Audio

CAConrad and Hoa Nguyen on Crystals, Crows, and Cannibalizing Poems

April 18, 2023

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: CAConrad and Hoa Nguyen on Crystals, Crows, and Cannibalizing Poems

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

CAConrad:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”)

we can prepare
 our shadows to be
  chewed apart or not
   but the chewing
    will commence

Adrian Matejka: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Adrian Matejka, editor of the magazine. This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded this prize. But this year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, 11 poets were selected. This was a nod to the 11 decades of the magazine’s existence. For this week’s episode, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975, CAConrad. We asked CA’s friend, the incredible poet Hoa Nguyen, if she would interview them for the podcast. Hoa writes of CA, “As a poet, they enact the role of Magician and High Priestess at once. A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary from beyond the veil. CA’s (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals are legendary, as is their love of crystals.” Here’s CA and Hoa talking about how they first encountered each other in 2001.

CAConrad: When Hoa Nguyen’s first book came out, Your Ancient See Through, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was mesmerized. I remember reading that book several times from beginning to end.

Adrian Matejka: CA read the book out loud with friends and taught the book as part of an epic poetry class.

CAConrad: First of all, epic poetry is usually a man’s thing that they like to do, and it’s usually about war. And that book as an epic is just so exciting. Everybody’s just expecting something else, and they start reading that and they’re like, “What’s happening?” And then when I met you, it was, I don’t know, it was just sort of like you burst out of a mountain, I got to see you finally, it was so exciting.

Hoa Nyugen: (LAUGHS) Well, I think you actually sent me like my first fan letter.

CAConrad: Oh!

Hoa Nyugen: Yeah. I remember, “Who is this CAConrad in Philadelphia?”

Adrian Matejka: About four or five years later, Hoa went to Philadelphia for an eco-poetics event and met CA in person for the first time.

Hoa Nyugen: I remember that first meeting. And you went and you introduced me to your favorite spot to view a sunset.

CAConrad: Oh, yeah, we did that.

Hoa Nyugen: At the top of a parking lot.

CAConrad: At the top of a parking lot in Philadelphia. I haven’t lived in Philadelphia for over a decade now, but yeah, I lived there for many years, and it was lovely when you would come to visit.

Adrian Matejka: Here’s Hoa Nguyen speaking with CA Conrad. You’ll hear Hoa bring up CA’s late boyfriend, Earth, who was murdered in 1998. Earth’s murder remains unsolved. The conversation begins with a Tarot reading Hoa gave CA around 2013, just as CA was about to embark on finding a somatic poetry ritual to help them overcome their depression surrounding Earth’s death.

Hoa Nyugen: You drew two final significant cards: the Magician, a figure that our friend Damian Rogers calls “a pan-dimensional change agent,” and the High Priestess, who she notes uses vibratory communications. And these were such perfect cards for you. Especially now thinking back, because as I recall, you were about to leave for a writing residency at MacDowell. And this was when you were writing While Standing in Line for Death, when you were turning to writing and ritual, after the murder of your boyfriend Earth to cope with and cure the depression that came. And it seems to me your relationship to transformation is such a significant part of your practice. And I was hoping you could talk about how you use vibratory communications in your practice as an artist.

CAConrad: I love that question. Thank you for asking that. And in that particular ritual that I did at MacDowell, that was all centered around vibration. He gave me a crystal the last time I saw him alive. And it was filled with his information about his life, his laughter, his feelings. He gave it to me just as he was getting on the road to go to Tennessee to work on a garden for a while to recuperate. I mean, we lost half of everybody we knew to AIDS. He was one of the chief organizers of ACT UP at the time in Philadelphia and he was burnt out. So after his murder, I was devastated and I hid that crystal for myself. You know, things that we know about crystals is that they’re used for their vibration, they’re used in computers, they’re used in phones, industry and science have been using them for years. But I wanted to push that technology. And I had a smaller round crystal that I would swallow every morning. And its job is to go through my body and extract his information and embed it into my blood, bones, and tissue. I will put the crystal he gave me that was in his pocket for a year and a half in my hair wrap pointed on my forehead, and it was the last thing I wanted to do, I didn’t even want to see this crystal. And it worked so quickly. It was just proof to me that the things we don’t want to do are often the things that we should do immediately. And how I knew it worked is because I had this pernicious film in my head that I had created, that was just torturing me, that the police were being kind, which is, you know, a joke, because they were, they basically covered up his murder. There’s been a whole documentary about it. But what I loved is that it vibrated through my body. And that film, where I was trying to feel better, I guess, you know, these things we create in our minds, it just went away, in less than a week. And one of the directors of MacDowell was in the audience when I was giving my presentation. And she was surprised at the end, she’s like, because, you know, I have it, I would go to the bathroom in the morning and then sterilize the crystal and eat it again. And she’s like, “You mean, you’ve been shitting crystals at MacDowell?” And I said, “Yes.” She’s like, “That’s amazing!” (LAUGHS) But yeah, working with vibration. But the thing is, you know, my last book, AMANDA PARADISE, was all about that, too. I filled my body with the field recordings of extinct animals. And now this latest work that’s in this new issue of Poetry, this is a different kind of vibration. This is a more hands-on vibration, where I’m literally, when I’m around certain creatures, I’m doing certain things to my body.

