Alana Sorensen: I was enjoying
your new book While Standing in Line for
Death, and was wondering why there are 27 poems in that first set. It occurred to me because you did a tarot
reading for me last night that you called “the 27-card reading.” What’s up with you and this number?
CAConrad: Those poems come
from a ritual that cured me of depression I had since my boyfriend Earth was
murdered. That sentence still feels strange
to me no matter how many times I say it, mostly because I cannot believe that I
am allowed to feel happy again. But it
is an important number, and not just for me.
AS: What do you
mean? Important?
CA: In Sanskrit 27 is
a harshad number, which literally means “joy giver.” There are 27 bones in the human hand. The hand conducts so much of what we do as a
species to give and receive, to build our homes and build the world. There are 27 channels of communication with
God in the Kabbalah and 27 percent of our planet’s surface is land.
AS: Something about
the moon and 27--
CA: --the number of
days it takes to orbit our planet--
AS: --that’s it! We have a Blue Moon every year because the
months are wrong.
CA: It takes 27 days
for a human cell to regenerate.
AS: It is also the
atomic number of cobalt.
CA: I am in the
middle of a two-part series of workshops called, “Mapping Dimension 27” for KW
Institute of Art in Berlin, and CAC in Vilnius.
AS: (laughs) CAC, like your initials?
CA: (laughs) Yes, but in Vilnius it stands for Contemporary
Art Center.
AS: So what does this
have to do with your workshop, and why mapping?
CA: It was an honor
to be invited to do these workshops in dialogue with the fascinating work of artist
Ian Wilson. In the late 1960s he shifted
out of painting and moved into language, or rather conversation as his art.
AS: Did you need to adjust
what you normally do for workshops?
CA: That is the sheer
beauty of it, I am a poet, and the whole workshop is layers of conversation through
building ritual together. First with our
conversation about what to do.
AS: What to do?
CA: I am getting
there.
AS: Okay.
CA: We build the
rituals together as a workshop. For
instance, we build a mumbling station, a place for tarot, dance, all kinds of rituals
bent toward conversations of release, including drawing haptics while staring
into a writing partner’s eyes. We take
notes the entire time inside the ritual space and those raw notes are later
shaped into poems. We are also working with
world maps created by the Berlin cartographer Ole Hantzschel. The maps are beautiful and very large. The first workshops were focused on North and
South, conversations about what those directional points mean politically,
spiritually, climate, food, imports, etc.
AS: Like what? How did those conversations work themselves
out?
CA: Well like the
conversation the body has with the planet.
The Northern hemisphere has the highest concentration of political
power, of nuclear arsenal, of wealth.
Much of the human race tends to privilege the brain, the upper
hemisphere of the body. And the Southern
hemisphere of the planet gets pillaged for resources, for slavery, is treated “less
than.” And through monotheistic dictates
the lower region of our bodies are taboo, dirty, forbidden. You know, to say Jesus or whoever, wants us
to be good, to keep our hands above our waists.
AS: Or else you might
be tempted to sin! Long live the sinner!
CA: Long live the
sinner! I knew you would like that!
AS: Oh yes, I do!
AS: Talking.
CA: Talking. Mostly what we have for one another as a
species is an exchange and in that exchange everything can be known about who
we are, even how we feel about the person we are speaking with. It is interesting that as much as 80% of our
communication is nonverbal. Most
children are raised to communicate in different ways at different times. Inflection feels almost as important as
facial expressions, conveying with tonal fashion. I am currently designing a new ritual where I
talk with a different tone for 9 days, but one tone per day, and I must always
use that day’s chosen tone no matter the situation.
AS: (laughs) Like what?
Give me an example.
CA: Well like an
extreme exclamation, like I am seeing a horrible car accident.
AS: You use that all
day?
CA: Yeah!
AS: (laughs) No matter what you are saying?
CA: And no matter who
I am talking with, like, “HOLY FUCKING CHRIST I will BUY THIS APPLE and eat it RIGHT
AWAY!” It is incredibly disruptive not
only to those around you, but internally, physically, emotionally. Another day will be like I am talking with
someone I have sex with. Another like I
am very sleepy, another like I am deeply embedded in anguish.
AS: (laughs louder) Oh it’s exhausting! I took one of your workshops in San Francisco
and I was so exhausted by the end of it!
CA: (laughs) But did you like the poem you wrote at the end?
AS: No! I hated it!
But I enjoyed writing it and I did like the workshop, it’s just I never
worked so hard to write poetry before.
You had us do this crazy thing where we each got to take turns sitting
and writing while the others put their hands on the writer’s head while humming. It was disturbing, like everyone was drilling
through my skull. It made me dizzy.
