MOO-VING ’70S POEM INSPIRES CHICAGO MUSICIAN
Jordan Kahn pays tribute to ‘Two-Headed Calf’ by poet Laura Gilpin with song, arm tattoo
For Jordan Kahn, Laura Gilpin’s poem “Two-Headed Calf” is a reminder to be content in the moment.
The poem, published in 1977, has stood the test of time, making the rounds on social media decades after its release.
Kahn, 25, who lives in Ravenswood and originally is from Deerfield, first saw the poem on the social media platform Tumblr nearly 10 years ago. Since then, he’s returned to it time and time again.
The poem reads:
“Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
“But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.”
“For the brief moment he’s alive he’s looking up at the stars, and nothing is wrong,” Kahn says. “Every time that I read that I kind of get shivers, it’s hard to explain why.”
Kahn, a musician who goes by the name Boxout, has been so enamored with the poem that he wrote a song inspired by it, which will be released April 19. Shortly after writing the song, he got a tattoo of the two-headed calf on his forearm.
“I’ve definitely found myself just as a person being a guinea pig for a lot of things,” he says, referring to being the first student in his program on computer science and advertising at the University of Illinois and the first person with a specific position in his job as a user experience designer and researcher. “I try not to be put in a box, I think that’s what the poem is about, too, just doing what you want to do.”
The tattoo is steeped with meaning, something that was important to him after his first and only tattoo of a paper airplane wasn’t too meaningful. He asked a friend to design the tattoo, provided her with the poem and his ideas of what it should look like and she took it from there, he says.
The calf is standing and looking toward the stars, two things that were important to him in the design. In other visual representations of the poem he’s seen, the calf is often sitting, but he wanted something different. By the time he took the design to Alisa Sova, a tattoo artist based in Kahn’s Ravenswood neighborhood, he knew it was ready to be inked on his skin.
The song, also titled “Two-headed Calf,” is the closer on Kahn’s upcoming album titled “Sasquatch Cyborg,” out May 24. The album explores themes of isolation, social media, climate change and activism, and the poem-inspired song felt like the best way to tie it all together, he says.“The song is about making mistakes and being OK with it,” Kahn says.