Hoa Nyugen: I’m excited to ask you about your new book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. I know it’s forthcoming from Wave next year, 2024. And I also think of boomerangs as vibratory objects, but I also understand them to be the oldest form of human flying device, and something that First Nations people use to hunt and dig or as a weapon and in ceremony. And that some of them are designed to return. I’m wondering if you could start by telling me something about this compelling title. And did it come to you from an instructional dream?

CAConrad: You intuited this, I love that about you. It did. It came—here’s the thing. So the title of this book is called Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, like you were saying, and this is the line it comes from: “I lift the pen, prepare for their answers when speaking with the dead, listen to the golden boomerang return.” To me, this golden boomerang was about speaking to the dead. So in this dream, the boomerang was flying from my hand. And it spun in place in midair for a long time. And it was turning golden because of the sunlight. But I wasn’t clear whether that sunlight was the sunset or the sunrise. So I immediately started looking for landmarks to see if I could figure this out. I was able to determine that it was sunrise because there was a tree that I know very well. And it was behind the tree. And I would always see the sunrise behind that tree. Once I understood this was the sunrise, it returned to me immediately, and landed in my hand. And it was hot, and smooth and beautiful. It was the most amazing dream. Sunrise made sense, because I’m more open to these voices that I write with, these ancestors or dead friends, lovers and family, they’re clearer to me. So I think that’s what it is. And that’s why I put that in the poems. And they were talking to the dead. And I did a lot of research. I thought I knew about boomerangs until I started really reading about it. And, you know, I always assumed that they originally came from Australia. And there’s a possibility they did. But they’ve been finding them all over the world. They’re in ancient America, India, Africa. And as you said, they’ve been used for all kinds of different things, even musical instruments. And I just love, too, thinking about the idea of the imagination who said to themselves, “I think that I can take this thing that came from the earth, from this tree, and spend enough time with it and care so the aerodynamics are just right, that it will fly through the air and then come back to me.” I’m a little put off by the American use of boomerang. It really irritates me. You know, there’s all this like, oh, you know, negative things boomerang back to you. And how dare you? You know, I mean, it’s this beautiful thing. I think about the fact that Native Americans gave us baseball. And there’s a sport with boomerang, and I love watching it. And sometimes they can keep them in the air long enough that they come back after four minutes, which I find extraordinary.

Hoa Nyugen: It’s interesting, too, that the terms that seems to be maybe objectionable is this idea of return, but return, it seems to also be an important part of your ritualizing ceremonial practice, and also like your concerns of returning to animal intelligence, like what you were starting to share with me about this manuscript, that I know that it was informed by a series of encounters with animal intelligence during this global pandemic, which was marked by social uprising. And I was hoping you could share something about those encounters and introduce us to the animal figures in your manuscript.

CAConrad: I would love to. This makes me very excited, because the last book, AMANDA PARADISE, like I was saying, I used extinct animal sounds, these recordings. You know, I’m in my late 50s now, and in my lifetime, we’ve lost 70% of the wild creatures. But after I completed that manuscript, and it became a book, I wanted a ritual that did the opposite. I wanted to work with animals that are thriving in the Anthropocene, that have found a way around all this pollution that we’re creating. And it started in Seattle, Washington, where I spent most of COVID lockdown. I couldn’t believe the experience that, how it all unfolded with the crows. If people aren’t familiar with Seattle, let me just briefly tell you, it’s one of the world’s largest populations of crows. In fact, it’s, they’re so vast their numbers that there’s a crow research center at the Bothell campus at the edge of the city. There’s so many crows that there’s a sort of a crow justice that I was witnessing. They just don’t care what any other creature or human, especially human beings want. One of the neighbors across the courtyard, the crows would get up very early at sunrise and they’d be sitting on his balcony having their conversation. And he would take a broom to them. And I watched those crows attack him when he went to—he had to run to his car.