CA: I call that The
Human Hibernaculum. It has made a few
people sick, dancers in particular, which I find interesting, the people most
in touch with their bodies in my workshops. I have modified that particular ritual quite a
lot now so that no one becomes sick or disturbed. But I love working with dancers.
AS: Well yeah, you
call your practice (Soma)tics! You know
I didn’t like my poem from the workshop but I like the poems you get out of
your rituals. The new book kills me!
CA: Thank you!
AS: It’s very upsetting,
and I don’t know when I’ve ever been so upset reading poetry before. But also elated at times, happy, dreamy, it’s
such a rollercoaster!
CA: Thank you Alana,
that means a lot coming from you, you are a harsh critic!
AS: (laughs) My girlfriend called me that this morning!
CA: (laughs) I am sure it was not the first time! The artist Jason Dodge published two
beautiful little books, two portions of While Standing in Line for Death.
CA: Jason Dodge is a
visual artist who is very generous with poets!
Maybe the visual artist who is the most generous to poets from any time
in history! That first set of poems in
the new book you mention is one of the books he published.
AS: Those poems look very
different in your new book though, why is that?
CA: I stripped them
of all the most personal lines before handing them over to Jason, then later
realized I needed to put it all back into place.
AS: And there are
more of them in the new book, why is that?
CA: That is because 9
of the 27 poems were revenge dreams where I was assaulting my boyfriend’s
killers in my dreams, or sometimes killing them. But I cut those 9 out and gave the remaining
18 to Jason, then later wanted them back in.
Those dreams were a part of my grief that was almost more than I could
handle at times. But I have to acknowledge
the darkness. It was darkness that brutally
raped and killed my boyfriend, I mean he was bound and gagged, covered in gasoline
and set on fire. The coroner said he
died from inhaling the fumes. That kind
of brutality will always remain beyond my comprehension. But it was the darkness I had to travel
through to become whole again, finally.
Those 9 dream poems were an exorcism.
The depression clenched my nerves with such malevolence and the dreams
pried it off me until each morning after waking from each dream I felt lighter. I feel like a deep breath today.
AS: They are terrifying
and difficult poems, even for readers to take in, but necessary.
CA: Thank you. Those poems changed me for the better. And Jason Dodge was very generous. He also made for me a large golden lightning
rod to use in the workshops in Vilnius and Berlin.
AS: What, what is
that?
CA: It is a stunning
lightning rod, the center of which is copper and the exterior is gold, and we
use it in various ways, like conducting energy through one another while
writing. It is an extremely effective honing
and transmitting device. The next half
of the workshops will focus on East and West.
AS: Well that will be
different for sure.
CA: Exactly, like
what is East and West and who gets to say?
Also, I want us to consider ancient texts and alphabets. For instance, the Nordic runes, also known as
the Elder Futhark, the letter or rune Pertho can face East or West. Pertho is considered the Mother Rune, and
when used it can signify ascending forces, or flipped it can mean decline. What I am most excited to consider with
everyone is Pertho’s corresponding letter in our alphabet which is the letter
P. And P’s bulbous portion of course
only and always faces East, the sunrise.
This is important to consider in a culture where we fear death and
decline. It is this very fear that
drives us to destroy entire ecosystems, not wanting to honor anything but the new,
accumulating more and more things, buying shit we do not need, things we only
think we want. Not living in union with
death has created a cultural psychosis.
Denial is always catastrophic.
AS: Are there other
poets doing rituals?
CA: Bernadette Mayer
comes to mind, but with her it is more procedural than ritualistic. She has these marvelous experiments and lists
to work with. I love her work so much!
CA: Rosalie Moore, HannahWeiner, Alice Notely. Eileen Myles and
Audre Lorde are especially important to me, not only for the strength of their
writing, but the way they use it to speak through power they were told was not
theirs to have. They wield a strength
and defiance I wish more poets knew how to locate in themselves. With Myles, it is more integrated inside the
tone of the text, and you can see it begin early in her career in the book Sappho’s Boat where she owns the page in
ways we are used to only seeing men do with a Rimbaud assertiveness. With Lorde there is a deliberate, overt
addressing of what she was denied.
Lorde’s poetry is set to reclaim the world so she can exist in it on her
own terms. But there are other things
besides poets who have had influence on my (Soma)tic poetry.
AS: (laughs) Are you going to talk about being a vegetarian
again?
CA: (laughs) Yes, absolutely!
AS: (laughs) Okay, let’s hear it.
CA: In the 1980s when
so many friends were dying of AIDS I came to macrobiotics. It was something I tried to get my boyfriend
Tommy and other friends who were sick to take on. My decade-long study opened up to me the
research of George Ohsawa and Michio Kushi.
