a genreless literary journal
42 Shard
43 Shard
45 Shard
46 Shard
Interview with CAConrad
Erika Walsh:
Towards the end of your book, Amanda Paradise, you speak about the shapes of your poems, explaining that one morning a voice, upon your waking, spoke to you and said, “You have too many straight lines in your human world. We want to show you the way out of the violence of the line.” What are the ways you think more experimental, less traditional poetic forms work in resistance to "the violence of the line"? What makes the line violent?
CAConrad:
Thank you so much for interviewing me, Erika! Yes, from 1975 to 2005, my poems were on the left margin for the most part. We experience the violence of the line when we work in an office building constructed with the speed and efficiency our empire demands. All those easily cut straight lines for walls, steps, ceilings, doors, picture frames, desks, chairs, cabinets, shelves, books, paper, computer screens, ID badges, all of it. The natural world curves and curls in contrast to the manufactured, angular human world. We humans pretend we are in charge of this planet, but cubed eggs would be sliding out of rectangular chickens if we were. In 2005 when I began writing with (Soma)tic poetry rituals, my Muse, ghosts, or spirit guides said that I would no longer rest on the left margin with my poems. Now my poems have bodies.
And in my latest book AMANDA PARADISE, they wanted to stand, meaning all of the poems end at the bottom of the page. Their starting lines are where their heads belong, depending on how tall or short they are. The artist and curator Angela Conant invited me to participate in an art exhibition in New York City earlier this year called "Boy Box." The poem is from the new book called MEMORIES OF WHY I STOPPED BEING A MAN. The poem and the show challenge toxic masculinity and the wars blooming carnage from our empire. Angela printed the poem on a very confronting 6 feet of chiffon fabric and hung it from the ceiling, allowing the poem to take their place standing as a human being could stand.
EW:
One of your somatic rituals involved drawing extinct animals on index cards with email contact and answering questions about them to anyone who inquired. What do you feel are the benefits of writing and creating in this way, outside of institutions and publishers, and instead placing yourself in immediate contact with others? How does this change the way you work?
CA:
When teaching (Soma)tic poetry workshops, I have made hundreds of personalized rituals for people over the years, many for people working inside various institutions.
I love your question because I first began working with these rituals because of the horrors of what jobs can do to our lives. Let me explain. My family works in factories, and when they go to work, they become extensions of the machines they operate for 12 hours a day. To survive these jobs, they shut the present off in their minds and live in the past and future. Can you imagine being present for a cardboard box folding machine all day? I'm pretty sure we would lose our minds if we did. When they go home after a long work shift, they cannot flip the present back on. As a child, I absorbed and learned this coping mechanism. Once I realized this behavior guided my days, I needed a new relationship with time, and (Soma)tic rituals are the solution. When I write inside a ritual, I am anchored in the present and cannot think of anything else except what I am doing.
EW:
I was so interested to read that, when practicing your newest (Soma)tic ritual post-Amanda Paradise, the Ignition Chronicles Ritual, you dreamt that a crow was going to bring you a gift of gold foil, and it later did bring you in waking life. In your poem “GOLDEN IN THE MORNING CRANE OUR NECKS” you also mention that "in a past life I was a little fish who/cleaned the shells of turtles/a dream/helped me remember/their deep voice of thanks." Do you often have prophetic dreams, and in what ways do your dreams (prophetic or otherwise) inform your poems and rituals?
CA:
That was so exciting with the crow! They flew to my window ledge to eat crackers, peanuts, and cherries that I put in a little bowl. They brought me 12 gifts, but it was the night of the first gift where I had a dream that they brought me a large piece of rectangular gold foil. And in real life, the 12th gift was gold foil! It is round instead of rectangular, but it is GOLD! I love it! I laminated it and now keep it with me at all times. I need to write a will and say that the gold foil goes with me into the oven!
