CAConrad: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 2014, 2016, 2018, 2023]

CAConrad (1966--present) has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. A recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Conrad embraces the occult, ritualistic, profane, and the queer in poems, inviting readers and viewers into “extreme presence,” a concept they developed through (Soma)tic poetry rituals that they began writing with in 2005. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis. This time and their experiences since as a wandering poet-explorer inform their work as politically active in both the polemic and healing senses. Conrad's many books, including While Standing in Line for Death (Wave, 2017) and AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave, 2021), have won a variety of awards and are cherished by writers of all genres.

CAConrad’s poetics is a form of presencing that insists on multiple ways to inhabit experience. A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary from beyond the veil, Conrad brings shape to the whispers of the cosmos. Influenced by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, and Eileen Myles, their thinking, teaching, and art-making participate in the search for hidden yet meaningful relationships between the world at large and the world of spirit.

—from “On CAConrad: Pan-Dimensional Change Agent in Vibratory Communion,” by Hoa Nguyen, published in Poetry, April 2023

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CAConrad's selected poems and prose in order of publication:

2014

“Introduction to (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals”

On the train ride home I had an epiphany that I had been treating my poetry like a factory, an assembly line ...

This introduction underlines CAConrad’s foundational poetics commitment to the “extreme present,” which involves embodying, inhabiting, and “being with” a moment or a poem in the act of creating and writing itself. What Conrad observes is the association of ritual, an intentional set of actions that are often formulaic and performed for a specific outcome, and the everyday “ritual” of automated, robotic labor required of the workforce. In some ways, the mundane motions of labor and everyday survival are as ritualistic as the intentional act of writing. Conrad found a question and a curiosity around turning those mundane, daily actions of living into moments of creative opportunity. The idea of the “extreme present” encompasses the finding of poetic inspiration in moments when most people are actively escaping by way of preoccupation. Distractions and preoccupations rob individuals from feeling, experiencing, and recognizing moments of joy. This detachment within the self amplifies anxieties about the future and a mourning of an unchangeable past; for Conrad, detachment takes away the ability for someone to be in a moment of presence ripe with possibility. “I had been treating my poetry like a factory, an assembly line,” they write, “and doing so in many different ways, from how I constructed the poems … this was a crisis” that made them recognize how the act of writing and creating was focused on production rather than creation. Growing up in a family of factory workers, Conrad recognized how this production translated into a lineage of family members unable to escape the exploitation of their labor and robbed of joy, creativity, and the inescapable repetitiveness of the labor that also allowed them to survive. For Conrad, every place, instance, and occasion holds creative potential through the practice of living in the “extreme present.” Always being present in whatever place one finds oneself allows for an opening and a reorientation away from being a factory worker in one’s own life: making “products” for production, not for enjoyment. 

“It’s Too Late To Be Careful”

       for
       wards of the 
       forward state
       who like different 
       things to kill alike
we CANNOT occupy Wall Street but
       we CAN occupy Kabul

This poem’s layout asks readers to read from right to left, the opposite order for English readers, to symbolically, perhaps, critique narratives of “progress.” Conrad’s poems often come alive on the page in a moment or moments where the past, present, and future unite. The present self or speaker of the poem makes charges about the past/present, such as “we CANNOT occupy Philadelphia but/we CAN occupy Baghdad” to call attention to the American political moment and demand that something be done now, in the present, to have a future, to “watch our/phoenix rise/I believe/in us.” The speaker’s tone is brash and angry because, as the title suggests, we are beyond and “too late,” in many respects, in the present, meaning that society has already waited too long to deal with the vast legacy of violence sanctioned by nation-states. Despite their protests, the speaker also understands that the past cannot be forgotten, going far back in time to remind readers “we’re the kind of poets/Plato exiled from the city limits.” By referring to Plato and his Republic from which poets were removed because of their dangerous political nature, this poem points out the long legacy of empire and violence that perhaps repeats precisely because history does not remain in the past—rather, it always exists just as the past, present, and future coexist.

2016

"Mars.1"

why are you angry you said
              why are you not I said

This short poem meditates on the emptiness of desire for love and connection when troubled by military violence. The longing for desire, “silos full of air,” as the speaker of the poem searches for some semblance or validation of themself by “watching myself for / full details in a strange man’s pants” distracts from the violence happening outside this individual’s moment. Though the distraction is brief and led by a desire to feel desired, it’s undercut by the ending lines: “we let / the soldier board the plane / shot in head three days later, why are you angry you said / why are you not I said.” This epiphanic moment asks that two things exist at once: both the recognition and remorse of something preventable. “We let / the soldier board the plane” expresses the speaker’s anger by inaction and the simultaneous ambivalence of the addressee, whose desires are possibly always their focal point. 

The poem asks the larger question of how individuals can lose sight of what happens around them because they are preoccupied by what’s happening inside them and their individual experiences. Though one partner correlates the death of a soldier encountered with a larger, global militaristic problem, the other partner experiences a situation in which intervention would be abnormal or extreme, so much so that the “you” doesn’t even consider it an issue worth being upset over or troubled by. Perhaps what Conrad implies through the narrative of this poem is that, sometimes, what can feel so obvious or simple in recognizing or giving passive acceptance for violence is a violence in and of itself. 