Hoa Nyugen: (LAUGHS)

CAConrad: I loved that. He deserved it.

Hoa Nyugen: Crow justice. (LAUGHS)

CAConrad: (LAUGHS) And there was a cat that was absolutely terrorized by these crows. Cats have it rough in Seattle. This cat, it was a little orange tabby cat, it would run from tree to tree trunk, just cowering and the crows would follow, screaming and throwing things down at this cat. And it was really remarkable. The crows, I was feeding the crows—I’m a Capricorn, so we’re, we just wake up working. And during the pandemic, I was like, I gotta keep busy. I had all these friends who were not Capricorn—and we’re fine alone, Capricorns, but I had all these friends, especially my Pisces friends were calling up all the time, like, “Oh my god, I gotta do something.” I’m like, “Write a poem, do something, write poetry. You write poems. Do it.” Well, anyway, I would feed the crows, I put the food out before the sun rose. And there would be so many different groups of crows throughout the day that I would be feeding. And one of the crows eventually allowed me to hand feed them. And then one day just sat there and lowered their head a little bit and I reached out and touched their beak. Maybe that was an invitation. But here’s the thing about this crow. Before I was allowed to hand feed them and pet their beak, they brought me gifts. And the first gift that came I really thought, “I think I’ve been out here too long during this pandemic, I don’t know if this is really for me.” But it seemed like it was. It was a little twig that they would shake and then set it down and tap their beak on the glass. Pick it up, shake it again. It kept repeating this. I was like, this seems to be really a message for me. And then they took a cracker and flew off. But the next day, they brought me a very small nub of translucent plastic, a little round piece of plastic. And they went through the same routine of picking it up, hammering the glass with their beak. And I realized this was really happening. Because that was a decision they made. They found this piece of plastic, and they’re like, “I know who’s going to like this.” Like that was for me. It was beautiful. It was one of the most favorite exchanges I’ve ever had with another living being on this planet. And it kept going, there were seeds of different kinds, there were berries. A linden tree seed and then there was a little green bouquet almost. It was on a rare sunny day and I saw it glowing as it came toward the window. It was after that gift, the 12th gift was gold. It was a gold, piece of gold foil. But what I love is that the evening of the first gift, the twig, the original twig, I had a dream that the crow brought me gold. And this very bossy ex-boyfriend was in there saying, “You better thank that crow,” you know, all this kind of thing. And I was so amazed when the gold came. Aren’t there 12 days of Christmas, the song—

Hoa Nyugen: Yeah. 12 months in a year. Well, I was also thinking of gold returning to you.

CAConrad: The gold returning.

Hoa Nyugen: Like the golden boomerang.

CAConrad: And you know, getting back to the boomerang, thinking about things returning, I think about the number 7. And I really love studying the shapes of our numbers. I mean, I like the shapes of poems to be, you know, in the shapes of letters. But the shapes of the numbers are very different. Those ten numbers with the 0 through 9, those were made by magicians centuries ago. And 7 in particular, you know how gamblers always say “Lucky 7”? They love 7, gamblers. And it’s because it’s a boomerang. You draw it from the bottom up in two strokes, one, two. And whatever you put into it, it flies off the top, there’s that, with this force off the tip. And then it brings back your wishes to you. I’m fascinated by that. And in the New Testament, 7 is assigned to Jesus. I mean, I’m not a religious person. But I was raised in a born-again Christian household, so I learned a lot about these things. The devil was given 6, I think everybody know that, 666, which makes sense, right? 6, you travel down the spinal cord, and you circulate in the lower chakra, it’s all the lower, the sexual organs and all that, that’s the devil, it makes perfect sense. And Jesus gets 7, where you’re flying up to heaven, for your wishes, for your prayers to be answered. That’s what that’s all about.

Hoa Nyugen: And I know that like, numbers are also really important to how you structure your work and organize your sequences. And if you wanted to share anything about that, or, or maybe something about

CAConrad: I can.

Hoa Nyugen: Okay, cool.

