(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises

FEBRUARY, 2012 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

2012-01-28T16:57:00.001-05:00

PERTHO

(Soma)tic Poetry

SUNDAY

FEBRUARY 12th

3pm

(includes a vegan meal)

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

PLEASE USE PAY PAL BUTTON TO PURCHASE WORKSHOP

if you would like to make other arrangements to pay
please contact CAConrad888@gmail.com

CAConrad updates the (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises web page monthly. He has also conducted (Soma)tic workshops in Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle, D.C., Boise, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop 1.22.12, Philadelphia

2012-01-23T09:01:00.005-05:00

VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM WORKSHOP
14 participants had black thread leading from their wrists to a carrot. The carrot dangled in mid air. Later we cut the carrot into 14 pieces and ATE IT! The NASA Space Voyager recording of the actual sounds of the rings of Saturn playing in the background. We consulted THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS as divination. Everyone counted from 1 to 9 out loud, the book was opened and closed with each count. The page we landed on was PHALLUS. We also reviewed the top 5 regrets of the dying. We ate food, drank wine, CELEBRATED our lives together on this beautiful day in Philadelphia!

#68: CATHETERS FOR SANITY

2012-01-17T10:19:00.005-05:00

for Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Let’s be honest about our culture and say that anyone who makes us remember we are naked animals under these clothes is dangerous. To remove the scandal of it would first require the total annihilation of every bureaucratic agency sending memos through our doors. It is 2012 and some of us have our boots holding back the Return To Modesty Campaign. The American homosexual in 2012 unapologetically celebrates surrendering to the dominant culture’s taste for marital equilibrium and WAR! A swift, unmitigated return to values acts like bookends many willingly throw themselves between. The opportunity to challenge these stifling, life-threatening institutions passes out of the conversation entirely in 2012.

Stupid faggots putting rainbow stickers on machine guns! I’m going to say it: GAY AND LESBIAN AMERICA HAS STOCKHOLM SYNDROME! The campaign to be included in the multi-billion dollar military industrial complex comes at a time when three children die of war-related injuries EVERY SINGLE DAY in Afghanistan. And after ten years of American occupation, Afghanistan has been deemed THE MOST DANGEROUS place on our planet for women. No other place on Earth is worse for women than Afghanistan. How else can I repeat this so you hear it? America DESTROYS women and children! Did you hear it that time?

The genocide of thousands of gay men in Baghdad is a direct result of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The most famous homosexual apologist for fascism Dan Choi helped make this genocide possible while serving as an American soldier in Iraq. American gay rights are all that matter I guess? And the destruction of Iraqi gays is just another item on the list of collateral damage? WILL NOT! To be repeated, WILL NOT SERVE WILL NOT SERVE I WILL NOT SERVE! WILL NOT! Today I WILL LISTEN to only my voice for NOT serving this sanctioned, collective, and REAL evil.

In the morning I performed reiki on a long, thin piece of plastic tubing, reiki with intentions to BE conscious throughout the day of being queer. Queer. Only queer. Today I will NOT ALLOW anyone to change the subject when I talk about what it means to be queer. Today I will NOT ALLOW the liars to step in front of me. Today I will talk about the frustration of watching war go unquestioned by the homosexual community of America. Reiki. I did reiki for half an hour on this plastic tube, then lubricated every inch of it, then inserted it inside my penis. It was not for pleasure of pain, it was for a chronic reminder of HOW this culture inserts its will on my penis more and more each day. You may now be married under our rules. You may now engage in the murder of innocent lives by our rules. I had many strained, bizarre conversations this day, constantly FEELING the tube inside my penis. The following poem is the result of this exercise which was more painful in spirit than it was for the tube inside me. THIS YOUTUBE is of me reading the resulting poem on January 1st at St. Mark's Church in NYC:

JANUARY, 2012 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

2012-01-17T10:15:00.002-05:00

NEW MOON

(Soma)tic Poetry

SUNDAY

JANUARY 22nd

3pm

(includes a vegan meal)

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

#67: CORMORANT STAGECRAFT

2011-12-08T09:54:00.013-05:00

--for Caitlin LaCourse Ryan and Kepler-22b

‎"Venturing into the sun to smoke 
I am proof of nature and all its declarations."
--Ariana Reines

Kitten is my favorite spirit animal, a totem to conquer my various forgivable, discordant planes of constriction. But it is the cormorant I surrender to for my most morbid of human needs. A cormorant DIVES into subconscious water-worlds to resurface somewhere new, and agitates my soul into happiness. When I was a boy I yearned for webbed fingers and toes, and was grateful to Benjamin Franklin for inventing swim flippers. Telling Ryan Eckes about this new (Soma)tic exercise he said, "That's what I try to do with every poem, I try not to drown."

What animal will you require yourself to meet for this exercise? I wore nylon stockings on my hands, then DOVE into the morning ocean off Virginia Beach, American fighter jets howling across the coastal trails, deafening the gulls, frightening the dolphins, and me. Eggs in the sand, nest in the dunes, a wind where all instruction flattens my eager crest. Love in a cormorant call compels a vibratory trance throughout a feral heart, lungs, liver.

Draw eight pictures of your spirit animal in different phases of your enactment of their lives. On the back of each write a message. Write a bit of confession from the bird, hippo, or alligator you choose to be. Create an email account for this exercise to include at the end of the message. Leave the pictures on the subway, in the bathroom at a museum, or on the counter at a coffee shop. Anyone who writes you must receive your animal’s reply. Your animal correspondence is YOUR TRUE correspondence! All your notes from the exercise are for the poem(s) you will create.

video for PRETERNAUTURAL CONVERSATIONS

2011-11-23T15:55:00.004-05:00

JUBILAT Magazine has published PRETERNATURAL CONVERSATIONS and the seven resulting poems in issue #20. To celebrate, they have asked poets to make videos reading the poems.

#66: THE SILENT MEETING GROUP

2011-11-11T00:20:00.006-05:00

--for Ariana Reines

On Halloween, 2011 it is estimated that the 7 billionth human child was born. 7 billion humans are here now. And we have displaced or made extinct SO MANY other species of creatures that we have ACTUALLY lost track! When poet Emily Dickinson was alive less than a billion humans existed on Earth. When she was alive wild bison roamed the open plains of the United States. Today there is just a small group of them in Yellowstone National Park, and those were put there to be wild on purpose because there were literally no wild bison left. They are museums of fur and hooves. We love our museums, they comfort and tranquilize us when we feel uncertain of the choices we have made. I have NEVER been MORE TERRIFIED than I am this Halloween!

Find a space in public to meet with other humans in silence. Create a flyer inviting anyone to come. Please do not invite your friends, it's IMPORTANT to let this time be for you to come together with total strangers. But let it be silent. Make several flyers and hang them in libraries, coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. My flyer read: THE SILENT MEETING GROUP -- WEDNESDAY – 10/26/11 – 5pm to 6pm – 2nd floor couch area of THE BOOK TRADER (2nd Street near Market Street) – ONLY RULE: NO TALKING. Show up a couple minutes late. I lurked around a bit, not wanting to appear too eager because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had created the flyer for the meeting.
To be perfectly honest this (Soma)tic is something I have NEEDED to do. How many people do I meet a day where I say to myself “IF I HAD TO LISTEN TO THIS PERSON EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE I WOULD KILL MYSELF!” Today’s answer: 7!!!!!!! (an exclamation point for every one of them) My threshold for small talk and stupidity is so low in this time of acute poverty and war that I could actually SCREAM when I face it! And in the past five years I have watched rich hipster yuppies take my neighborhood over. It belongs to them now and they know it, and they want me to know it. The amount of bullshit I have to witness at the grocery store is incredible at this point. INCREDIBLE! Watching the spoiled rich be malicious to stock clerks, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU RAN OUT OF IMPORTED OLIVES!?!” This brand of selfishness INFURIATES me! And there are now so many new condominiums in my neighborhood that those of us who rent apartments are the extreme minority. In fact the last public Laundromat in “our” neighborhood shut down and was turned into a ticket office for the ballet and opera. I’m doing my laundry in the bathtub because otherwise I would have to get on a bus and go many blocks across the city to even find a Laundromat to use. My soul is worn thin by human beings who don’t care about the infrastructure of community.

