Wrapping Up The Tattooed Poets Project, Volume 4

Well, it’s May, which can only mean one thing here on Tattoosday - I’m exhausted.

Every year, I put together the Tattooed Poets Project in the month of April and it’s a labor of love. Toward the end of the month, however, it’s more labor and less love, and I am relieved when another National Poetry Month has passed.

So, I’m going to take a deep breath, and pause briefly, before we resume our normal programming here on Tattoosday.

However, before doing so, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who helped out with this year’s installment.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank all of the poets for their contributions. For a list of this (and previous) year’s inked scribes, you can visit the index at www.tattooedpoets.com.

Next, I’d like to thank David Lehman and Stacey Harwood from the Best American Poetry blog. They’ve been supporters of the project since its inception, they help publicize it every year and, in 2012, they helped even more by re-tweeting several of my posts.

Part of my process is to reach out to poets in the literary world, soliciting their submissions. Often, poets may not be tattooed, but they certainly know some who are. For that reason, I want to thank Tony Barnstone, Amy Newman, and Tim Donnelly, three un-inked poets who tipped me off to other poets who ended up in this year’s group of 35 contributors.

And of course, I want to thank the readers of Tattoosday, who continue to support the site through their appreciation of the site. In four years, we’ve featured 123 different poets, eight of whom have submitted work in multiple years. If no one visited, we’d be lonely indeed, and Tattoosday scored a record for April with 50,000 hits and a monthly high 89,643 page views (but who’s counting?). I am humbled by your interest and am motivated to make next year bigger and better for lovers of poetry and tattoos, everywhere.

Thank you again,

Bill Cohen