The discovery of not only how the body processes nutrients, but how the
standard US-American diet robs vital organs and bones of necessary nutrients. The human body is from the planet, is a
composition of its elements. The way we
treat our bodies is exactly how we treat the planet. My immersion into this
research led me directly into seeing how writing poetry can be influenced by
the slightest new ingredient at breakfast, seaweeds for instance that feed the
brain, or mushrooms for energy. Like the
rituals themselves, each shift or introduction of a new ingredient alters the
way the language comes out of us and onto the page.
AS: You stopped
macrobiotics in the 90s though.
CA: Unexpectedly,
yes. 1998 is when my boyfriend Earth was murdered. It derailed me in a way I did
not think could happen. I had been so
dedicated to my health through the worst years of the AIDS plague. It was the brutality of the police and their
cover-up of his murder that sent me into a deep depression that lasted for
years, too many years. That ritual you
mentioned, the one at the beginning of my new book, that is the one that gave
me my life back. It broke the
spell. I used a crystal he had given me
the last time I saw him alive. It is clear
quartz, one of the more absorbent crystals, meaning it was a library of my man because
he had carried it around for over a year before giving it to me. His feelings, his breath, his beauty, his
heartbeat, the way he kissed, the way he laughed, it all got recorded in
there. I secured it against my forehead
each morning and would swallow a smaller, round, polished crystal to act as a
worker crystal, pulling Earth’s information out of his crystal and forcing it
into my blood, bones, and organs. Each
morning I would shit out the worker crystal, sterilize it and start all over
again. In under a week I was out of the
dark cover of depression. Immediately I
began taking better care of myself.
During my depression, I had gained a lot of weight and that was of
course hard on my joints and bones, but it is all coming back now, slowly, to a
healthier relationship with body and life, with the natural flow of the planet
and seasons.
AS: It makes me happy
to see you feeling better my friend. Poetry
rituals that can heal. You have so many
different kinds of them, but we are focusing on healing.
CA: This brings me
back to Audre Lorde who said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is
self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
AS: Well that’s
certainly putting it into perspective!
CA: My body is where
my poems are made, so I should take care of it.
Should want to take care of it.
There is an extraordinary poet named Akilah Oliver, she sadly passed
away not long ago, but I quote her in my new book at the end of that ritual for
curing my depression.
AS: Oh yes! It’s such a good quote!
CA: We were talking
after a poetry reading in New York, talking about our planet’s ecosystems
failing, mass extinction of species of plants, insects, animals, and I made
some kind of exclamation about how our planet is dying and we cannot fix
it. But earlier in this conversation I
had told her that I was about to begin the ritual to cure my depression. She touched my arm and said, “CA, you are
about to do a ritual to heal yourself, and you are part of the planet so you
are healing part of the planet by healing yourself.”
AS: It’s
beautiful! What about those 3 political
rituals? You have a variety of them in
the book, but there are several directly aimed at the situation against us
queers in the US.
CA: Yes, they are
each titled “Power Sissy Intervention,” and numbered 1 to 3 with subtitles.
AS: The bubbles!
AS: When I read this
I wished I had been there to see it!
CA: I blew bubbles on
a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina. I was living there for a little while, but it
is one of those small cities in US-America that likes to claim it is
liberal. I blew bubbles while sitting on
a chair on the sidewalk, which of course attracted children. When their parents would come close I would
look up at them and say, “These bubbles will make your children queer.” I said it would make them queer revolutionaries
to help rid the world of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other
forms of stupidity.
AS: (laughs) Bravo!
They didn’t like that!
CA: Oh no, most of
them snatched their kids and left immediately!
It is just like Stokely Carmichael said, “What a liberal really wants is
to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.” It felt important to show that, but show it
in a way that seemed fun, while the fun was really unveiling a very ugly truth
of homophobia. Bubbles do not have the
power to be anything but bubbles. You
know? As though BUBBLES can magically
transform their children into radical, politicized queers on contact!
AS: It’s madness, and
I can just imagine the parents grabbing their kids and getting away from you
and your bubbles!
CA: And this comes at
a time when there are over 200 anti-LGBTQ laws issued in the US. Many of them sticking. There is a new segregation, a legal
separation of heterosexual Christian norms and anything related to being queer. These are state laws, so in some states it is
now legal for shop owners and hotel owners to turn us away. There was a brand-new law this year in Texas
that is so incredibly vicious to queers and it crushes my spirit whenever I
think about it!
AS: It infuriates me
so much!
CA: Me too! In Tennessee, a law which allows doctors who
are Christians to turn us away, and this goes against the foundational
principals of the Hippocratic Oath!
AS: Fuck these
people!
CA: It is very dark
their hatred. And I drive across the
United States a lot, and when doing so now I have to consider where I am and
what might happen as a result. A dear
friend of mine has asked me to consider not wearing nail polish and growing a
beard for the road.
