The Tattooed Poets Project: Catherine Bresner

Our next Tattooed Poet o' the Week is Catherine Bresner.

She sent us photos of two of her tattoos, starting with this literary ink:

The line that marches across Catherine's collarbone and around her shoulder is "mi corazón se cierra como una flor nocturna."

Catherine explains,

"My first tattoo is on my collarbone and is a line from one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda. It is from his poem 'I Have Gone Marking', which is in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The translation is 'My heart closes like a nocturnal flower'. I grew up near the ocean and in this way I suppose I have always felt a sort of kinship with Neruda. We both draw inspiration from the sea."

She also shared this one:

Catherine explains:

"My second tattoo is on my upper arm, and it is part of Aubrey Beardsley's illustration entitled "The Peacock Skirt" (1893).

Aubrey Beardsley was an Art Nouveau artist and author. This is the image that Oscar Wilde used to promote his tragedy Salome, and it depicts the Syrian Captain of the Guard who casts his gaze on Salome.

I am haunted by Beardsley's artwork, and by this picture in particular, because it is seductive and sinister. I also loved the story behind its origination, as Beardsley and Wilde often collaborated together in order to create their art.

Both tattoos were done by the very talented Tim Brewer, who owns a tattoo shop in Hadley, Massachusetts called Blueprint Gallery."

Catherine was also kind enough to share the following unpublished poem:

LACUNA


The ivy presses against the window pane as if this room were the sun—as if this was the center
of everything, here, among the tables and books. The pillars are endless, their flirtations growing
like ivy from beneath floorboards; they nuzzle the skylight panes.

(Outside: the bird caw and the daisy’s slow decay.)

Everything is sinuous and coy, each wallpaper detail like a belly dancer, exotic and surprising.
Each lampshade, a crocus. Walls are not walls here.
In the orange light of a sunset, the cherry wood glows like the first ember in a forest fire.
This room gives off its own light.

Outside, the wind pulls at the last patch of grass until it turns tawny and brittle. The sun is a gas
lamp dimming out.

~ ~ ~

Catherine Bresner is the author of the chapbook The Merriam Webster Series. She was the editorial assistant of Pilot Books, an intern for The Massachusetts Review, and a participant of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her poetry has been published in The Pinch, H_NGM_N, and Burntdistrict and has poetry forthcoming in The Cream City Review and Yemassee, where she was a finalist for the Pocataligo Poetry Contest. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at The University of Washington, Seattle, where she is the associate editor for The Seattle Review and an intern at Wave Books.

Thanks to Catherine for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

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.

Andy Young's Egyptian Ink - The Tattooed Poets Project Goes Global

Our next submission comes to us all the way from Egypt, on the flesh of Andy Young:

This unusual piece located on her left forearm was done at Nowhere Land in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt, by a female Italian artist whose name is Orne Gil.

Although the tattoo is in Arabic, it is actually a translation of a quote by Pablo Neruda and, in English translation, reads: "You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay the spring." Andy also credits the design of the tattoo to Islamic art historian and revolutionary street artist Bahia Shehab, who works with her at the American University in Cairo.

She summarized this further by sending along an excerpt from the project this design came from, via the website "Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution":

"Bahia Shehab collected a thousand different visual representations of the word 'no' printed, stitched, molded, engraved and cast over the past 1,400 years on vases, tombstones and walls, in locations as far-flung as Spain and the border of China. She called the installation A Thousand Times No.  After the Revolution Shehab began to see a connection between A Thousand Times No and her country’s situation. She took to the streets, spray-painting 'no' on walls throughout Cairo.

'I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street,' Shehab said, describing her first image, which read 'no to military rule' in a script taken from a tombstone. 'A series of ‘no’s came out of the book like ammunition.'

Some of the 'no's that followed: No to a new pharaoh. No to violence. No to killing men of religion. No to burning books. No to the stripping of veiled women.

This particular quote by Pablo Neruda was found in a field hospital during the early days of the revolution. She speaks about it toward the end of this short TED talk which details this project:
 A Thousand Times No."

Andy sent along the following poem, which is the title poem from her chapbook The People is Singular (titled "Mubasher" in the book):

The People is Singular

in the dark

a white-lit

screen: watercannons

spraying praying

people

on Qasr-El Nil Bridge

humans shielding

mummies

books Akhenaton

which way will

            the army

go chanting pours

through my husband’s       

            laptop

selmeya selmeya

peaceful

            peaceful

he says

the screen

shows

screens in Tahrir

gone black

the Square

itself black

except for

            the flashes

should we mute

the sound

of gunshots

eshop yuri eshop

yuri what

            the hell

does it mean

the people want

            the people

want the fall

of the fall

of the you

say they say

the people

want bread

the barrier between us

and our president

was broken

by teargas says a man

in the news

who cannot

mute cannot shut

the screen to teargas

a fog from

this distance up close

the canisters

expired dates

made in usa

etched in metal

            in Arabic

“the people” is

singular which

does not

translate

~ ~ ~

The chapbook from which this poem comes was released by Press Street Press in 2012, and is a collaboration with Alexandrian photographer Salwa Rashad. You can get more information on The People is Singular here.

We are posting this today, April 6, because Andy told me it's an important anniversary today:

"This was the date [in 2008] of a worker's strike in Mahalla, which was an early inspiration for the Egyptian revolution.  An activist movement named for the date was formed in support of the workers and was later actively involved in the Jan 25 uprising. The founders were arrested in November as part of the new anti-protest law and sentenced to three years in prison. So the date encompasses a lot: the fact that there was opposition to the abuses of power in Egypt long before 2011, particularly among workers' groups, as well as the fact that many activists are being imprisoned by the repressive powers of the State today." 

Andy Young's poems, essays, and translations have been featured internationally and in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Guernica, and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century. Since 2012, she has been dividing her time between New Orleans, where she works for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and Egypt, where she works for the American University in Cairo. Her first full length collection is forthcoming this fall. 

We are thankful beyond words to have Andy's contribution, in both image and verse, here on 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: 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.