Dollars and Sense
Morgan Ritter’s Poem Tags

Artist and poet Morgan Ritter remembers watching the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, during which — amid the usual red carpet fanfare and celebrity spotlights — R&B artist and soul singer Macy Gray appeared in a metallic, floor-length dress with lace sleeves. Down the middle of the violet-blue fabric, from chest to mid-thigh in capitalized sans serif font, ran the words “MY NEW ALBUM DROPS SEPT. 18 2001.” When Gray turned for the cameras, hands on cocked hips, Ritter was able to read the concluding statement emblazoned across the vocalist’s derriere: “BUY IT!”

Ritter cites this as a formative chapter in the evolution of her Poem Tags (2020–ongoing), a series of aphoristic embroideries scaled to the approximate dimensions of a garment label. Alternating tonalities, the fabric scraps switch between rueful disclosure, bureaucratic directive, and fortune-cookie benediction. Koan-like, the phrases in Ritter’s tags arise from intuitions during breath exercises, long-form poems, and ideas for unrealized works. You want elves / You get elves is an extract from iSn’t She, a book of poems written between 2013 and 2017. SPACE AVAILABLE / For pleasure & dreaming mocks up in miniature a large-scale installation yet to be produced. Unfixed and readily available in the artist’s webshop, the curatorial placement of the tags remains in the hands of their users: against skin, behind glass, between pages; personal monument or public secret.

The spatial limitations of the form enforce an economy of language that challenges Ritter and her reader. “How short can I write a poem?” Ritter asks. “Can I distill something that is open-ended, a question mark, and have that be expansive enough to be imaginative? One line, two lines, is it still a poem?”¹ In their brevity, the texts become sweepingly abstract. Framed by exuberant graphics of bow-tied ribbons in red thread on a periwinkle tag, “Feelings” suggests an empty placeholder for welling emotion. Or, in red cursive on blue, “The action of a rose / in a window” hints that beauty is a process experienced through time. The tags’ grammars are often surprising, graced by occasional workaday imagery that interrupts and tests their philosophizing flair. For example, written in black on cream: “A WHITE BUTTON MUSHROOM / NOTHING SOMETHING / OF EXISTENCE.” Blurring commonplace objects and phenomenological mystery, the tags demand that we reorient our perceptions of the innocuous and banal.

Ritter’s Poem Tags were originally conceived as roadside billboards, co-opting advertiser sloganeering for more intimate messages.² Actualized at diminutive scale, they displace logos and corporate fine print for humorous eloquence. Intervening in the sites and structures of capitalism, we might understand them in dialogue with the research of Shanzhai Lyric, a collaborative project by Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky. Deriving their moniker from the Chinese word for “counterfeit,” Shanzhai Lyric mines grammatical and typographic errors from imitation t-shirts, recasting foraged nonsense as poetic language. T-shirts printed with the lines “LOVE IS SO SHORT / FORGETTING IS SO LOVE” and “A STIUA TION WHEHE / LEADERSHIP / IND EFFECTIVE / COMMNICATION SKII / COMINTO THEIRO” are two among the many in their archive. Shanzhai, the mimetic mode of production at the heart of the project, is a strangely utopian form, emerging from the vertiginous speed of globalized commerce. Appropriating and reworking designer logos, full-length books, and even electronic goods, shanzhai subverts intellectual property for multitudinous authorship and creates anew through iterative replication. Observing shanzhai wordplay, South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Adidas becomes Adidos, Adadas, Adadis, Adis, Dasida, and so on. A truly Dadaist game is being played with these labels that not only initiates creativity but also parodically or subversively affects positions of economic power and monopolies.”³ A sportswear panther acquires a cigarette and dubs itself “Fuma.” Or, in Ritter’s universe, the “space available” is “for pleasure & dreaming.”

Like a shanzhai shirt, Ritter’s broader practice often springs from found language and material, absorbing detritus spawned casually by capital’s ebbs and flows. In keeping with the far-flung subjects of her tags, the partial and eroded objects in her work are unsettled and interpretable: a sea brick simultaneously suggests industrial waste and a civilizational memento mori; a vacant sticker sheet connotes both the act of play and its termination. If her sculptures and paintings abound with junk mail, shipping pallets, and mulched egg cartons, her poetry similarly emerges from street signs, corporate lingo, misheard dialogue, and dreams. Found language is experienced through incompleteness and interpretive ambiguity. With context abandoned, emphasis is lost. Should we, for example, understand the tag that reads “There is an approachable door” with italics on “there” or “is”? Fragmentary, encoding larger totalities, we might also conceive of the Poem Tags as remnants.