The Silent Meeting Group was – quite honestly – an incredible experience! I hovered around before joining the small group. There were six of us, and after being together in complete silence for awhile you begin to SMELL the others. Smell you, I SMELL something, maybe it's you, yeah, IT'S YOU! And it's okay. You smell just fine, but I smell you just the same. At one point a man in the group started to talk, but stopped himself, then wrote on a piece of paper for us to pass around, “Maybe we can all get a snack afterwards.” He seemed very sweet, however---

IMPORTANT: Do NOT go for a snack! You have poetry to attend to! For the entire hour of the meeting take NO NOTES! Meditate with these other humans, these fellow travelers in complete silence. If no one shows up the first time KEEP TRYING! People WILL show up! Enough humans will show up. You will all show up together. The only notes you take should be in your head. Make note of ALL THE SOUNDS around the group. Do not fear LOOKING at these people. The kinds of people who show up will understand, and will be looking at YOU as well! Look at how WEIRD our world can be! It’s beautiful and peculiar! What and how are we communicating without talking? Remember these things. Then as soon as the hour is up, casually walk away WITHOUT TALKING! NO TALKING! GO, GET GOING, GO SOMEWHERE where you can sit and quietly take account of your silent meeting. Take the quiet with you. I took a subway to a grocery store in my neighborhood. This is what I observed:

Outside the grocery store tonight a man and woman approached the entrance. He grabbed one of the large shopping carts. She said, "Why don't you get one of the smaller ones, we're only getting a few things." He said, "I'M A MAN I'M NOT PUSHING AROUND A SMALL CART!" She rolled her eyes and went inside. HOW FUNNY! I must admit that I had thought he was hot, but when he said THAT he was suddenly 10 times HOTTER! He reminds me of my old boyfriend Nate, a double Leo with a Scorpio moon and a fresh ax to grind every morning until he's had sex and coffee. HAHA!

Take your notes and shape them into a poem. The Silent Meeting Group might be something you want to continue in your life. I think I want it in my life!

2 (Soma)tics published online today!

2011-11-04T23:35:00.005-04:00

MANY THANKS to
Peter Moysaenko of
BOMB! Magazine for publishing
(Soma)tic "Aphrodisios" and its
resulting poem! You can see it
by clicking THIS LINK!!!!

MANY THANKS to
publisher Adam Robinson
and special guest-editor
Benjamin Spivey of
EVERYDAY GENIUS for
publishing (Soma)tic "MINDING
THIRST" and the
resulting THIRST
poems! Click
HERE to read!

#65: SAMHAIN BOTANOMANCY Magic Ritual

2011-11-01T15:13:00.013-04:00

a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun

We went to Occupy Philadelphia on 10/31/11 where the tent city grows by the day for the world that is possible! The encampment is on the west side of city hall, facing the cavern of skyscrapers, forest of glass and villainy. This was late at night, between Samhain and Day of the Dead.

We were down near the subway entrance, and spent time meditating on two small gemstones we had given to one another earlier in the evening. CA’s was chrysocolla, and Debrah’s was red jasper. As soon as the meditation began a snare drum from the camp commenced, followed by another drum, then a bell, then a flute. We took notes for our poems.

We began the botanomancy by reading sprigs of rosemary and sage. One would hold and meditate on the bunch of herbs, then drop them to the ground for the other to read through their fallen patterns. These are the readings:

CAConrad: Two anarchists were making out by the strands of long wild grass, rocking back and forth to the beat of the snare drum. This is truly sacred space. Debrah threw the herbs, ALL the sage was together in the east. Two sprigs crossed over the pile, making a solid railroad tie. Tracks of the spirit world have brought her here to this day. Not just this day today, but to this day where she is the amazing poet she is. Her bio on the last page of her new book (The Ida Pingala – Blazevox Books) says she believes in near death experiences and prays to the old gods. Those are the tracks. Solidly. And they have brought her to the pile of rosemary, bunched together in the west. Rosemary being the foundational herb for magic spells, this packed bunch of rosemary to the west is a magnificent opening to the new, all the sprigs together in the same direction, a concentrated magical force PUSHING toward some unanticipated beginning.

Debrah Morkun: CAConrad threw the herbs, and the majority of the herbs fell into one pile that beamed with light. I held my hand over the pile, to sense the herbs’ vibrations. Botanomancy is a choice endeavor, for plants have a very communicative vibration. I kept hearing the words “planning” as the vibrations of the rosemary & the sage entered my hand. I heard this word “planning” like a cacophony of multiple herbal voices. Soon, Conrad will embark on a world tour for his amazing upcoming book A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, & he will spend quite some time doing necessary planning & prepping for this magical tour. I noticed two rosemary sprigs that had fallen outside of the larger pile – one to the Northeast of the pile, and the other to the Southeast. I touched the rosemary sprig to the northeast first, felt the vibrations of this foundational herb tell me that this beautiful tour itself will lead him into positive magic spirals & he will remember something that he forgot a long time ago. This memory will be so large & so good that he will wonder how he ever forgot this. Next, I touched the rosemary sprig to the southwest. This sprig indicated that before CAConrad leaves for the tour, he will experience a heightened spiritual transformation that will send his entire body & spirit into the highest spiritual vibrations. This spiritual transformation will manifest itself in the most proper ways to prepare him for his tour.

For a little while we took our notes, then we each built further botanomancy ritual-meditations for the poems. These are the rituals:

CAConrad: The drums had changed to a more sustained, deep, steady beat. It felt as if they were working with us, which is part of the magic of coming to Occupy Philadelphia, or going to Occupy Wall Street. The community is a complex mixture of feeling HOME, and feeling like entering a new family, a new kind of family structure. The vibrations were ripe this night especially. At this point I asked that we fix our eyes to a lighted window in a skyscraper beyond the trees above the subway entrance. It seemed as though no leaves were moving, but in fixing the gaze on a solid, unmoveable point, the slight, hidden motions and gestures of leaves would reveal themselves. Sometimes you can only see what moves by staring into what will not. This flickering parade is then revealed at last. To the snare it shines. After a long drink of this meditation we again took time to write our notes for the poems.

Debrah Morkun: Another set of snare drums. I was reminded of Shango & CAConrad’s divinations from our previous (Soma)tic collaboration. I rode the drums for awhile, & felt pulled to a sculpture in the center of the cavernous part of underground City Hall where CAConrad & I sat. Was this a sculpture of an angel or a paper airplane, folded properly & ready for flight? Either way, the sculpture bespeaks of flight, of leaving one moment to seek another, of hope & aspiration. I said, “Conrad, we must walk around this circle & gaze into the bizarre world below.” For this sculpture sits atop an ancient Masonic magic spell of lava rocks & yom kippur, of footballs & elephant ears. An underground glimpse of flora native to Philadelphia, weeds & trees & an interesting bush with red bark. We walked around this circle & gazed below, receiving wisdom transmissions showing us that there is another piece of magic spell in Philadelphia’s magic sluice – where lava rock, non-native to Philadelphia, & nonexistent for miles & miles & miles until you reach the Pacific Northwest or Hawaii, rests creating an eruption of energy that catches flight in the wings of the angel or the paper airplane above.

Drunk from this experience, we took more notes.

#64: HELEN DRIVING Magic Ritual

2011-10-24T21:24:00.009-04:00

(a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun)

We made our way to the roof of a ten-story building. October, Philadelphia, late at night. There was a large yellow arrow painted on the ground. We called the four directions over the arrow.

We took turns standing at the arrow’s tip, facing Polaris, the lodestar. We each drew Polaris into our circle and carried it to a large cement pedestal. We ate from a bar of dark chocolate with a snarling black jaguar on the label, and then we took notes for our poems. Jaguar chocolate and poetry, perfect together. We later used chocolate pieces as chalk to draw a celestial orb with rays and waves emitting off the top of the pedestal.

On a different pedestal far from the black jaguar we had tiny rabbit cookies, which we arranged in a star pattern, eating every fourth one. The large fluorescent light shining down on this pedestal was used for two meditations. First we were to each find a word for this star. Debrah saw the word HELEN. CA saw the word DRIVING. HELEN DRIVING.

