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.

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The Tattooed Poets Project: Cody Todd's Murals - Star Wars and an Interpretive Tribal

Today's tattoos come from Cody Todd, who was referred to me by Carol Muske-Dukes:

The first one is a back piece, still in progress:


Cody explains this as "a Star Wars mural--the Millenium Falcon in front of a meteor pursued by a TIE Fighter, from The Empire Strikes Back with the specter of Boba Fett looming above the chase." He credits an artist named Skip (since retired) at Old World Tattoo in Arvada, Colorado (North Denver). This was primarily done in 1996.

Cody expands on the piece:

...the one on my back is still in progress--I foresee at least 5-6 more sessions and touch-ups before I can say it is certainly complete. I like visual collages and pastiche, just as I like the poetic collage of Eliot's Prufrock and The Waste Land, Marianne Moore's Poetry, or Frank Stanford's "The Battlefield where the Moon Says I Love You" and Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids, are other examples. Poetry that synthesizes subject matter, speaking voices, speaking subjects, and stitch together otherwise independent and unlike things--unified by the mode of collage.

Why a Star Wars tattoo? Well, I guess I buy the argument lent forth in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with A Thousand Faces, that the mythical embodiments of the epic, the quest, and the hero are not just culturally shared, but I think each generation has their own embodiment as well. Hokey, cheesy, and melodramatic --yes, but I still watch Empire... with great nostalgia, and I don't think enough credit goes to [George] Lucas and his literary homage paid to Aquinas, Emerson, Plato, and Homer, to name a few. However, the revisions of Star Wars Episodes 1-3 are so bad I cannot watch them without getting sick. Maybe I am old now, but I just don't get them at all. Nevertheless, my parents still joke about the fact that I was conceived in the backseat of a Ford Pinto while they were "watching" Star Wars at a south Denver drive-in in the summer of 77."

The second piece is a "tribal-esque mural," of sorts, and was tattooed by a friend of Cody's named Bryan in 1997, at Your Flesh Grappling (now known as Your Flesh Tattoo) in Durango, Colorado. This piece was drawn by Cody and wraps around his left thigh:

Cody added:

"The leg tattoo was a personalized redefinition of the "Tribal" tattoos that were the craze when tattoos were no longer isolated to deviancy. Loosely quoting Mike Ness of Social Distortion, in the 1990's, kids could go to a mall and get their little "parts" pierced or walk out of there with a barbed wire tribal band around their biceps. I took a one-page graffiti collage from a notebook that I penciled of hooks, circles, ovoids, anemone-shaped and flame-shaped patterns with tentacles--my first name is actually on the upper left, and a small skyline of Denver with that wacky cash-register shaped building [The Wells Fargo Center] is just 1:00 o'clock from the family of bubbles or spheres centered in the band. I am going to amend this tat with another piece of similar solid black-ink graffiti to wrap a 4-inch band around my knee. That is the thing about tattoos--they are addictive; they beg to grow new limbs, and in that sense they are like little monsters."

I've been posting the tattooed poets' work over on BillyBlog and you can check out not one, but two of Cody's poems here. One is called "Boba Fett". But, as an added treat, I'm including one here, as well, because it just seemed appropriate:

Tattooed on the Backs of Eight Fireflies:

Under a dark loam of night,

pure barbed wire.

*

Apparitions dancing

dancing and dancing.

*

Some of us just might bite

the apple those cursed birds already did.

*

Old story: cat bats us away

to reanimate or destroy.

*

Words are the ruse, flight

is the guise, and we are the fakers.

*

Return the favor: grace for

sex or salvation for dust.

*

Time is the knife. Gods the size

of thumbs. Men with bloody hands.

*

We captured our god, the sun,

and feasted on him by torchlight.

Thanks to Cody for not only sharing his tattoos with us here on Tattoosday, but for expounding on them at such length. It's always fascinating to hear people go beyond the literal meanings of the tattoos themselves, and explore the deeper significance of the art form as it pertains to themselves and society.