Course:CA Conrad - Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the future wilderness
In my apprenticeship with CA Conrad I was drawn to their powerful style in writing. The visually stimulating concrete structure in their poems. And mostly utilising their (Soma)tic rituals as a prompt and indication to my poetic practice during this year and beyond.
“One morning I made a list of the worst problems with the factory, and at the top of that list was "lack of being present." The more I thought about this the more I realized this was what the factory robbed my family of the most, and the thing that frightened me the most, this not being aware of place in the present. That morning I started what I now call (Soma)tics, ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible. These rituals create what I refer to as an "extreme present" where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.”
Right now as I am writing this with an avalanche of deadlines weighing upon the shoulders of my brain, I cannot help but agree more with CA. It was the fear I had; as I explained to my colleagues during the invitation of my apprenticeship with them. I came here to the program to write. Half of the writing I did was due to deadlines. The other half because I did not know what else to do but write it down. However, with a genocide occurring across, with across being too close to home I do wonder if this is not the factory assembling again and again. Yet as people pray to gods for salvation all I do have is poetry and this term I was grateful to have CA guide me along this trying and terrible months. In a world that keeps trying to sell us consumption and distraction Conrad challenged me to stay in the present. The extreme present they call it. I jokingly added during the week of my invitation that I am not sure Conrad and I would ever be friends. Assuming they would ever want to either or that we would ever meet. The process of the apprenticeship was extremely intimate. Reading through Ecodeviance I realised how we share many things. We both appreciate absurdity; if perhaps I, understandably so, take myself less seriously that Conrad does. It was consoling knowing that another poet (am I a poet?) remains haunted by all the horrors around them. How everything parallels and interlinks for them. In "Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return" we experience them drawing links between the HIV pandemic and COVID-19, and here in Ecodeviance they end the book with a ritual involving cleaning a crystal, speaking to it, burying into a hole in the ground and what is close to a dreamscape ritual. This is the poem that came of this ritual titled "GRAVE A HOLE AS DREAM A HOLE":
OBLIVIOUS IMPERIALISM
IS THE WORST KIND
is ho-bo
short for
something?
i just got
called one
someone
recently said
"HEY your nails
are beautiful but
the rest of your
outfit is just okay"
glamour is my
great love but its
too expensive and
too much work
my beautiful
glittered nails are
my HOMAGE to GLAMOUR
every time I hear an interview
with a fashion model talking
about HOW HARD her job is
walking up and down the runway
up and down
so much walking
i become very tired in my
vicarious glamour fatigue
and I must nap
everyone around
the world knows
america's real
fashion statement
is bullet holes
every single
day we
spray the
arab world
with bullets
sometimes in
the faces of
babies we
don't have
special
little
bullets
for the
baby
faces they
have to take
our adult-sized
bullets right in
the middle of
their little
crying baby
faces BLAM take
THAT BABY it's
american
fashion."
Perhaps part of the objective of remaining in that extreme present is that the past is already and still happening.
Perhaps CA and I could be friends after all.
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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