Maggie Smith's Feather (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Maggie Smith, who shared this tattoo:

Maggie tells us:

"My tattoo is a black silhouette of a feather. So many of my poems feature birds, and I got the tattoo to celebrate the publication of my second book, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015). I also love the Emily Dickinson line 'Hope is the thing with feathers' (and have designed my website with that line in mind), so a feather was a natural choice. The artist was D. Willy at Sweet Baby Octane in Columbus, Ohio."

Here's a poem from Maggie:

Wren Songs

It’s an installation: Wrens pinned like brooches

to the trees, singing, their eyes glass beads.

Shake a branch, be wary of what falls.

In the unofficial spring, sunshine plays xylophone

on the lawn. The trebly notes are mouths

singing oh, oh, oh. A paper boat leads

the children downstream, through countless

shades of green—spring, grass, moss, forest.

Light plus one green makes another.

The exhibit rotates seasonally. Soon enough

the children will instead be foxes, the greens                                   

will rust. Someone will strike the wren set.

But for now their songs saturate the air.

If the message is urgent, they’ll tell again tomorrow. 

~ ~ ~

Photo by Lauren Powers

Maggie Smith’s second book of poems, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press 2015) was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the Dorset Prize. She is also the author of Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, and three prizewinning chapbooks, the latest of which is Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming 2015). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry, Maggie has also received four Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She can be found online at www.maggiesmithpoet.com.

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

This entry is ©2015 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: Guillermo Filice Castro

In our weekly post-April Tattooed Poet o' the Week continuation of the Tattooed Poets Project, our next contributor is Guillermo Filice Castro:

Photo by Mark Papellero

Guillermo told us:

"I met the tattoo artist Nikki Lugo (currently at Tattoo Paradise in Washington DC) about ten years ago through my partner back when they were roommates. I had wanted a tattoo for a long time ––notion reinforced by having a new boyfriend with lots of ink–– but had been dillydallying, unsure of what to get and, mostly, afraid of the pain. Knowing I was a writer Nikki suggested one day, 'You should get a quill!' It was the perfect idea. With my birthday coming up, she offered to do it herself as a present to me. How could I refuse that? And when the time came, whatever trepidation I may have had vanished as soon as Nikki’s needle touched my skin, yielding a wonderful design at the cost of no pain."

Guillermo shared the following poem, which appeared in the April issue of The Brooklyn Rail:

Self-Portrait with Musician

Sometimes the heart strikes out noisily,

Leaps into a grand piano like a stunt man.

Green-eyed, an almost green voice:

She leaps out of a grand piano like a stunted man,

Resurfaces reptilian, shedding scales.

She’s a whisper inside a box of wails,

An amphibian on the surface, adding scales

To leave the swamp dressed for a part.

I too whisper from inside a box of veils,

Rustle up a melody that comes apart

Leaving the water in a dress from K-Mart.

She sings over sweeps of pedal steel,

Rustles up a harmony that quickly comes part

Of my flesh. More and more I would steal

From this lady singing over sweet pedal steel:

The green eyes; and the pale green noise

That sinks into flesh as much as it might heal

Whenever the heart strikes, without a voice.

                                                           

                                                                                            For Chan Marshall a.k.a. Cat Power

~ ~ ~

Guillermo Filice Castro is the recipient of an Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship. His poems appear in Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, Ducts, LaFovea, Quarterly West, and more; as well as the anthologies Rabbit Ears, Flicker & Spark, Divining Divas, My Diva, Saints of Hysteria, and others. His translations of Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. In 2012 his work was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya prize. Castro lives in New York City.

Thanks to Guillermo for his contribution to The Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2014 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: Amy MacLennan

Late last month, I received an inquiry from Amy MacLennan about the Tattooed Poets Project. April was already full, but she was kind enough to agree to be another Tattooed Poet o' the Week. Check out her work:

That's a mirror image and is a little blurry, so let's take a close look and hear about the work.