CAConrad: Because it’s a disturbing dream. (LAUGHS) Another dream from writing this book. So, I wanted there to be 72 poems, because 7 plus 2 makes nine. And the thing about 9, it’s indestructible. No matter what you multiply into 9, it heals back into itself. 2 x 9 is 18. 1 + 8 is 9. 3 x 9 is 27. And keep going, you know, 45, 54, 63, 72. You can’t do anything about it. It’s going to heal whether you like it or not. It’s the epiphany. It’s the going, the number 9, the energy goes up the spinal cord, and it circulates in the crown chakra. It’s this epiphany, I love it. So, I wanted 72 poems, but I accidentally wrote 73. So I cannibalized one of them, and basically fed those pieces to other poems in the manuscript. I had a dream, I came home with groceries in the dream, and six of the poems in this new manuscript were having sex on my bed. And I thought, “This is very unexpected.” And they were really going at it. I mean, this was almost like a porn video with these poems.

Hoa Nyugen: Orgy.

CAConrad: Yeah, an orgy. And they were very upset with me. And they started throwing letters at me. And they couldn’t really talk. They would make these guttural sounds. And I thought, I remember thinking to myself, “I wonder if I can teach them to talk.” And one of them galloped, it was terrifying, galloped to the edge of the bed, to better aim at my face and was throwing these letters at my face. (LAUGHS) And they were stinging in the dream. When I woke up the next morning, I realized, because I know these poems by their shapes. And I knew those six poems were the poems that I cannibalized the other poem for and fed to them to. I believe it was the lines of that poem that I cannibalized trying to reunite or some kind of sodomy ritual they were doing, I don’t know what was going on. But it was disturbing. I was disturbed for a while. (LAUGHS) I thought, “What have I done?” Maybe there should be 73 poems, but I’m not, I’m not going to do it.

Hoa Nyugen: You’re not going to change the manuscript? (LAUGHS)

CAConrad: No, it’s going to be 72.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: Your poems are beautifully shaped. They don’t adhere to the left margin. They often take shapes that I think you’ve described as shards in the past. Sometimes they look arabesque. You could say it looks like maybe a salamander with a partial tail. And I was hoping you might read a poem from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return.

CAConrad: Thank you.

(READS POEM)

  a shotgun above every
    door where I grew up
      I did not mean to
        get her ashes
          on my shoes
            I will wait
              to walk in
               the rain
               refusing
               to exert the
              stress of time
            everyone envied
          everyone’s shotgun
       behind their backs
   our favorite game
  when I was a baby
 was to throw me
   off the roof
    then run
     downstairs
      to catch me
       oh how we
        laughed

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: CA, ceremony, ritual, and the imagination, purpose towards transformation seemed to be at the heart of your practice. And I love what you say in AMANDA PARADISE, when you write, “falling in love with the world as it is.” I was hoping you could say something about that and how it’s operated in your practice across your life as a poet and maybe share something about that expression now.

CAConrad: Thank you, Hoa. That line that you’re quoting, that’s the whole idea of this new book, that I want to fall in love with the world the way it is, not as it was. Because the last book was all about the world as it was, because all those creatures are gone. And I wanted to spend time with creatures that are absolutely thriving, somehow, mysteriously, on this planet right now. Crows, cockroaches, rats. The rats of Rome are beautiful. We need to change our relationship with these creatures immediately. And we’re not going to. There’s so much money being made with extermination. But the proof is that you can’t exterminate them. What was the question again? (LAUGHS)

Hoa Nyugen: (LAUGHS)

CAConrad: Sorry.

Hoa Nyugen: It was about falling in love with the world as it is, and about how that operates in your practice now.

CAConrad: It’s really important, I think, to fall in love with the world the way it is. It’s almost as important to do that as it is to understand that we need to be completely clear about everything in front of our eyes right now. And I say that because I keep encountering so many young people right now that want to talk to me about poetry that, they asked me, I mean, you know, “You use this term ‘somatic’ and ‘soma’, does that mean that you’re doing drugs?” And I said, “I’m glad you asked, why do you ask that?” And they would say, well, I like to do, they would mention the drugs they like to do to write poems. And I would say, “Well, I would like you to try to not do that.” And I told them that when I was a teenager in Philadelphia, there were always these old men around me who just said the worst things you could say to somebody, as a teenager, they would say, “Wine loosens the tongue.” Now, why would you say that? And they were alcoholics, and they were miserable, and they were ruined. It’s ridiculous. We don’t need these things. We absolutely don’t need these things. It’s really important that we get on board with this, this idea. It’s just destroyed so many poems. But more importantly, so many poets and the lives of people around them. I’ve seen it, I’m sure you have too. I want us to have more clarity. And that means getting off, getting away from all of this illusion that we want to dip into, because people are afraid right now, I understand that. Something else I’m constantly confronting is people telling me—and I’m sure you’ve heard this over and over again as well—that when they’re depressed, they do their best work. I want to say that I understand. And they’re right. But I want us to think about why they’re right. Because if you think about it this way, this is my theory. Not everybody agrees with my theory, but you know, I do, because it’s my theory. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Hoa Nyugen: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