2018

"Glitter in My Wounds"

            first and most important
            dream our missing friends forward
            burn their reflections into empty chairs
we are less bound by time than the clockmaker fears

CAConrad’s work always pushes against the romanticization of nostalgia. The danger of nostalgia is the longing for a past remembered as better or more desirable than the present and wanting to return to that better time. People longing for this past remember what was good often in an ahistorical or anachronistic perspective because the past they remember was not as good for everyone as they remember—and perhaps their memories are also faulty. To counter this notion, Conrad instructs, “dream our missing friends forward / burn their reflection into empty chairs,” beckoning readers to conjure and imagine those people, rather than the past, who have been lost to the forefront of the imagination, the poem, and the historical moment. 

Conrad is making a personal and historical reference to the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which the LGBTQIA+ community was abandoned, scapegoated, and blamed for the causation and rampant spread of the HIV/AIDS virus. Culturally and socially, identifying oneself as other than straight or living any type of life perceived as “deviant” labels one as suspect or is cause for ostracization. As history notes, the U.S. government and media specifically targeted gay men as those directly responsible for spreading a virus and creating an epidemic that affected many people across all demographics. 

Conrad challenges despair, grief, and loss by asking those who recall the experience of mass loss, death, and grief to never let those memories of loved ones be lost to a skewed narrative of the past. The poem beckons readers to “burn their reflections into empty chairs” so that the images of those lost remain present as if they had never perished. Conrad challenges the capitalistic temporal mode of time that flattens itself toward a trajectory in which progress means forward movement and any looking back on time or on history can be validated only by what events in history governing powers and people deem important or victorious. The word victory is a loaded term meant to hyperbolically represent a historical narrative told by dominant powers of the time and how dominant narratives control what they allow to be remembered.

                                          heterosexuals need to see our suffering
                            the violent deaths of our friends and lovers
              to know glitter on a queer is not to dazzle but to
unsettle the foundation of this murderous culture

In this turn of language, CAConrad utilizes the clinical term heterosexuals to employ the same or adjacent derogatory charge that the term homosexual has carried throughout history. To turn the phrase society accepts as the preferred identity into a direct address narrows a population to its sexual preferences as has been done to the queer community and directly asks for acknowledgment of this categorical violence. Conrad also addresses how the queer community, known for its “dazzle” and “glitter,” is belittled to spectacle and performance, with the stage being the only place where engaging with such so-called societal deviance is acceptable. 

What Conrad points to is how the very act of glittering is a rebellion against a culture and society that would erase such a community while it capitalizes on the marketability of deviance. Calling in the historical legacy of Oscar Wilde, who stood trial for the “crime” of being homosexual, Conrad writes,

              you think Oscar Wilde was funny
                     well Darling I think he was busy
                            distracting straight people
so they would not kill him.

Critiquing and commenting on the ways that queer performativity served as a survival mechanism, Conrad conjures Oscar Wilde into the very chair referenced lines earlier to show that queer people have always been on trial, and it is the patterns of history that escape judgment.

From the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

7 Poems from “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”

              I am a
            bride of
          poetry in
        my orange
      and purple
    gown an
     unequaled
      extinction
      machine

The curvature of these seven poems is the formal poetic equivalent of a spine. If it were an X-ray, this is the curvature of deviance that has upheld CAConrad’s twisting, vertebral works across their oeuvre. A boomerang, by definition, is a curved thing that, once thrown, returns. As with the seven poems, returns are infinite. “I’m a poet / not a motivational speaker,” Conrad proclaims. This commanding line insists that poetry can operate beyond the linguistic mode of proclamation to separate itself from language that intends to influence and language that seeks to ignite expression or difference. Conrad’s tone is a trademark of their poetic voice because it at once demands and questions and in its definition drives the poem with prowess.

       looking elsewhere
          is another kind
         of looking away
         it was the same
        during the early
            years of AIDS
        just ask straight
          people my age

The comparison of looking away then to looking away now refers to the poetic voice that recognizes how disaster and humanitarian crises can be ignored, not only by those who were not affected at the time but by those who chose to ignore the aftermath. Conrad voices this speaker as a survivor and illuminates the macro issue of who survives and holds the power to tell the story. With the lines that follow, “how can we follow a horizon / yet still fear death,” Conrad inserts their authentic poetic disruption, 

       just relax it’s not a
        white flag out the
          window it’s my
            new panties
            I will never
           surrender

The tonal gift of this long poem is a definitive, demanding resistance to surrender, a voice that refuses to bend toward any one time line but rather is jagged with parts that exist in its “extreme presence,” with memories that do not forget a past and a body flagging itself for the future. This future doesn’t recognize clichè signs of surrender but rather utilizes the way in which all waving symbols of defeat can be turned into swaying signs of resistance.