Occult Poetics with CAConrad
In this talk, CAConrad will discuss how poets’ occult and paranormal experiences and practices
in the past show us how to trust that these same forces are alive and at work today. Rumi,
Hannah Weiner, Will Alexander, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, and Ariana Reines are some poets
whose work and practices we will investigate.
CA will also discuss (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals as a practice for all writers and artists. These rituals
provide a window into the creative viability of everything around us, initiating an "extreme
present," where we learn how, even in crisis, we can thrive through the poems and learn to
collaborate in unexpected ways with other artistic disciplines.
Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, “CAConrad’s poems
invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and
propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.”
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest
book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received
the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew
Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages,
and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit
poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and
Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at
https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88