CAConrad: It’s not—when our lives are going in the direction, you know, we get up in the morning, all of our routines are unbroken, there’s so much to get through this day to remember: brush your teeth, obey traffic signals, there’s so many things to do. But when there’s a tragedy—now, I’m not talking about depression where you need to be medicated and there’s a chemical imbalance. I’m talking about depression that results from a lover leaving you after seven years or an illness or somebody’s in the emergency room, something like that, something terrible has occurred. This is what I think people are referring to when they talk to me about depression helping them focus. Yes, it does. But why? So, when we have all these things we’re doing during the day, to get through the day, when there’s something dramatic that happens, some terrible thing, all the things that we normally think about vanish, and our mind centers around this one terrible activity. That’s why we can focus on the poems, because our mind is freer. That’s what I think it is. I think it’s as simple as that. And once we realize that it’s the focus the depression gives us instead of the depression itself, well, it’s the most liberating thing then, because you can make the focus be whatever you want. And we can stop living in this way of thinking—I mean, I’ve met people who believe that if they’re not depressed, they’re not going to be able to create. That’s a terrible way of living. I think everybody should be going in the opposite direction of that whole theory.

Hoa Nyugen: When you write in—there’s a poem I’m looking at, actually, I was going to ask if you could also read about mind and body being separated. There’s something also about this kind of focus of attention. So I was hoping that you might grant us a listen to that one as well.

CAConrad: Thank you. I’m, I like the shape of this poem. It almost looks like there’s a bit of a decapitation somewhere in it.

(READS POEM)

            mind and
        body can only
      be separated through
        decapitation
                 another
                    mistake
                    we have
                    lived with
                    for too long
                    when it’s your
                    turn go or
                    hesitate
                    which
                     will
                       it
                       be
            I’m a poet
              not a motivational speaker
               I keep trying to tell you
              press a hand to
             the rumbling
wrap yourself in elegy
  we kill 3000 silkworms
    to make one
    pound
   of silk

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: There’s that attention to and relationship with animals again. And so much of your practice has to do with relationships, it seems, forms of connection. And communications between yourself and place, between yourself and animals or the nonhuman, between your practice and your political commitments, but also, significantly, yourself and other poets. And for the latter, in your work, we often find poems that are dedicated or devoted to friends or poets living and departed. And that relationship with the dead seems to also be really present for you. And I was hoping that you might just say something about that focus in your practice and in your poetry.

CAConrad: I just really believe that we are connected and we’re collaborating, whether we think we are or not. It’s funny when I received the Ruth Lilly Award, which is why I’m in this issue of Poetry Magazine. I asked very specifically, I said, “Am I going to have to say anything or perform?” And they said, “No, no, no, you’re just there to be celebrated with the other winners.” And I said, “Oh, great.” So I didn’t prepare. But then I found out when they were handing out the awards that they did want us to come up and say something. Which I was, I was completely thrown off. And I said, “What will I do?” And then I was on very quickly, and I just had to get up there. And I said, “Well, I didn’t prepare for this, so I just wanted to say thank you to everybody I’ve ever met, because you all had something to do with these poems.” And then I just left, that was it. People were laughing, but I really meant it. And I think that there’s nothing in this world that we experience that doesn’t become part of it. I mean, the thing that makes each of us so unique is our experiences really, in this way. It’s like we are building lenses to see the world through, read poems through. And I mean, in a way, this has a lot to do with a lesson I learned very early on as a poet. I’m grateful that I learned this lesson when I was very young. My poems were verbose when I was a teenage poet, entirely too many words. But the reason there were so many words is because I wanted to make absolute certain that everybody understood exactly what I meant. Well, that’s, that’s not possible. It’s just never going to happen. Because every single human being is going to come to the poem with their own experiences, the things that they see, and they’re translating it through that lens. It freed me up immediately. I got rid of every adjective. And I mean, The Book of Frank, there’s not a single adjective in that book. I stripped all of them out, just weeded out all the unnecessary language. Let the adjectives be for the reader. In fact, when I meet somebody who says to me, “Well I don’t like to read poetry,” or even worse, they say, “I hate to read poetry,” I don’t say it out loud, because I don’t want to be rude to people, but I think to myself, “Well, maybe you’re a lazy reader, you know, you want connection, you want everything to be connected.” Nothing wrong with that. That’s what prose does for you, go ahead, you know, read a novel. But if you’re going to read a poem, you’re required to bring your imagination. We’re corresponding ideas for the reader that they bridge together. And that’s what’s exciting to me about poetry. But I’m happy I learned that as a young person.