EW:
In your poem “72 CORONA TRANSMUTATIONS” you write that "bullets put an/end to the/imagination" and later in the book you speaks towards how "monotheism's holy scriptures have wielded [Heterosexual Violence] against queers for centuries." What are the ways poetry, creativity and imagination can work against violence? What is the role of the artist, of the writer, in working against violence?
CA:
Thank you for this question. It's the kind of conversation I want to have. Queer and straight people need to be working every single day to end heterosexual violence. The rate of murder, suicide, and other forms of early death is incredibly high among black transwomen. All three major monotheistic religions continue to maintain the traditional tools of heterosexual violence because they have been effective at instilling fear to control their congregations. The designers of "homophobia" knew that most straight people have homosexual inklings; therefore, outlawing these desires and making them sins is the perfect way to get everyone policing their bodies and the bodies and desires of everyone around them. Queers have been underground on and off for centuries as a result. Before the age of the singular God, pagan cultures worldwide had room for multiple genders and celebrated sexuality instead of condemning it.
My boyfriend Earth was bound and gagged, tortured, raped, covered in gasoline, and burned alive. The men who did this to him hate queers, and we know the exact origin of that universal hatred. It took me years to recover; in fact, I am in the middle of it. In my previous book, While Standing in Line for Death, I did a (Soma)tic poetry rituals to cure my depression. I am grateful to say that it worked. I will always love him, always miss him, but I am glad to feel happy I am alive and moving onward.
Your question about the artist's role in working against violence is tricky. I believe too many artists are involved with the opposite when you think about the thousands working for the military-industrial complex designing killer drones and bombs. We must realize that among the many progressive, thoughtful students in art academies, there are also students who want to work for the most dangerous forms of evil on our planet. Our job is to never shut up about the grotesque disregard for the life we see around us.
Over the years, activism changed my poems, working with ACT UP, Sane Freeze, Greenpeace, antiwar marches, and gender and racial equality demonstrations. Getting to experience the Occupy Wall Street movement firsthand was a tremendous shift for many of us. Occupy was one of the most successful movements in leveling leadership by making every organizational decision horizontally. I am very grateful to have experienced the Occupy movement, and I miss the magic touch of it all.
EW:
Toward the end of your book you reveal that Amanda Paradise is the author, and by CAConrad is its title. When did you realize that Amanda, who you describe in “WE VANISH INTO ONE ANOTHER AS NEEDED” as "the kind of/bitch who yells/HUMANS ARE THE INVASIVE SPECIES/every time they point at a pretty/flower and say it is not/being pretty in the/right place" was the author of this book? Were you channeling her perspective, or writing through a kind of persona? What was her role in the writing process?
CA:
She has been growing alongside me all along. In 1984 I decided to rid myself of the very gendered name I grew up with for the genderless CAConrad. Merging with our various bodies can be done unconsciously, but I prefer to remain awake for all procedures undertaken.
EW:
You mention in your poem “DIVING INTO THE PREMONITION” that "Wolves give birth in late April an/entire species of Tauruses." As a Taurean myself I found myself especially drawn to this line! It made me wonder how much research went into this book. What did the process of gathering information for this book look like?
CA:
The breeding season for wolves is in late winter. They cannot afford to have babies in the dead of winter because they might not survive. Like everything we humans do, astrology tends to be just for our species, but of course, toads, bears, and cheetahs also have birthdays. What does a Capricorn mouse look for in their Virgo partner? I put this in a poem in the new book, but one time a man asked me, "if poetry could possibly fulfill me," and I answered, "but it is the study of everything." Most people I know in this lifetime are poets, and everyone is always studying something and putting that something into their poems.
Sticking with wolves and research, part of what did not make it into the book was studying this United States's fantasy of "wilderness." While I have been vegan since the 1980s, I grew up hunting and eating meat and know that world well. When writing with this (Soma)tic poetry ritual for AMANDA PARADISE, I read the hunting magazines regularly. In states such as Idaho, you will see a listing for wolf hunting licenses. No one is eating wolves, so this is for the human thirst for violence. When wolves kill, it is what Alice Notley refers to as a "clean kill." The killing of wolves in the US happens when they pour out of the so-called protected areas of the National Park system. In other words, this is not "wilderness," this is a well-managed safari, or as I call it, a museum of fur, fangs, and hooves. We exterminated wolves and bison from the wild, then felt bad about it, so we reintroduced some of them back into the "wild," but they are not wild, not really. If you are trimming the "wild" herds and packs with guns again, they are not wild. The US empire has so many fantastic lies for us to resist.