AS: What? Go in the closet?
CA: Yeah.
AS: You wouldn’t!
CA: Fuck no, are you
kidding!? My friends and lovers who died
of AIDS, suicide, murder, all of that homophobia killing them, no way! I left the closet as a teenager for
good! To quote Audre Lorde again, “When
we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still
afraid. So it is better to speak.” There is nothing these Christian extremists
have not already taken from me that is dear.
Fuck them! My fear got washed
away with my grief and depression!
AS: What’s surprising
to me is how these three “Power Sissy Intervention” rituals are very political
as rituals, but the poems coming out of them not as much. It’s like you get it all out of yourself
politically within the rituals, leaving the poems to have whatever space they
want. How long have you been writing
with these rituals now?
AS: And before that
you were writing differently? How were
you writing before and what made you start using rituals? What happened in 2005?
CA: I started writing
poetry in 1975, so for thirty years I was writing poems in what I refer to as
the normal way, if that makes sense. You
become inspired, you grab your pen, you know.
I grew up in a factory town and all my family worked in factories and I
saw what those jobs did to them physically, emotionally, spiritually. Factories destroy people. My grandmother had a shelf in her home with
little pieces of artwork by all 9 of her daughters and sons, paintings,
sculptures, a tiny ceramic pot. When I
was a child I asked her where their new art was, meaning that nothing on the
shelf was after the age of 4 or 5. She was
annoyed and said they did not have time for art, that they were busy working.
AS: Art is only for
children.
CA: Exactly, and I
knew I had to get out of there early in life.
And I did! I ran away as a
teenager, refusing to put my body and soul into the grinding cogs of the
factory. I wanted to be a poet, and I
became one, and I loved my life.
AS: What year did you
get to Philadelphia?
CA: 1984 and I got my
first apartment of my own by 1986. I loved
it! I feel fortunate to have taken so
many of those early risks to be able to have my life just as I wanted it. And for decades I was writing poetry, running
reading series, publishing zines and chapbooks.
Then in 2005 I went back to where I grew up for a family reunion. It was on the train ride home that I realized
I had turned my writing into a factory.
And I could see it when I got home when I looked at my desk, that
brutal, cold efficiency of the factory set in how I was writing, tabulating
poems for magazines, all of that shit.
This was a crisis, I did not want the factory in my poetry! For nearly a month I refused to write until I
figured it out. I mean I did cheat a
little because I took notes for things, but I was not writing. When I wrote I would be up all night some
nights. It was killing me not being in
that space of writing that I loved so much.
AS: Then what?
CA: A few weeks into
this self-imposed exile I woke and began making a list of the problems with the
factory. At the top of that list was the
phrase, “The inability to be present.”
My family is either depressed about the past or anxious about the
future, but never present. The factory
did that to them because they spend so much of their lives being extensions of
machines and who wants to be present for THAT!?
So, they spend most of their time thinking about the past and future at
work and can never shut this way of thinking off. That morning I created the first rituals
where I ate a single color of food for a day for seven days. After the first day of only eating red food
and wearing a red wig I realized it worked because I had created this strange
space where being anything but present was impossible. I refer to this space as the “extreme
present,” and I have done hundreds of them now.
AS: What is the new
one you are working on with extinct animals?
CA: I call it
“Resurrect Extinct Vibration” and it is based on the research from
organizations like the World Wildlife Fund who have crunched the numbers to
reveal that close to 60% of all the wild animals on our planet have been wiped
out in the past forty years. With this
ritual, I gather audio recordings of the extinct creatures and lie on the
ground wherever I am when driving around the US. I use powerful small speakers to flood my
body with the sounds. For this ritual, I
am also including a journal of road notes which are currently focused on guilt.
AS: Guilt from the
extinction of species?
CA: Actually no, my
guilt from enjoying the ritual. I
expected it would depress me, but oddly, mysteriously, these animal sounds fill
me with joy, and I am writing about my guilty feelings about that joy. And now combining it with the guilt I
continue to have from surviving AIDS. I
remember when I got my AIDS test and it was negative I was confused because I
just assumed we were all going to die.
And I also felt too guilty to tell my boyfriend Tommy who was very sick
and eventually died of AIDS. To see so
many people die and to not die with them is a definite burden. Also, I feel very strongly that I must ENJOY
my creative powers on behalf of them, that the pleasure and excitement in
creating things is for them and with them in spirit.
AS: Well I’m so glad
you are here!
CA: Thank you, and
you too! After surviving Auschwitz, the
brilliant French poet Charlotte Delbo wrote, “And finally it would be too
stupid for so many to have died and for you to live and do nothing with your
life.” Living, being creative every
single day, it is beautiful! Like 27 is our
joy giver!