On CAConrad: Pan-Dimensional Change Agent in Vibratory Communion

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.

Transformation is at the core of Conrad’s practice. As a generous and beloved teacher, their (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals are legendary, as is their love of crystals, which they often form into a crystal power grid in their pursuit of transformation. They assemble sites of the possible and create “laboratories of the future of wild unleashing,” to quote “Chocolate Crack on a Stick,” their ecstatic essay on liberation, love, and the imagination.

I think of CAConrad’s art and ways of being as interventions, creative acts that aim to restore conditions for regaining presence. You could say that CAConrad’s practice is a form of magical studies, a practice in dialogue with the ineffable. As a poet, they enact the role of the Magician and High Priestess at once. As Damian Rogers writes of these cards: Magician, a “pan-dimensional change agent,” and High Priestess, a “vibratory communion.” These were the representational figures Conrad drew in a tarot reading I gave them as they embarked on writing While Standing in Line  for Death (2017), a book they wrote when they turned to writing and ritual to cure their depression after the murder of their boyfriend Earth.

CAConrad composes symbolic and mental landscapes that offer us a glimpse of what exceeds the reach of language. Their art is that of ritualized structures that make meaning out of rage and hopelessness; it shapes and transforms emptiness into meaningful correspondence. “Mine is a poetics of uncooperation for all the brutal strategies built to sustain capital gain,” Conrad once said. Against the dehumanizing conditions of the factory in all its forms, CAConrad invents ritual concerning places and creatures, politics and events, the dead here too, rallying cries. What I love most is that CAConrad makes possible a vision of the cosmos, in acts of transcreation, where words, sounds, and images might acquire the ability to remain open to action and insight, to shape new realities.