The second meditation with the rabbit-shaped cookies and intense beams of industrial light was to listen for a message from a god or goddess for the other. We offer our findings:

CAConrad: Well, first of all the black jaguar made me RAVENOUS for the little bunny cookies! I wasn’t even hungry but I tore into the little cookies! They were incredibly DELICIOUS! We deliberately kept the jaguar and rabbits on different pedestals, far from one another, but I must have brought the giant cat’s energy with me! It didn’t take me long to hear Shango calling. God of drums, thunder, protector of children. He wants to help Debrah safeguard, even inoculate an exposed wound from her childhood. He says “LISTEN TO DRUMS” for drums are the vehicle He rides when He is needed. He says listen to drums while driving in the car especially. Shango wants to raise a wound and in doing so transform the life.

Debrah Morkun: Rabbits are much like stars, & jaguars like the night sky that holds them. Realizing this, I felt the presence of Egyptian Goddess Isis hanging in the air around CAConrad & I. She was not alone, however. Much like the night sky holds the stars, & just like the jaguar holds the rabbit-star, the spirit of Isis came to us residing in the spirit-body of Simon Magus, apocyphral magician & heretic whose magic was so powerful that he was hated by the Apostles because his miracles rivaled the so-called divinity of Jesus. Isis told me to tell CAConrad that he has great powers stored in his hands – that they vibrate with creative & healing energy. To compliment these power-hands, he must find a powerful writing utensil – a pen unlike any he has ever before seen or experienced. This pen must be purple, & it must border on the “gaudy” (Isis’ word), replete with a purple feather, so it looks like a psychedelic modern day quill. This feather must not be from a real bird – feathers of actual birds must not be bought but found – it must be a synthetic feather. The commingling of CA’s energy vibrations & the magic of this pen will spin a power-poem.

After these messages we took more notes. We returned to the yellow arrow and closed the circle in view of our lodestar, our night’s guide, Polaris!

#63: SoMA MoMA de Kooning LoMA

2011-10-22T08:54:00.003-04:00

a collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad, Stephen Boyer, and Filip Marinovich

for the current, 2011 de Kooning retrospective at MoMA in NYC

find a favorite de Kooning. what
do you imagine it
smells like at
10 paces then
5 paces then
what does it
taste like? (ass and gravy, pitch and starlight, calm and sea grass, asbestos and miles of candy, etc...)
SCRAPE OFF
stare at a de Kooning
for 5 minutes
keep track of the image then
free-write for
5-10 minutes then
reduce it to 10 words
use these words to
create an image
or landscape
GOD COCKS
Become a pink angel
in De Kooning's painting
"Pink Angels."
Don't leave the painting
under any circumstances.
If they put you in the painting
in a crate don't leave it.
Stay in the painting
when they vandalize it.
When who
vandalizes it?
When the museum gods vandalize it
stay in it, a Pink Angel
Guardian.
When the museum gods come on the painting
after midnight
with their long thick
museum god cocks
reach out and grab god cocks
and pull them off and
use them as paintbrushes to
paint a reproduction
of De Kooning's "Pink Angels"
on the walls of every bank ATM stall
in New York City,
and then, dear Pink Angel, please
feed me your Ass-To-Mouth god cock now.

2 new (Soma)tic Poetry publications!

2011-10-20T09:52:00.008-04:00

The (Soma)tic exercise,

"OIL THIS WAR" and

its resulting poem

"DUCK CALL FOR DEAD DUCKS"

are in the latest issue of INTERIM Magazine!

Many thanks to

editor Jonathan Skinner!

The (Soma)tic exercise, "DOUBLE-SHELTER"

and its resulting poem "EXPRESS AN INTEREST IN LISTENING OR

FLOWERS WON'T BOTHER" are in the latest issue of LOADED BICYCLE Magazine! Many thanks to editor Martin Rock!

#62: Gender Continuum

2011-10-10T00:02:00.001-04:00

--for Anne Waldman (aka Outrider Anne)

Every morning for seven days I gave my friend Elizabeth Kirwin treatments of reflexology and massage, and she in turn gave me craniosacral therapy. Each morning while on the table I would fix my mind to meditate on seven possible genders for my body, intersex intersecting day to day. Starting with the female skeleton, hormones, glands, and genitalia. OF COURSE START with woman against the fairytale of Adam and his magical life-giving rib!

Day seven was male, but days two through six were variations of our world. The aim of physical, political, and sociological outcomes were in constant flux days two through six. Margins were permitted to drop in meditation. Permission to drop margins is an exceptional space to offer yourself and others. The craniosacral therapy was straightening my spine, relaxing my muscles, and challenging my thoughts throughout the gender exploration. The craniosacral lifted my consciousness while in deliberate concentration on the sex of my body.

Each morning after our healing exchange I would take notes about my physical condition, how it was shifting, mending, and notes on my gender meditation. The notes took no specific course other than a personal demand to divulge all hidden words and needs breaking free through the experience. I am a woman. I am a man. I will be neither, or bits and parts of both with blood and imagination flow on the increase. And that increase is a prodigious stream tempering the spirit, today, tomorrow, again, again against a wall. Up the wall. Over the wall. Away from the wall. The world as it could be (or a collective version of it) is always trying to bend the air around itself to be heard. The risks of the day are holding themselves out to us, yet we all know too well that the power structure is far ahead of us, the ambush of the ages. My notes from this exercise were plucked and shaped into a poem.

#61: TICULI Magic Ritual

2011-10-03T14:35:00.014-04:00

(a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun)

We went to Atlantic City at dusk where we found a dilapidated wooden dance floor on the beach outside TRUMP PLAZA CASINO. This was perfect for the ritual that would lead us to our poems.

In a gazebo overlooking the crashing tide we called the four directions. We took discarded four-foot tubes and placed them on the dance floor one at a time to form a hidden word: TICULI. We offer our definitions:

Ticuli (tih-coo-lee)
1. Noun. A color not detectable to the human eye, as in the color of ghosts.

2. Noun. A sand bar where the detritus of a tidal wave has left a lingering historical shadow.

We placed a large chunk of orange calcite on a wet and sandy TRUMP PLAZA black jack table in the middle of the dance floor. We touched both ends of the stone and meditated with a long, low hum. We then wrote notes for our poems. Orange calcite is known for enhancing our creative functions and dissolving obstacles blocking our way to our highest potential. We took notes to the flashing lights of the casino and the roar of a warm, September ocean. Aphrodite. Yemaya. And now, Ticuli.

Next we took turns walking off the dance floor, across the beach, down to the ocean to find and bring something back for the other person. We offer our experiences:

CAConrad: Warmth blowing off the ocean pulled me into the water. At first I stood knee-deep, then felt an electrical EXCITEMENT and threw myself onto my back to look at the sky. There were three bright stars directly above me, two for my shoulders, one for my feet. But then the incoming tide forced my legs apart. I went limp to allow the ocean to position me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me. A small animal was in my left palm for a moment, something that looked like a miniature armadillo or beige beetle with many legs. After it swam away my hand felt a large shell fragment, smoothly worn into a hook. I brought it back for Debrah, told her it was from Aphrodite, to help her gently hook and pull love into her life.

Debrah Morkun: After receiving this goddess lore sea treasure from CAConrad, I made my way to the waves, listening to the communal oyster, crab, sea urchin sounds that one can only hear through auditory spying. I listened to the human sounds, the sounds of human ghosts, humans who spent centuries dying at sea. I thought about the communal voice that these sea ghosts create – a cacophony of both dead human voices & the sounds of sea creatures mating. The Earth is often referred to as The Blue Planet due to its astounding hydrosphere, so I thought about what it means to be a Blue Person on a Blue Planet as I finally reached the ocean, embraced it, allowed it to bring its salty survival all around my legs, drenching my dress, feeling the eternal pull of the ocean. While connecting to the salt & its commotion, a seashell kept finding its way under my left foot, rubbing against my big toe. Despite the tumult of the waves, this shell remained there. I knew this shell was to be my gift to CAConrad, for when I looked at it, I realized it was an "essence hook." With this hook, Conrad will be able to catch those little things that are really big things, the essences at the root of all life.

We took more notes and asked if the ritual was complete. Wind pulled a gate at the edge of the dance floor closed: our answer. We went back into the gazebo to bid farewell to the four directions and close the circle. Our notes from this collaborative magic ritual were shaped into poems.

