New Yorker Follows Morgan Parker to the Tattoo Parlor

Did you know that "samo" (short for "same ol' shit") appeared as a graffiti tag in '70s and '80s NYC?, as painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Poet Morgan Parker recently set out to have "samo" tattooed on her upper arm at Electric Anvil, a shop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Amanda Petrusich documents the experience in her subsequent profile of Parker, published online yesterday at New Yorker. "The tattoos with text, she explained, are 'things that I need to read and see every day. They become mantras.' There are bits of poetry by Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton on her right and left forearms, respectively, and a line from Allen Ginsberg—the word 'Holy!' fifteen times—running along the left side of her body. 'They're reminders,' she said. 'I can be impulsive about it, but they're of a time.'" Let's join Petrusich and Parker there:

The poems in Parker's second book, "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé," are similarly crowded with influences. In the mode of Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara, Parker's poems are chatty and colloquial. In them, she writes about living in New York ("When I drink anything / out of a martini glass / I feel untouched by / professional and sexual / rejection") and staying at home ("I will not be attending the party / tonight, because I am / microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines / and watching Wife Swap, / which is designed to get back / at fathers, as westernized media / is often wont to do"). She writes about mental illness, psychoanalyzing herself ("Crying in the Gap by my therapist's office / or I am still angry with my parents / for traumatizing me / through organized sports") and President Obama. The collection's titular pop star reappears throughout ("In the news today Beyoncé went / to brunch this weekend. Two / neighborhoods over, dressed all in black"), often so that Parker can contrast the star's reality to her own ("Comparing salad recipes / and third-wheeling weekend dinners / dog kibble in my loafers / seducing my self in sweat pants / is not how I envisioned my twenties"). Parker, whose tweets often resemble lines from her poems ("I would buy a Maxine Waters action figure"), can sometimes sound epigrammatic or even glib, before she suddenly doesn't ("I am a tiny robot like them / but there is no one to love my robo-heart. / On the last day of the year I enter / a scalding tub and think you away"). The poets Terrance Hayes and D. A. Powell, and Lena Dunham, have declared themselves fans.

Parker lives in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with stacks of vinyl records, a wall of overstuffed bookshelves, a non-working fireplace filled with "Mad Men" DVDs, and artful preparations of crystals and candles. On an afternoon shortly after the publication of her book, she was wearing flared jeans, suede magenta boots, an eyebrow ring, and a gray T-shirt with "Phenomenal Woman" on it—a reference to the Maya Angelou poem. Her appearance made me think of a line from her poem "Another Another Autumn in New York": "I don’t know / when I got so punk rock / but when I catch / myself in the mirror I / feel stronger." She described her domestic aesthetic as "a little bit about avoiding the quiet." Her miniature poodle, Braeburn, gnawed a toy while Parker made coffee; Carole King’s "Tapestry" spun on the turntable.

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