Cody Simpson is Prince Neptune. It is unclear if Prince Neptune the poetry spawned Prince Neptune the fashion label or the other way around, but the former offers a pretty wild window into a Hollywood celebrity’s soul. “Enter now the eternal summer,” reads a passage from Simpson’s Prince Neptune: Poetry and Prose, published in 2020.
“The crystal tropics await. A tribe of deep electric jungle. Face paint.
Drum rhythms. Semen sprawled upon trees. Marble palaces on canals.
Naked women on great green lawns. Joyous, sensuous copulations. At night.
Beneath the incoming rain.” The trees won’t know what hit them. When the book came out, Simpson described his process of narrowing down his best 100 poems from the 300 he had scrawled in notebooks since the age of 18.
One of his favourites is called Man has never discovered new islands in previously charted waters . He often worked “intentionally” on a 1950s-era typewriter, and was partly inspired by American writers from the ’50s such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A lot of the time, he let a stream of consciousness guide him.
“Some of what I write is more aphorisms, quotes and sayings, and then sometimes I’ll write short stories, bits of prose,” he said in a 2020 interview with Paper Mag . “I wanted to assume the role of Prince Neptune, use it as a pen name and alter ego ..
. an alias.” In 2023, he reflected (via Instagram), that he released this “dazed and somewhat disorderly first collection of wor.