#60: MINDING THIRST

2011-09-08T13:11:00.002-04:00

--for Jamie Townsend

Watch weather report for heavy rain. On the day before, drink NOTHING. No beverages of any kind. Eat no soup or broth. Eat only steamed vegetables with soft noodles or bread. Wait for rain. Set your alarm to wake in the middle of the night, and then sit by the window peering into the dark sky with binoculars. Think about your first memory of being thirsty. Take notes, go back to sleep.

Wait for rain. You are still not drinking the next day and you are very thirsty. When rain arrives sit by the window. Close your eyes, take your pulse, hear the rain, feel your blood. Imagine that the water you hear coming to earth will never touch your lips, can never quench the dryness that is your mouth. Were you ever so thirsty that you were in pain? Open your eyes, take notes.

Go out into the rain. Lie on the ground. Look into the sky through binoculars with your mouth open. Drink DIRECTLY from the air while watching the streaming drops fall onto the binocular lens. Open an umbrella and take notes to the beating of rain. You are a drought that is cured. You are a body sponging back your life. Shape your three sets of notes into one poem or three.

#59: PRETERNATURAL CONVERSATIONS

2011-08-24T20:20:00.000-04:00

--for Dana Ward

Every once in awhile I think something about a stranger on the sidewalk and they dart a glance at me and I get it -- I GET IT -- we are one! Allow seven consecutive days for this exercise. DAY ONE, think about a woman you know, think about experiences you have had with her. Think about conversations you have had, think about the things she wears, eats, her way of walking, her laugh. Think about every detail you can imagine. See if she calls you or emails you. Take notes about this attempt at psychic connection.

DAY TWO, do everything you did in DAY ONE, but for a man you know. DAY THREE, go out to the streets and follow someone walking a dog. Look closely at the dog, study the dog’s movements. Whistle in your head, bark in your head. Imagine throwing a stick, throwing food, yelling "GOOD DOG!" Does the dog respond to this? If so, how? Take notes.

DAYS FOUR, FIVE, SIX, and SEVEN are for strangers. In cafes or restaurants, or followed briefly on the sidewalk. Try to connect with two women and two men, complete strangers out in the world in shops and museums, or going up escalators or standing in line at the bank. Focus on the clothing they wear. Shoes. Imagine saying HELLO, and each time imagine walking beside them and saying HELLO. If you want, end each experiment by doing just that. Visualize tugging their sleeve, TUG IT with your mind; punctuated with putting a hand on their shoulder and saying, "Don’t I know you?" Imagine clapping and shouting "HEY! HEY! HEY YOU!" Did they look at you WHILE you were walking behind them doing your experiment? Communicating beyond the auditory is our goal. But punctuate it with a HELLO. What are their reactions? How do you feel about it? Take these seven days of notes and form your poem(s).

AUGUST, 2011 Philadelphia workshop

2011-08-22T20:10:00.016-04:00

Philadelphia
IVY ORACLE
(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop

ALL DETAILS
at THIS LINK

2011-08-08T16:18:00.004-04:00

Many thanks to Eric Baus for his thoughtful, insightful essay on the brilliant Arthur Russell. And the (Soma)tic chapbook ARTHUR ECHO that I had the great pleasure of writing with Thom Donovan!

iPhone poetry app

2011-08-03T10:42:00.005-04:00

The Academy of American Poets has just published my (Soma)tic poetry exercise "CONFETTI ALLEGIANCE" and its resulting poem as an iPhone app, which you can view here without use of a phone.

And for the full text and formatting, it is also available at this link.

Thank you, and ENJOY! I'm very happy to have an iPhone poem!
CAConrad

DAVID BUUCK you are AMAZING!

2011-07-15T21:15:00.005-04:00

The POETRY FOUNDATION has
just written about David Buuck
and The Crystal Nexus
(Soma)tic
Click HERE
for all
the details!

JULY, 2011 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

2011-07-06T18:16:00.002-04:00

Philadelphia
CITY SPARROW
(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop

ALL DETAILS
at THIS LINK

#58 DOUBLE-shelter

2011-06-01T23:53:00.007-04:00

for Joshua Beckman

"thriving requires more than just survival."

--Erica Kaufman

If you’re visiting someone far away, first spend time studying everyday structures of your own apartment. Where and HOW does the light hit walls? Press your ear to the refrigerator, taste the water with small sips, eyes open, eyes closed. Study the smell and temperature of rooms. Feel your pulse on the toilet, in the shower, by the oven. Cook broccoli with a little oil and salt. Eat it slowly.

As soon as you arrive at the house you are visiting cook broccoli with a little oil and salt. Eat it slowly. Do everything in reverse order, pressing your ear to the refrigerator. How is it different? Take notes while investigating THE TRUTH if there is truth. What does it mean to say THE TRUTH? What matters most? The water has what differences? Are they subtle? Metallic?

Listen to Philip Glass on the floor, on your back, very still, in, the, dark, just, you, and, Mr. Glass. I chose the song “MUSIC IN CONTRARY MOTION.” Reflect on a personal violence you want undone. Some terrible THING that removed the beauty you once lived with. My boyfriend Mark (nicknamed Earth) moved to a queer community in Tennessee to work the land. He meditated in a cave each day where homophobic men followed him, bound and gagged him, covered him in gasoline and set him on fire. For a long time I would go to sleep and dream of stabbing his murderers, shooting his murderers, drowning, choking and bludgeoning his murderers. Breathtaking dreams of retribution for the man I loved, which, woke, me, each, morning, more inconsolable than the last. I was never going to feel happy again it seemed. Take notes about how the violence in your life will not leave. How it may never leave. Take notes about how you are sensing the world differently since then.

6/5/11 (Soma)tic Poetry Workshop

2011-05-28T12:09:00.001-04:00

for all details on the

JUNE Philadelphia
workshop "MASONIC SLUICE"
go to THIS LINK

#57 SPLAB Institute in Seattle

2011-05-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

(the following exercise was created at the SPLAB Institute in Seattle, Washington on 4/30/11. This collaborative exercise was created by: Greg Bem, Alex Bleecker, J Chive, Adriana Grant, Armen Moradians, Meredith Nelson, Paul E. Nelson, Reshe Sabre, Stanley Sabre, Jeremy Springsteed, Ellen Welcker)

find a quiet room in which to lie down. it may be your bedroom
or living room. it may be blue. open all openable things. leave
open. place something pungent to eat near where you
will lie. it may be an orange. set an intention. close
eyes. seek sound. notice the first one you hear,
then the next. they may come either from
inside (house, room, you) or otherwise.
connect them in your ear with string.
it may be catgut. continue to
connect until you fall asleep.
wake up, hold nose closed.
as still as possible, take
a bite of the pungent
thing. release nostrils.
wait for something to
happen. resume
connecting
sounds.
fall ba
ck a
slee
p. re
pe
at.

(Soma)tic poem in The UPL

2011-05-09T11:26:00.011-04:00

Click HERE to find the PDF of my (Soma)tic exercise and poem. This one was about sitting in a storm, EATING the storm. I loved doing it!

Click HERE to see other writing in The UPL: The Underground Public Library of NYC, edited by the amazing Greta Byrum!

MAY, 2011 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

2011-05-09T11:25:00.001-04:00

SUNDAY

MAY 15th
3pm

Philadelphia
NEW GROWTH
(Soma)tic Poems

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

SEATTLE WORKSHOP 4/30/11

2011-04-29T13:20:00.002-04:00

details at SPLAB.org

#56 OIL THIS WAR!

2011-04-05T15:01:00.008-04:00

for Jonathan Skinner

How is it where you live? If there are no wealthy people and/or the poor are nurtured and protected, then maybe this exercise is not for you? I have been littering in wealthy neighborhoods with JOYFUL PROTEST for some time now! It is exciting to SEE “refuse” in the open, not hidden in landfills, if only for a moment. Here in Philadelphia taxes pay for uniformed workers to clean prosperous neighborhoods of cigarette butts, cans and wrappers all day, each day, while completely ignoring working class and poor communities. Philadelphia public school students have a 51 percent dropout rate, and 25 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line (That’s 1 in 4 people THAT’S 1 IN 4 PEOPLE!). The police patrol and protect the rich while they INFAMOUSLY threaten, beat and rob the poor (just ask Philadelphia Daily News reporters Barbara Laker & Wendy Ruderman). WE MUST RESIST! WE MUST BE RESISTANCE! Take initial notes on the class structure of where you live.