Hoa Nyugen: And it does seem to come back to these relationships with your, your gratitude to every person that you met, but also, the ways in which we correspond both reader and writer and audience and author. I was wondering if you could, speaking of, there’s a poem I would really love for you to read that has both mentions of dreams, other authors, and the relationship between animals.

CAConrad: Oh, yes, this poem—do you mind if I say just a little bit about this poem first? I’m not going to use the names because I’m not here to gossip. I’ve been the subject of gossip all my life, why should I participate? But I had a professor years and years and years ago, I was writing a paper about “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville’s Bartleby. And my paper claimed, I believed—I still believe I’m right—that that was Melville’s answer to the transcendentalists. I believe he did not like them. He, you know, Melville worked on Wall Street. You know what I mean? He was with a man on the boats where the whale—you know, it was like, he was very different. He didn’t want not even anything to do with these people. So what does Bartleby do? He goes behind the green scrim when he begins doing his like, contracting himself from the world. And the green scrim to me is Walden Pond. And I think it was Melville’s way of saying, “Oh, you want to be a nonconformist? Well then just curl up like a child and die.” And by the end of that story, Bartleby is eating gingersnaps, children’s things, and he’s in the fetal position. I mean, it’s so clear to me that Melville was not thinking of Bartleby as a hero. Quite the opposite, I believe. So I decided to just put it in a poem.

Hoa Nyugen: Yeah. What did the professor say when you turned in that essay?

CAConrad: He was, oh, well, he, first of all, he loved the transcendentalists is the problem. It was like “How dare you?” kind of, just like “How dare you?” came out of his mouth. But I was ready for it. I was like, “Oh, yeah?” and I just started arguing with him, because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do in college. Really it wasn’t. (LAUGHS) As it turns out.

(READS POEM)

       the hill
     appeared
   in many dreams
         never sure if
        it was real
      Melville
    aimed his
  gun at the
Transcendentalists
    and named it Bartleby
     we can prepare
       our shadows
        chewed apart or not
         but the chewing
           will commence
I saw a spider eat a fly
 I saw a praying mantis
  eat the spider
   I did not mean
    to see these things
      the spider caught my eye
       then the spider was gone
        into the green body
       we begin to discern
      waning time as
     seasons through
    our organs

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: Thank you. Do you mind if I request a poem?

CAConrad: Oh, sure.

Hoa Nyugen: I was thinking about my last question and relationships with other poets. And I have a really strong memory of having a Zoom conversation with you in 2020 with the—you had bay windows behind you. And seeing crows coming right at the window and then landing at the ledge and then departing in numbers. It was quite astonishing. And also of you visiting me and doing your nails and there being glitter that we would find months later.

CAConrad: (LAUGHS)

Hoa Nyugen: And remember you fondly. So I was hoping that you might for me “Glitter in My Wounds,” which appeared in Poetry.

CAConrad: Yeah, Poetry published this. And it’s funny when Poetry magazine published this poem, I received an email from the editor saying, “I’m sorry that people are talking badly about your poem.” And I was like, “What are they saying?” And I looked over where he directed me, and they were complaining about the fact that it wasn’t rhyming and things like that, it’s like, I’m not having this conversation. That argument people were having against this poem was from another century or something, you know? (LAUGHS) You’re kidding me. I’m supposed to be upset about that? And by the way, you know, I just want to say before I read this poem, whenever I read this poem on stage I dedicate it—so, a little over a year ago now, my friend Marie Fontini died. We were the exact same age. And when Marie and I were very young, all of our friends were dying of AIDS. And Marie had a telephone, I didn’t have a telephone, this is before cell phones and laptops, this is long ago. I didn’t have a phone at all. And I didn’t own a car. She had both of those things. So I would ride my bicycle over to her place. We would start calling our friends, our sick friends, to see who needed groceries, who needed to go to the doctor, who, you know, all these things to do. And I dedicate this to Marie because, not only because we were doing all of those things, but because she understood the hard work that there was to be done. And she also understood that the reason there was so much work to be done back then, is because 95% of all the heterosexuals we knew abandoned our community. I mean completely. Not coming to the funeral, I mean, just like, gone. But I dedicate this to Marie.