Amy tells us:

"The original tattoo was done in a London studio by the artist Bugs in 1992. He agreed to do the design freehand with the stipulation that I brought him a peacock feather. I was working in a cheap youth hostel at the time, but a friend managed to find the feather for me. I remember that Bugs told me to drink a lot of water and eat something sugary after. I drank a blended mango drink and then had a good cry with a friend, and later that night got drunk on stout. The tattoo has had two color touch-ups, but I've never had the design changed."

Bugs is a phenomenal artist who is respected worldwide. We've featured some of his work before when we've spotted it at the NYC Tattoo Convention in years past (most recently here).

The floral part of her back is actually comprised of two different tattoos of flowers:

Amy told us that the small flowers were tattooed in 2012 "by Kory Kidd at Epic Ink in Medford, Oregon." She explained, "I wanted something flowery and red/coral toned. Kory worked with me endlessly to get the design and color right."

As for the large flower, she elaborates:

"In 2013, Kory added this one. I wanted to cover a small, grey salamander that I'd had done in the Fillmore in 1990 when I was young and desperately stupid when it came to tattoos. My intentions for a first tattoo had been good, but my choice of tattoo artist was not. I needed more color and balance to the work already done."

If Amy wasn't generous enough to share her tattoos, she also gave us a poem, which originally appeared in February 2014 in the 30/30 Project from Tupelo Press:

Heat and Hunger

You kiss the top of one shoulder,

a run of your lips across the strip

where my bra strap hits.

I trace circles at the place

your fingers meet your hand,

stroke the mild webbing there.

A dainty scorching

of each other's skin,

such a delicate devouring.

~ ~ ~

Amy MacLennan lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon. She has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Folio, and Rattle. Her second chapbook, Weathering, was published by Uttered Chaos Press in early 2012. She has a poem appearing in the anthology Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems that was published by Tupelo Press in March 2013. Her article 'Social Networking and Poetry Publishing' appeared in the 2011 Poet's Market. You can find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/amy.maclennan.

Thanks to Amy for contributing to the Tattooed Poets Project, beyond April, here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 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.

Cecilia's Spiritual Dreamcatcher (at the NYC Urban Tattoo Convention)

Even though the 4th annual NYC Urban Tattoo Convention was at the end of June, I'm still reliving the experience through posts of tattoos I saw there.

While speaking with one attendee named Cecilia, she pulled her shirt up to reveal this dreamcatcher tattoo on her ribs:

I recently followed up with Cecilia and asked her specifically about the tattoo.

First, she credited this lovely work to Kristin Lowery, owner/artist at South Seas Tattoo in Hilo, Hawaii, who used a feather Cecilia had found in New York as reference material. She said she was "pretty sure, after researching, [that] it's a hawk feather."

Cecilia was very detailed, explaining the spirituality behind this dreamcatcher:

"... I wanted to incorporate something like a dream catcher using the symbol of the 3rd chakra ... the hawk - in animal spirit medicine/as a totem in Native American tradition means

-messenger of the spirit world
-focused power
-power to see/clear vision
-connection to spirit, spiritual awareness

I got [the tattoo] on my left side which represents the feminine and I got it on my rib cage for it to land close to my heart and aligned with the 3rd chakra solar plexus and heart chakra.

Chakras are energy points in the human body.

3rd chakra is a energetic center for empowerment, where your ego lives, where your inner warrior develops and where you decide who you are and project it out unto the world. It is from this place that our principles are born and developed, and where our codes for living get created and maintained. It is from here that we assert our will and stand up for 'who we are.' Self-esteem is the result of the third chakra.

[This tattoo] represents for me a rite of passage to connect with my true nature, to gain spiritual awareness, to own my power and to become the person I was meant to and fulfill my purpose in this lifetime!"

Cecilia's spirituality should come as no surprise, as she is an New York-based artist, whose photography can be seen here. You can also visit her Etsy shop here.

Thanks to Cecilia for sharing this lovely tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2013 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website 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.