Save your “garbage” for a week, packaging, and containers, especially plastics. Take notes about each item, tracing its origin of production from label information or the manufacturer’s website. Find other companies they work with, for instance a candy bar needs chocolate from South America, and plastics, inks, and glue for wrappers. Trace on a map the distance each item needs to travel to the candy bar factory, then from the factory to your city. Calculate gasoline and oil consumption per mile. And consider that plastics are petroleum byproducts. And not just the packaging, but in fact many goods themselves are made from oil: hand lotion, shoes, ballpoint pens, disposable diapers, glue, rubbing alcohol, soda and milk jugs, credit cards, nail polish, ink, crayons, and more. Much of the modern world IS oil. Toys, televisions, telephones, microchips, luggage, cars, condoms, it’s in the air, water, soil, food, IT’S IN OUR BODIES! Take notes about oil, take notes about your discovery of oil consumption in ways you had never considered or realized. After immersing yourself in this information STOP! Then write nonstop for 30 minutes, WHATEVER comes to mind, just write! Let it flow! THIS is where the best language for our poems will arise!

Real change needs creativity and action! Using a black marker write suggestive notes on your “garbage”. Littering in wealthy neighborhoods is precarious but gratifying! Just IMAGINE them reading your used tampon marked US WAR! and puzzling over the message. Make the rich THINK! Or at least make their children think! OIL OIL EVERYWHERE! Write on old shoes, sandwich wrappers, cans, bags, snotty tissues, used condoms, THIS OIL WAR! On an empty bottle of hand lotion OIL THIS WAR! On a cereal box THIS FAGGOT WORLD VICTORIOUS! On a soda bottle YOUR SISSY CHILDREN SAVE THE WORLD FROM YOU! As citizens it is our duty to communicate the temperature of SUFFERING! Littering helps us SEE our planet’s transmuted elements before they’re swept into trucks and hauled to the dump, far, far away, leaking toxins into the water and soil. A tidy sidewalk does NOT EQUAL thoughtful, mindful citizenry! CITIZENS OF THE WORLD RISE UP AND FILL THE STREETS OF THE AFFLUENT WITH YOUR SHIT AND “GARBAGE” TODAY! Let them SMELL and READ the products of THEIR WARS! Write on your “garbage,” WE DEMAND A PLANET SAFE FOR ANIMALS AND OTHER HUMANS! Take notes about your littering excursions. Take notes about the neighborhoods you visit with your deposits. Take notes, take MANY notes, then STOP! Write for 30 minutes on autopilot. Always remember to carry your notes with you wherever you go to pull and wrench your poem into existence.

new (Soma)tic chapbook!

2011-03-28T14:01:00.001-04:00

I'm very excited about my new chapbook MUGGED into poetry from Cannot Exist Press! And it's only $5 for pre-sale now. All details about the chapbook, as well as other new chapbooks and issue #7 of Cannot Exist Magazine, please click HERE!

APRIL 2011 (Soma)tic Workshop

2011-03-28T14:00:00.001-04:00

SUNDAY

April 10th

3pm

SPRING, WHEN SOMA

OVERTAKES SOMATIC

the poetry in everyone

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

PLEASE USE PAY PAL BUTTON TO PURCHASE WORKSHOP

if you would like to make other arrangements to pay
please contact CAConrad888@gmail.com

#55 AKILAH'S LEGACY

2011-03-01T01:37:00.015-05:00

in memory of Akilah Oliver
(1961 - 2011)

"...but I think also death itself, as an event, as a limit, as a field of investigation, is too many things at once. It's solid and it's slippery." (in her interview with BOMB Magazine)

It is horrendous, this world's condition of dying. Loss of life is the most arduous vista of pain. Let us honor Akilah's life and legacy, and honor her advance toward death as "a field of investigation" by writing a poem. One of her many appreciable gifts was her encouragement of others. Years ago when she lived in Philadelphia she taught workshops at the LGBT bookstore I co-managed at the time. Her students always seemed some of the most jubilant, motivated people entering the store. Let's share their enthusiasm TODAY! Bring your favorite Akilah Oliver book to this exercise. Consider creating your own (Soma)tic Reading Enhancement for the book you choose. The enhancements are to be created intuitively, a structure derived from initial sensations upon receiving a particular book. It is my wish as a poet to motivate readers to not be passive, and to take credit for a poem’s absorption. After all, we each bring a unique set of experiences and circumstances to filter and digest poems, making them part of ourselves and entirely in our own way. In honor of Akilah Oliver let’s inspire one another to have full participatory reading! Take NOTES while engaged in this exercise, notes you will later pull from to shape your poem. A couple of summers ago I created the following reading enhancement for Akilah's book A Toast in the House of Friends. Wanting to get OUT of my city for it, a visceral reaction transpired:

Maybe it was the trees on the cover, or the NEED for something MOVING around me, but I took this book out to the protected wildlife parks around Philadelphia and found a secluded stream, first for my feet, then…. Bring a battery-powered radio, turn it to a talk radio station, but put it far enough away from you that you can hear it, but can’t make out what it is they’re saying. Faint, keep it faint, go and adjust it if you can understand them, as we want the voices to be clearly voices, but the words unattainable with our senses. Get your feet in the moving water and start reading, “language is leaving me: ahhhhh—this victimization shit / is not stable and the victors: / when are we going to safari / we: [astounded exclamation] / nancy reagan out of my head” This is a book, and it feels like it is written right into your skin when you read it. I found an old scuba mask, and if you have one, please wear it and rest your head in the stream, submerging your ears at least for the reading of one poem, “well the point is, things were calm down / here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i / want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am / so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to / hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home. give me a chance to say / welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat. what do you wear / out there?” That was the one I read underwater, under running water. This book needs time to be alone between poems. How is the water? How is today for you, reading Akilah’s poems? “i’d like all the stone butches to wave their hands in the air right now, wave em / like they just don’t care / (it seems to be unfortunate but true; corporate spell check does not recognize you / we are all too young to remember this”

Now let's listen to her voice! There are marvelous recordings of Akilah available online, but my favorites are on MATCHING HALF, poems written and performed by Akilah Oliver and Anne Waldman, with the exquisite music of Ambrose Bye. This is A MUST, find a copy! Borrow a copy! LIE FLAT ON YOUR BACK IN THE DARKNESS and listen to the entire CD from beginning to end without stopping. GO TO THE BATHROOM BEFORE you begin, do NOT interrupt the flow of the CD. Do NOT answer your phone or the door!

Prayer is palms pressing together, directing the circulating energies in the body through the extended fingertips and OUT of the flesh. Let's redirect that energy while listening to the CD. While on your back fold your fingers with fingertips pressing into your chest, this way you conduct the flow of energy back inside you. Occasionally PRESS your fingertips deeper into your chest to better sense your recycled circuitry. Listen carefully to the CD, let their voices SHAKE you out of the landscape where you meditate. Let the poems and music become an entirely new PLACE you go to. When the CD ends light a candle. WRITE THESE PARTICULAR NOTES BY CANDLELIGHT ONLY! Have the candle, paper and pencil sitting beside you so that you don't shift out of position. Notes about death, notes about living with death, notes about the topography of grief, of darkness, isolation, forgiveness, and what it means to give and receive mercy. For the next week keep your notes on you at all times. Walk everywhere with them and BE READY to add to them, or to begin PULLING them and kneading them into a poem, a poem you write for the living who are dying everyday. And STOP sleeping so much! We sleep TOO MUCH!

Philadelphia (Soma)tic Workshop MARCH 6th

2011-02-26T13:46:00.003-05:00

3PM

at the FREE Library

DETAILS AT THIS LINK
Hope you can join us!