(READS POEM)

“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
this morning all I want is to follow where the stone angels point
                      birdsong lashing me to tears
                              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
         defiant weeds smashing up through cement
                      you think Oscar Wilde was funny
                     well Darling I think he was busy
                             distracting straight people
so they would not kill him
if you knew how many times I
have been told you’re not like my
gay best friend who tells me
jokes and makes me laugh

no I sure as fuck am not
I have no room in my life to
audition for your pansy mascot
you people can’t kill me and
think you can kill me again
I met a tree in Amsterdam and
stood barefoot beside it for twenty
minutes then left completely restored
     yet another poem not written by a poet
                    sometimes we need one muscle to
                                     relax so the others follow
                                 my friend Mandy calls after a
                               long shift at the strip club to say
                             while standing in line for death I am
                        fanning my hot pussy with your new book
                   will you sign it next week my fearless faggot sister

CAConrad: Thanks for asking me to read that. It was unexpected.

Hoa Nyugen: (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: I’m wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about your decisions about making the poems look the way they do on the page. I’m also interested in how the poems are being featured in these installations. And if you can tell us about some of those.

CAConrad: The answer about why they’re shaped is a little unexpected, I guess, to some people. So I started writing poetry in 1975. And between 1975 and 2005, my poems were almost exclusively on the left margin. But in 2005, that’s when I began working with the (Soma)tic poetry rituals. And I believe that these spirits that I was writing with were just saying no more of this left margin thing. And then this voice literally came to me in the morning, and it said, “We are trying to show you the way out of the violence of the line.” And that’s where they get these, they’re very almost like natural shapes. And it didn’t happen very fluidly, I have to say, like I resisted at first. And when I would resist, I would literally, I actually felt like vomiting. Not a figure of speech, I felt like I was maybe getting sick. But when I started moving them off the left margin, I would feel better, it was almost an intuitive thing to do that. And then I just surrendered, which is hard for a Capricorn to do. And then worked and was like, just surrender, just be, just let them tell you what to do. And I never know what they’re gonna look like.

Hoa Nyugen: And I know that, you know, you wanted to mention some of the other animal figures in Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Did you want to mention one of those other encounters?

CAConrad: Well, after COVID lockdown, you know, most people wanted to go out and be around other people. And I was accepted into a residency program, the Joshua Tree Highlands residency. Incredible. So I spent all this time alone again in the desert. And they knew what I wanted to do, they knew I wanted to feed animals and be with them. Could I actually read a letter that I wrote? So, Eoin Dara, who is a curator in Ireland, he wrote to me while I was down there and said, “I am curating a series of letters for this festival. And I’d like you to be in the anthology. Do you have a letter?” I said, “You know, I don’t. But I would like to write one.” Because at the time I was dating this man who was a truck driver, and he was going to be coming down to visit me. So I decided to write the letter to Trey and explain to him what I was doing down there. And I just really would love to read this letter if you don’t mind.

Hoa Nyugen: That’d be great.

CAConrad:

(READS LETTER)

