poetry

(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals with CAConrad

Please join us to explore how (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals can help us see the creative viability in everything around us. CAConrad has created writing rituals using the night sky to design homemade star constellations, another ritual to dream with crows, and many others, from talking with trees and ghosts, translating Shakespeare’s sonnets with crystals, and coping with the destroyed wilderness of our planet.
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.”

BIO: CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of 9 books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. UK Penguin published two books in 2023, and a new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024 titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

Sound & Background: Using Etymology to Kickstart Your Writing with Michael Mercurio

We all know that poems are “the best words in the best order,” but how do you find the best words? This workshop will provide you with tools for finding them through etymology and sound.

Bio: Michael Mercurio lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Palette Poetry, Sierra (the magazine of the Sierra Club), Lily Poetry Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Bear Review, Sugar House Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust + Moth, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

Michael curates What The Universe Is: A Reading Series, which happens monthly on Zoom. He is the Director of Community Engagement for the Faraday Publishing Company, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering discourse of enduring value rooted in the work and experiences of the global majority, and he also serves as a member of the steering committee for the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, held each September at Emily Dickinson’s house. You can find out more about Michael at poetmercurio.com.

Digital Death Drive is a dip into finding poetic inspiration via digital technology. In class, we’ll briefly discuss the ethics and theories of technology as a means of artistic production, weaving in the history of techno music. Then we’ll launch into different means of unlocking a poetic flow through use of personal technology. Please be prepared to use a smart phone and feel free to bring a laptop. If you have neither of these, no worries! We’ll have some on hand.