The vestigial materiality of Ritter’s poetic and visual practices communicates a truth about artistic labor: it’s an after hours pursuit, undertaken when the work day has ended and the dishes have been washed — that is, once corporeal needs have been met. Reflecting that continuity of work and life, her poetry is procedural and sensorial, redolent of bodily compulsions. Art and ideas are metabolized alongside the rest: in a 2024 essay, “Vibes of the Periphery,” she equates painting and writing to preparing Concord grape jelly; peeing is a frequent topic of iSn’t She.⁴ Irreverently “making meaning with matter that is not classified as precious or valuable,” her language and work prioritize that which is most central to living and, for that reason, often left out.⁵

Language poet Ron Silliman — who Ritter came to know while her husband studied with him at the Naropa Institute — has attuned himself to quotidian debris. In his 1978 prose poem “Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps,” Silliman assembles unexceptional objects unmodified by verbs: “An open umbrella upside down in one corner of the room. Ritz crackers topped with cream cheese and, beside them, crayolas.”⁶ His 1974 book-length poem “Ketjak” follows a parallel accumulative logic, the same paragraph repeating over and again like the monotony of days, accruing new sentences with each recurrence. Per literary scholar Andrew Epstein, Silliman’s willfully drab dailiness marshals a critique of life infiltrated by the institutions of capitalist consumption; his laundry lists of nonevents can be seen in dialogue with Henri Lefebvre’s characterization of everyday life as “residual” and “left over.”⁷ Rejecting logic on political grounds, like the Dadaists before him, Silliman frames narrative’s production-oriented sense-making as “a mere means to an end,” which is “in bourgeois life, common to all things.”⁸

Despite the earnestness of her tags, Ritter has expressed an ambivalence toward the small-scale texts. She speaks of them as “prototypes and hypotheticals,” “bite-sized” souvenirs that operate adjacent to or in extension of, but never quite level with, her work.⁹ She considers the modest profits garnered by the Poem Tags as a form of making do. At several points over her career, Ritter has also attempted to define what art means to her. She’s termed it “a dream to be protected.” However, she acknowledges that it can encompass “t-shirts, easily disseminated,” “a perpetuation of consumerism, no matter how radical its motivations or aesthetic,” and “a crucible of negotiating perversions.”¹⁰

Recent years have seen a proliferation of streetwear projects that turn wearable goods into substrates for visual art or aesthetic research. Despite intentions of reinserting art into the everyday, their references to critical theory and aesthetic movements play into the IYKYK binary of cultural capital. The circulation and acquisition of wearable goods is a frictionless industry; it’s only too easy to launder your incomplete bibliography with a graphic tee. I am reminded of a frame from Ad Reinhardt’s 1946 cartoon How to Look at Art, in which an animated abstract painting stuns a derisive museum-goer. “You get from it what you bring to it,” Reinhardt writes of art. “It will meet you halfway but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something and so do you.”¹¹ Generally speaking, a t-shirt is nothing like Reinhardt’s painting; it is easily integrable, requiring few conceptual or physical accommodations. It quite literally conforms to the body of its user.

Though the size and price point of Ritter’s Poem Tags make them easy to consume, they remain evasive — difficult to see and, once seen, equivocal. The kitsch sincerity of their ready-made icons belies the heady enigmas inscribed within a flotsam vocabulary of the minor, peripheral, embodied, and sentimental. The tags do not commit the sin of making sense, but rather urge their viewer to slowly parse mutinous linguistic forms. Like Shanzhai Lyric’s indexed shirts or Silliman’s senseless sentences, Ritter’s texts contest the forms in which capitalism invests value and query what it is to center that which has been cast aside. She understands her work as an “instigator of personal, creative logic,” a way of making visible the creation of meaning.¹² It is in this light that we should read the Poem Tags — not as ends, but means.

1. Morgan Ritter in discussion with the author, September 17, 2025.
2. The series took on a fabric form in homage to Ritter’s grandfather Solomon Lemel, a tailor and Holocaust survivor, who sewed secret pockets for his fellow captives. The earliest title for the series was “Hiding Poem Tags.”
3. Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. Philippa Hurd (MIT Press, 2017), 56.
4. Morgan Ritter, “Vibes of the Periphery: A Journal Entry,” I am Alive, You are Alive, They are Alive, We are Living (Center for Art Research, 2024), 58.
5. Linda Lombardi, “Member Spotlight: Morgan Ritter,” Americans for the Arts Blog, October 13, 2021, https://blog.americansforthearts.org/2021/10/13/member-spotlight-morgan-ritter.
6. Ron Silliman, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps (Tumba Press, 1978), 1.
7. Andrew Epstein, “‘There Is No Content Here, Only Dailiness’: Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman’s ‘Ketjak,’” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 4 (2010): 737–8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41261814.
8. Ron Silliman, The Chinese Notebook (Ubu Editions, 2004), 26.
9. Ritter, September 17, 2025.
10. Morgan Ritter, “Attempt #2 to catalogue the functions of Art accompanied by 12 dramatic endings in classical music,” Morgan Ritter, 2019, https://mmmo.info/artas.html.
11. Ritter reposted an image of Reinhardt’s cartoon to her Instagram account on November 12, 2018, with the caption “🖐️Slam Dunk ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️”
12. Morgan Ritter, The Thoughtful Digestion of Unique Objects, Complex Subjects, & Composited Projects (Publication Studio, 2011), 43 and 50.