#54 Crystal Nexus

2011-02-14T18:03:00.004-05:00

for David Buuck who eats the dirt

Find a gemstone speaking to the YOU you are today. RHODONITE speaks to me today. (STUDY THE MAGICAL PROPERTIES OF YOUR STONE). Sleep with it under your pillow. Ask 3 friends to take turns sleeping with it but be certain you 4 are 2 women and 2 men. If you don't have this many friends we need to work on getting you more love. You don't need to share information, you don't need to share dreams, you don't have to all write poems, JUST TRUST the stone to carry the nexus. After each friend has returned the stone keep it ON YOU all day. Rub it along your ears, bridge of your nose, your forehead ESPECIALLY your forehead. The shared dreams of you 4 will coalesce WILL ENGAGE newer spaces inside your stone. Wash it thoroughly after all 4 of you have DREAMT INTO IT! Then swallow it. Be certain to purchase a smooth, tumbled stone of course, NOTHING WITH SHARP EDGES. Don't die. Please. We're here for poems, this is not the time to die. Swallow your small gemstone. Don't worry you will pass it out the next day. But while you SLEEP with the stone in your belly IN YOUR INTESTINES moving to your lowest chakras DREAM with your crystal representative inside you INSIDE YOU. What is it like the next morning? What notes have you been taking? Take notes about your notes. Take notes about how you hold your pen. This is a beautiful moment, having the Earth's hardened gem travel through you after friends have dreamt into it with you. What do you have to say? What plan do you have for the stone? What area of your life has it covered? What stranger can you approach tomorrow and make a new friend from? PULL THE POEM OUT OF THE NEW FRIEND AND THE STONE. You are REQUIRED to make a new friend. Your love will INCREASE! Let your love increase. Let the poem shape itself from notes of your stone, your old friends and your new friend.

FEBRUARY PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

2011-02-14T17:31:00.007-05:00

2/20/11
details at THIS LINK

2011-01-18T02:52:00.002-05:00

TO CELEBRATE MY 25TH YEAR
LIVING IN PHILADELPHIA
I'M OFFERING
one (Soma)tic Poetry Workshop
every month
for $25 each
(or take all 12 for the price of 10)

for ALL details please
click HERE

#53 your ZOE magnifier

2011-01-02T20:59:00.004-05:00

What is your favorite Zoe Strauss photograph? Everyone has one, or two, or many. For this exercise get your copy of her book AMERICA and find one. “STAY ALIVE” is a favorite of mine. What is your favorite canned vegetable? I love canned peas. Canned peas would make a lovely pillow in a coffin or dream. Think about your favorite canned vegetable in your life, take notes. This exercise needs three consecutive nights. ONE: BOILED canned peas, very simple, careful to carry the scent and texture through the mouth, sinuses, and let’s be CHEWING while looking carefully at Zoe’s photograph. Eyes open WIDE, look through a hole in the bottom of a box. ALLOW ALL MIXTURE of senses to explore. Take notes then go to bed. When you wake, what dreams did you have? TWO: FRIED canned peas, in olive oil, a little toothpick to eat them one at a time while looking at Zoe’s photograph with a magnifying glass, then through panty hose. The clouds in “STAY ALIVE” move over the trees in my dreams. One night my old boyfriend Tommy who died of AIDS was in Zoe’s photograph, standing near the yellow sign along the highway, its black letters commanding “STAY ALIVE.” He pointed to it, “Did you read this today?” THREE: FROZEN canned peas, spread out with salt on wax paper in the freezer, QUITE DELICIOUS! Tonight stare at one part of the photograph, STARE without blinking for as long as you can. Then pop a delicious frozen pea in your mouth and close your eyes. SEE the details of the photograph in your mind. Open your eyes, focus on another detail of the photograph, then pop another delicious frozen pea in your mouth. Close your eyes and THIS TIME imagine someone you love thawing from ice as the pea warms on your tongue. How are they doing? What do you love most about this photograph? Pop another frozen pea, keep your eyes OPEN, but shut the light off, then back on, off, on again, over and over, all the while popping delicious frozen peas. EYES WIDE OPEN in light, in dark, seeing, chewing, then suddenly STOP in the dark. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness, the photograph taking shape in the shadows around it. Staring at the unlit photograph look for MOVEMENT and take notes about what you see. Dreams this night for more notes the next morning. All the notes from this exercise will come together into a poem.

#52 vibrAting dAys

2010-12-21T05:54:00.013-05:00

A collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad & Bhanu Kapil

DAY ONE:
Rest your hands on a vibrating machine: car, fan, washing machine or dryer, anything with a motor that vibrates. Take notes after a few minutes, spontaneous notes, write with one hand still on the machine. Rest your cheek and other body parts against the machine, close your eyes and allow a low hum to build deep inside your body. Deepen the hum and allow it to rise. Open your mouth to release it. Take notes with your forehead against the vibrating machine. What is a favorite song from your childhood? Hum that song (don’t sing the words) with eyes closed with as much of your body pressed against the machine that you can manage. HUM HUM HUM THIS SONG LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER. Take notes about the song about the time in your life when you first heard it and take notes about now take notes about your life that is now.

DAY TWO:
River Inversion. An experiment in cadence. Walk to the nearest river. This may take you days. This may take you minutes. Invert yourself above this river. Let your hair go into the river. You are face up. If you do not have long enough hair, or hair, then let your hands go into the river, above your head. You are lying on the ground as close to the edge as you can get. You walked here. It's snowing. It is winter-time. It is spring-time. You live in the country you were born in. You are in India. You are far from home. Perhaps there is no river. Perhaps you are at the sea. A river is more stable, yet runs shakti. Shaki is the primordial vibration. It is the divine feminine vibration, and I have found it in the rivers of North America as much as the Ganges or Thames. Some rivers are very powerful. I went to Chicago and the river below my window was a toxic river, but I felt the shakti like KALI. An oblivion. It doesn't matter if it is pure river or a toxic river or an ordinary stream with mixed qualities. As an extension of your body you could use, instead of hair or hands, wool, or branches -- something that you will feel in your own body when it moves in the current. This is the current. Wait until you feel your breathing and spinal flow mixing with the riverbank or shore. Your throat is open. Your head tilted back. At the same time, you should feel almost slumped. Very relaxed and free. It is hard to experience a physical feeling of freedom with someone telling you to feel that way. But nevertheless, this is the path of descent. It is not about posture, it is about the surrender of posture. I am sharing with you what I learned at the ashram in Kankhal. Stay there as long as you can, until the vibration of the river has mixed in with your body. Inside, with your lips zipped shut, repeat: "Ram." A long central syllable: "Raaaaaaam." Like an "a" version of OM. This will run the shakti through you even more. You could say it 8 times aloud, then zip your mouth shut and repeat/chant the syllable inside you. This will increase the power of your mantra. You will now when you have softened. If you have recently suffered a heartbreak, or find yourself unable to shake the sense of loss following a broken love, visualize, too, a stream of light as gold-white as the sun coming into your heart center. Sometimes, if I have a lot of anxiety, I bring the parallel shakti of the sun into my forehead. In-breath: the light comes in. Out-breath: the light softens out, filling the chest or the brain. The brain is very real. I know you are not meant to think of the brain as a reservoir of thought, but lately, I have been thinking that the brain is, in fundamental ways, that cave. Of red things. But in the river inversion, the brain is surrendered to the larger flow of images.

Now it is time to go home, or to a sheltered place. Sit up gently, and take in your hand some of the earth of the riverbank. Just keep in it in your fist until you reach your home, or the the sheltered place. Try not to speak to anyone. When you have reached the next place, put the dirt on the table where you have sat to write. Take out your notebook, or its equivalent. Now write the beginning of the book you have wanted to write for much of the last five years, or more. A poet's novel. A page or two. A map. Day Two is for cleansing. Day Two is for beginning something new.

on 2nd Ave. Poetry...