EW:
You dedicate many of these poems to other poets and reference other poets throughout your work. Who have been some of your biggest influences, and how have they influenced your writing?
CA:
Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, and Eileen Myles were my main influences as a young poet. And my friends, including my non-poet friends, inspire my poems. The "how" has many answers, but the main gift is clarity.
Some recent poetry that has overwhelmed me with its brilliance: Jane Goldman, SEKXPHRASTIKS (Dostoyevsky Wannabe Press), Nat Raha, of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press), Divya Victor, CURB (Nightboat Books), Joey Yearous-Algozin, A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat Books), Nadia de Vries, I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe Press), Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books).
EW:
Your poem “72 CORONA TRANSMUTATIONS” is of course extremely immediate and rooted in the present moment. It was interesting to read this along with poems that were written while listening to the sounds of extinct animals, and poems about your memories as a child and your memories of living through the AIDS epidemic. Setting aside the fact that time isn't quite linear, and we are still dealing with many of these "past" problems in the present moment, do you find there is any distinction between writing about something as it is happening, and writing about a memory or something that has happened before?
CA:
As much as I am living in the present while writing with (Soma)tic poetry rituals, the fact is, we can only write about the past. Writing about something that happened five minutes ago is still writing about the past. Being present is difficult. It's like trying to focus on something out the window of a moving train, everything zooming past us into the past. But I like this question because pain and suffering, at least for me, are easier to write about when enough time has gone by to clarify survival and the ruin left behind.
EW:
In “72 CORONA TRANSMUTATIONS” you write "if you do not think there/is something positive/about this virus/we are all/hiding/from/think/of the/animals." What are the ways you think animals and nature have perhaps benefitted from the way our world is changing? Has your connection to animals and nature strengthened during this time?
CA
Oh, I love this question! Some ornithologists claim that a partial reason for reduced bird populations is that they cannot hear one another over our human noise. We are so loud we are preventing birds from hearing their mating songs. But the covid pandemic allowed our fellow creatures to move and breathe and hear and live a little better. And now, all of that is coming to an end again. Let us be clear, though; it was a little better for the wild creatures but not for those we keep in captivity. Each year 70 billion animals are raised on farms and murdered and made into meat; this does not include the billions of animals incarcerated and forced to lay eggs, forced to give up the milk they produce for their young, the honey they produce for their young. We humans are parasites of the worst order. Consider, too, the animals incarcerated for their wool, their fur, and those kept in cages in zoos, and used by police for various invasive and violent purposes. They outnumber us by the billions, but there is no way for them to know so they can rebel and take back their lives from my species.
EW:
In your poem “CAMISADO” you say "poetry is the opposite of escape/but makes this world endurable." I love this idea and would love to hear more about the thought process behind this. What are the ways that poetry bring us closer, rather than offering escape? How does it work to make the world more endurable?
CA:
The very nature of poetry requires participation. I have nothing against novels, but we are being led through connections to form a story's path when we read them. Poets do not sew all of the thoughts together for the reader, meaning there is work to do. When people say they hate to read poetry, I shrug, assuming they are too lazy for what it requires. The actual space around a poem on the page is for the reader's imagination. Reading poetry is the act of writing and creating, and in that, we sharpen our tools of understanding how to make the lives we want.
EW:
What does a perfect day look like for you?
CA:
The empire of the United States has ENDED and begun the process of taking all of the money of every person who made fortunes on manufacturing weapons and using that bloodied, violent wealth to rebuild the millions of lives destroyed by those same weapons.
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death and Ecodeviance. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