Dearest Trey,

It is 45 degrees Celsius this afternoon here in the Mojave Desert. I’m missing you. When do you arrive? The intense heat makes things seem further away. How’s it doing that? Here is a new poem for you. Wet your finger in your mouth and spell each word onto your chest and keep that finger moist, my dear. Losing something too important to lose is hard the first time. So next time ransom April’s song before it finds itself. I took my time finding the right man to build this wall against the phantasm. We’re rowing to the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. We send our love. When you get here, I will introduce you to the nine animals who are part of my new (Soma)tic poetry ritual. The nocturnal animals include a band of howling coyotes, who comb the sand and cactus around the house each night looking for something delicious to eat. The kangaroo rat is one of my favorite creatures who lives in the desert. My binoculars are good enough that we can watch their whiskers and little hands hold sunflower seeds to nibble while balancing on those massive legs, which actually evolved to kick their way out of the rattlesnake’s jaws. I had a dream I was breastfeeding a kangaroo rat. It was beautiful. My mother came in the room and screamed. But you calmed her down while I continued to enjoy feeding my friend whose little claws were gently tangled in my chest hair. “Queers can breastfeed?” I nodded to her. “Yes, I used to breastfeed my stuffed animals as a child, didn’t you know?” What a strange thing, to dream of my mother seeing me feed a small animal with my body and that you had to intervene on my behalf. Queer needs for queer nerves revealing themselves in new ways. Remember, a few years ago, I asked you to cut my arm with your bowie knife, so I could write a poem while observing my cells and their 27-day repair cycle. This is something special. There is something very special about this, about having the body be part of the writing experience. And with these birds and animals in the desert, each one is assigned a spot on my body. For instance, when the glorious quail come bopping in the yard, running across the sand together, I lightly caress my right jaw line with my left thumb, brush it ever so lightly for thirty seconds. Locating an animal on myself is an incredible way to enter the writing. You will love this. The kangaroo rat is my left nipple. After the dream, how could it be any other part of me? The coyotes are the back of my ears. I can easily imagine that if one of them would let me rub the back of their ears, they would like it a lot.

CAConrad: There were also road runners, things like that, that’s what I would do, I would put these animals on my body and then write. And then here in Greenfield, Massachusetts, I’ve been working with red squirrels, black squirrels, gray squirrels. There was a bobcat, but, you know, I didn’t really work with the bobcat too much. I have this feeling that poets need to be speaking up a little more about being different in the art world than the way they want us. Do you know what I mean?

Hoa Nyugen: Yeah, represented as part of the installation rather than as an appendage to it, or.

CAConrad: Exactly. Instead of asking poets to read at their opening. And I’m not rude about it, but I am very direct about it. I don’t want to be rude to anybody. But I come off that way sometimes, because I’m direct, but I’m definitely not. And people write to me saying, “Well, can you read my opening?” I’m just like, “No, I don’t do that.” And it was like, “Oh, what does that mean?” I said, “Well, I would rather be in the show, especially if it’s a group show.” And they’re like, “What does that mean?” I said, “Put my poem on the wall.” And they do. And sometimes it gets even better than that. Angela Conant from the EFA in New York City. She wanted me to be at the opening. And I said, “I don’t do that, Angela.” And she said, “Well, what, you know, what do you want?” I said, “I want a poem in the show.” And she said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I said, “Well, I’d like a poem to be six feet tall. And to be human size. All my poems stand on the bottom of the page. Like they’re vibrating inside their own center, like they’re creatures.” And she thought about it. And the next day, she had this brilliant idea. The poem is called “Memories of Why I Stopped Being A Man,” and it’s all about warfare. So she had this great idea to print it on six feet of chiffon, it’s actually eight feet of chiffon. Chiffon is a fabric, I can’t think of a single male piece of clothing made with chiffon. It’s perfect. And she hung it up, you know, away from the wall a bit that so that it would shimmer, which was amazing.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Hoa Nyugen: I can really see that your poems have this embodied presence. I really think of them also in an organic way, like what you’re saying about how you arrived at the shapes, that they seem to have their own capacities to take shape, which also seems to be tied to your practice.

CAConrad: Yes.

Hoa Nyugen: Thank you so much for this great conversation.

CAConrad: Oh, I’m so happy I get to talk with you, Hoa. I mean, you’re one of my favorite living poets. It’s like a dream.

Hoa Nyugen: This was wonderful. Thank you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Big thanks to Hoa Nguyen and CAConrad. Hoa Nguyen is the author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Violet Energy Ingots, and Red Juice, all published by Wave Books. CAConrad’s latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, out from Wave Books in 2021. Their new book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, will be out spring 2024. You can read seven poems from the forthcoming manuscript in the April 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. This show was produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thank you so much for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)

This April’s issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence. This week, we hear from a Ruth Lilly Prize winner who’s worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975: CAConrad. The poet Hoa Nguyen writes of them: “A queer activist, a diviner, and a visionary from beyond the veil, Conrad brings shape to the whispers of the cosmos.... You could say that CAConrad’s practice is a form of magical studies, a practice in dialogue with the ineffable.” We asked Nguyen if she would interview CAConrad for the podcast, and they get into crow justice, poem orgies, and the fact that we are all collaborating whether we think we are or not. We also hear several poems from CAConrad’s forthcoming book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024).

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