Kat for sharing her work with us here on Tattoosday!