2010-12-07T23:15:00.001-05:00

Frank Sherlock interviewed me on (Soma)tic practice and the occult
for 2nd Ave. Poetry (many thanks to the editors!)
Click HERE for the interview.
THANKS FRANK,
CAConrad

#51 a Mercury Retrograde FREE FALL

2010-12-05T04:16:00.005-05:00

Let’s surrender to the turmoil, find a poem in the clattering increase. Mercury is communication, Mercury’s retrograde has grades of dysfunctional communication. Enhance these troubles with food from Mercury’s temple: dill, carrot, celery, and LEMON lots of LEMON. ENHANCE close listening in this time of hard listening. Carry an agate, wear yellow, lots and lots of yellow. Take careful notes through the three-week period of the planet’s retrograde cycle: arguments with others, miscommunications, or HOW MANY TIMES did you feel thwarted unnecessarily or jealous or angry or confused and stupid? Careful, thoughtful awareness of WHAT EXACTLY IS our listening? What are these ears? I remember a particular venison stew as a boy, meat from a young stag. Later I saw an old doe by the creek, she caught my eye, tilted her head, twitched her tail. She KNEW I ate her son, her delicious son, and it was horrible. FILLED with his spirit I leapt from stone to stone to fallen tree. HOW do molecules of a digested Being reach AND BECOME our own senses? How? Through blood? Gliding the aura’s taut surface? We walk through waves of sound all day long, birds fly through them, dolphins SEE with sound. SEE with sound. Dolphins SEE inside structures with their sonar. Engage with animals, in fact allow ALL communication doors wide open. Willfully take the flood into your life and into your home. Notes notes, take many notes, the poem will follow.

TWELVE-TWELVE workshop

2010-11-12T11:11:00.003-05:00

COME!
WE'RE DOING
A (SOMA)TIC
WORKSHOP IN
PHILADELPHIA

DETAILS AT THIS LINK!

#50 a beautiful marsupial AFTERNOON

2010-11-09T15:46:00.008-05:00

Someone downtown bought a new refrigerator and I carried the large cardboard box upstairs to my apartment. Lined with blankets and pillows it was the perfect marsupial pouch for the new poetry exercise. I punched a hole in the back and inserted a baby bottle filled with soy milk to suck on. Just outside the box DVD's of Pasolini's films played, first The Decameron, then The Canterbury Tales. An entire world of human sexual intrigue and treachery outside, my, warm, pouch, here, I, am. HOW do I make the world comfortable everyday I ask myself? HOW do I manage to get up in the morning KNOWING that my taxes pay for bullets and bombs to kill the people of Iraq and Afghanistan? In 2009 three children died every single day in Afghanistan from war-related injuries. HOW did I not kill myself with worry and guilt? HOW often do I think about being complicit in the degradation of life on earth? My boyfriend came over, we played Pasolini's SALO OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM. We removed the baby bottle from the back of my cardboard pouch and my boyfriend used it as a glory hole. Graffiti around his cock AND THEN little wigs for its head made of cotton and pillow stuffing. I glued a frame around the hole, asked him to back up and enter again slower, slowly, a portrait of a cannon at the castle gates maybe? YES! Finding the spaces between hating this world, finding and loving those spaces. Today. Tomorrow. It's going to become a poem from the pouch. My cardboard Momma, Pasolini, and the glory hole of a beautiful marsupial afternoon. Thanks to you who make things delicious and wonderful. Without you despair would appreciate its earnings. Notes from this day are to become a poem.

#49 take a (Soma)tic bus ride!

2010-10-27T14:08:00.001-04:00

A collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad and Ryan Eckes

PART ONE: Take a bus to a city where you have never lived. We took a bus to NYC from Philadelphia. The driver was obnoxious, but we were undeterred. The driver was a terrible driver, tapping the accelerator over and over and over lurching stopping lurching stopping. This is excellent for poetry, these bad bus drivers. Have one foot on the floor, the other hovering an inch above the floor. FEEL the staggering, growling engine through the floor. Look outside. What engines move the world out there? Trees, what does the engine of a tree sound like? Touch the seat in front of you in two-second intervals. Lift your hand to the air in front of you. It is FREE from the vibrations of the bus. HOW is this your life? What does it even mean to ask "HOW is this your life?" How are you FREE and not free? Look around you at the strangers on the bus. You are near people who share planet Earth with you. LOOK AT THEM. What do you have in common with each other? Take notes, take notes, notes notes notes. PART TWO: When you get off the bus, you should be hungry. Go get something to eat at a kind of restaurant you've never eaten at before, and order something you've never tasted before. As you eat, say the name once in a while of the dish you've ordered, and think about the sounds of the words along with the taste of the food -- does it match? Are there discrepancies? Take notes on your napkin. Ask the server what they think about the dish -- do they like it, why, why not? Take as many napkins with you as you can so you can write on them throughout the day. Exit
the place and ask the first person you see (or who'll answer you) in which direction they think you should walk. You're not worried about going any direction in particular. If they ask what type of destination you want, say "Look, I need some guidance, okay?" Walk a couple of blocks and then ask another person "Left or right or straight ahead?" Do this 7 times. Walk two blocks after the 7th direction -- this is your destination. Take out your napkins and write about what you saw on the way, see now, and how the food feels in your belly. Do this sitting on the ground. Shape all your notes into a poem.

#48 YOUR (Soma)tic Spectrum

2010-10-25T13:25:00.005-04:00

Eat a single color of food for a day. For 7 days do this, eating through the spectrum of color our optic nerves are able to bring into focus and joy. Use food coloring, it's about EATING the color, not whether or not RED naturally appears. Water with food coloring, rice, potatoes, you can do it, you can absorb it for the poems. And wear or SURROUND yourself with the color. For RED I wore a red wig someone threw in the dumpster behind the beauty academy near my apartment. For ORANGE I drew an orange ladder on my chest with magic marker. For YELLOW I tucked a yellow condom in my left sock. For GREEN I painted my middle fingernails green. For BLUE I listened to Bobby Vinton's song "Blue Velvet" on a continuous loop from 6 am to midnight. For PURPLE I wore purple clothes pin nipple clamps all day. For WHITE I wrote the number 108 on my forehead with my boyfriend's semen. EACH color EACH day found me anew. This was a visitation with each CHAKRA. Each day, before eating the color, drinking the color, hum a LOW, DEEP HUM, sit straight in a chair, feet on the floor. Reach into that day's chakra, RED the root/sex, etc., GREEN the heart. The notes you take will want out naturally. Work with a clear quartz crystal gemstone. On the first day, RED, meditate with the quartz on your groin. Each day move the stone UP your body as you investigate the next color. There are samples of my color poems HERE.

#47 (SOMA)NIMAL COMMUNIQUÉ

2010-09-14T21:31:00.006-04:00

A Collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad & Erica Kaufman

DAY ONE: On 8 small pieces of paper draw 8 different animals with crayons, magic markers, pens, paint, or whatever. Elephants, bats, tigers, wolves, and even supernatural animals like angels, dragons, leprechauns, horse ghosts. Make one of these your spirit totem, or at least an animal you feel an affinity for. On the back of the drawing write something like, “HELLO, my name is Craig, and I am a dragon from rural Pennsylvania. You might have some questions for me, and I might have some questions for you.” Create an e-mail address to include with your message. Go out into public and leave each animal for strangers to find on subways, in libraries, at hair salons, or taped to a restroom stall. SAVE your totem animal for last. Research the spiritual and mystical legends associated with your animal. For instance one of my totems is the crow which is said to know both Divine Law and Human Law, but always weighs situations by Divine Law. While walking through Philadelphia with my crow drawing I looked for such signs. For instance it is perfectly legal by Human Law for rich people to purchase diamonds many suffered to mine, and then to walk past homeless people begging for spare change for supper. Clearly the Science of Love has no legitimate testimony for Human Law. Take notes throughout the entire process of the animal card creations and public deposits. And involve any correspondence with strangers in your poem. DAY TWO: Begin your day with a walk around your neighborhood. Notice the animals that surround us. Try to keep a list of them and what they say to you as they cross your path. This can include squirrels, dogs, cats, rats, mice, etc…bugs are animals too, in my opinion. Look for them. Listen to them. Talk to them. Take notes. Use at least 1/3 of these "conversations" in the poem.

#46 your MINA LOY PORTAL

2010-09-05T20:13:00.012-04:00

Green is the color of the heart chakra, even in this world where the brain continuously insists the heart is not clever enough to know the way. Today we will not be practical. Today we will listen to the sounds of war our bodies resist. In her time, poet Mina Loy listened very closely for the directions, and told us in her poems. Prepare yourself with rose quartz, the gemstone most associated with the heart. You can purchase a small, inexpensive piece at almost any jewelry store in your town. Just a small piece, as it takes less to stir our openings than might be expected. When you bring it home keep it in a solution of salt water overnight to clean it, then flush the water the next morning. Now carry the stone for a week, taking notes while reading the poems of Mina Loy. For nearly a century her poems have been waiting to be used as keys for the map. Find a passage you want to turn into a portal. For me it was from her "Songs to Joannes":

        I don't care
        Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
        Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
        Or what would look at me
        If the shutters were not shut

        Red a warm colour on the battlefield
        Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
        Count counter
        I counted           the fringe of the towel
        Till two tassels clinging together
        Let the square room fall away

Type it, using the largest font size to fit a page, then print it out on green paper. Green is the color of the heart chakra. Draw a large circle into the poem big enough for your eyes and nose to come through. Cut the circle out. Walk around looking through your portal, green, the color green of the heart chakra, bringing the heart UP to the head, keeping the color of the heart UP to the head, keeping the head to the color of the heart. Walk around. Look at your home, walk outside and smell around, look around through your MINA LOY PORTAL, your own portal, it belongs to you. Occasionally stop and read the poem while taking your pulse. Feel your pulse while reading, reading right up to the missing words around your portal. Notes, notes, take notes. The poem you create from this exercise will be the key to your next poem, and to the next day, and for you, and because it is your life.

(CAConrad and the "your MINA LOY PORTAL"

photo by the amazing Dorothea Lasky)

2010-08-19T15:09:00.001-04:00

ALL DETAILS for the
CHINATOWN
Philadelphia
(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop
for 9/9/10, 6:30pm
please click HERE

I interviewed Me

2010-08-05T14:25:00.001-04:00

I interviewed Me on (Soma)tic SOUNDWAVES. Thank you Pam Brown for this publication, which everyone can read HERE!

#45 MUGGED into poetry

2010-08-01T09:39:00.003-04:00

If you haven't been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. After I was mugged recently in Philadelphia this exercise came to mind on the subway ride home, the post-mugging subway ride where poetry took it's rightful place at the center of my world where even muggers play a part in it, it being bigger than the knife, more concentrated and firmer than his cock which will have many admirers in prison. He's going to die. So am I. So are you. He could have EASILY killed me, he and his three friends BUT I AM ALIVE AND QUITE WELL writing for poetry as I willingly came to this cesspool of humanity to do. All the globe becomes a poem. It is enough to manage this small part, here, a body, in a body, stinking, beautiful, a bit of tormented, angry, tender, delicious flesh. It is enough. Each of us. If we can read this we are all alive and creative. Anyone who tells you that you are not creative is a coward afraid of his own potential, trust me. Ignore all cowards, they were born to be ignored. Find your strength, find your poems. Every morning for two weeks as soon as you waken PREDICT your death. And write it down. For instance, "by choking in 11 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 12:18 pm." THEN STARTING at the tips of your toes touch your cells of skin and nails, feel bones, your pulse, hair, feel your moving body in the morning ALWAYS moving as long as you live you are moving blood through veins moving thoughts through dreams EVERY morning for two weeks touch every inch of your body's surface and your holes moist and dry. As soon as you finish this reaffirming ritual write a poem from your moving blood in the thoughts of the dream, and combine that LIVING poem with the prediction of your death. Click HERE to see my poem from the execution of this exercise, "GUESSING MY DEATH."

08/08/10 workshop

2010-07-19T20:11:00.001-04:00

(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop
CHINATOWN
New York City
August 8th, 2010

Limited number of participants
REGISTER at this link

#44 AIDS Snow Family

2010-07-01T00:03:00.001-04:00

"The poem is restorative, rather than fragmenting."
--Alexandra Grilikhes

for anyone who loved someone who died of AIDS

In January gather snow, this is intimate this calling to honor the shock of being alive. I made one tiny snowman named CAConrad, and one tiny snowman named Tommy Schneider. For six months they held hands in the privacy of my freezer while I visited the streets and buildings in the Philadelphia of our Love. Snow crystals travel miles out of clouds into the light of our city. My snowman read to his snowman the letters I brought home to the freezer. It's 2010, AIDS is different in this century you didn't live to see. The used bookshop where you worked on South Street is now a clothing store. Our first kiss in the Poetry Section is a rack of blue jeans and I resist hooking my thumbs in the belt loops to pull you in -- I FEEL you everywhere today. In March an old friend was visiting and she said, "But you wrote poems for Tommy after he died." I said, "But it's sublime retracing our love in this exercise." She shook her head, "No, it's sad, it's very sad. Can't you see this beautiful day?" OF COURSE I see the beautiful day, in fact I SEE IT MORE THAN EVER, and I don't need her choreography to enter it. The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. It's important to ignore the directives of others when investigating the way these doors swing on their hinges. Months of spring into summer, my snowman told your snowman the memories. One night you had asked if I was upset at something. I said, "I have no right to complain, all the men are dying in our city and I don't have AIDS!" You said, "Well I have no right to complain because I have a wonderful boyfriend who loves me and I DO have AIDS!" Macrobiotics, herbal infusions, massages, sensory deprivation tanks, reflexology, music by Soft Cell, music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, music by The Thompson Twins, music by Patti Smith. Of course we're all dying, you'll never kiss someone who isn't dying, I know that, which is why the fear of this is not allowed to stop me from missing you the way I want. The streets were filled with men in wheelchairs that year. We were kids in love while you vanished in the funnel with them. The day after Summer Solstice I took our snowmen out of the freezer. 90 degrees, we melted quicker than expected, even sooner than I could have imagined. I burned the letters, mixed their ash with our slush. And I read to the puddle a poem that came to me years ago in a dream soon after you died: he wrote "I have AIDS / and kissed this wall" / X marked the spot / I wrote "I'm not afraid" / and kissed him back / wherever he is. I took many notes during the life of our snowmen in the freezer until they vanished. Those notes became a poem.

#43 UNEASY RIDERS

2010-06-28T00:41:00.007-04:00

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young invited me to create (Soma)tic #43 for their piece A MEGAPHONE, forthcoming in CHAIN Magazine. Many thanks to Juliana and Stephanie.

"If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction. The antique way to live and express life was to say it according to the rules. But the modern flings herself at life and lets herself feel what she does feel, then upon the very tick of the second she snatches the images of life that fly through the brain." --Mina Loy in a 1917 interview

Gather twelve of your favorite books of poetry by living women poets. Divide your copy of Maria Raha's HELLIONS into twelve parts ("Uneasy Riders" is the name of chapter 7). HELLIONS is the perfect book to accompany this exercise. Talk to twelve women about visiting them. Tell them you will bring a box, and ask them to place a small object inside the box, something you're not to know about. It can be anything: a stone, button, shot glass, comb, lipstick, dildo, chalk, etc., but ask them to not tell you what it is. Ask them to sleep with it under their pillow the night before you visit. I told Maria Raha about this (Soma)tic exercise and asked her if twelve was too many, and she said, "If you don't know twelve women you need to SELF EXAMINE!" This is why it's good to ask Maria Raha. Twelve women it is! Take notes through the process of choosing the books of poetry, and visiting the twelve women to gather the objects. Write write write notes notes notes. After you have gathered the books by living women poets, and the box of twelve objects, set aside twelve consecutive days.

DAY ONE: As a preliminary, read the Loy quote aloud, then immediately watch Mary Wigman's 1914 dance HEXENTANZ on You Tube, and watch Wigman with the volume as LOUD as possible. Then read the first of the twelve sections you've created in HELLIONS. Climb into the bathtub, turn on the shower, open an umbrella, and lie down to read the first book of poems, pausing from time to time to YELL the poet's name! Take notes take notes. Reach inside your box and choose an object, but don't look at it. Smell it, rub it against you. Meditate with the object in the middle of your chest while thinking of the twelve women, water beating against the umbrella. SCREAM YOUR NAME with eyes closed in meditation. SCREAM YOUR NAME with eyes open. Harryette Mullen says, "proceed with abandon / finding yourself where you are". Look at the object. Do not put it back in the box, but do take more notes.

Choose a different location for each of the next eleven days. Stand in mud, hunch in the back seat of a car, in the basement with a candle, sit in a graveyard, on the steps of a courthouse, or stand facing the statue of a very dead old man. But be somewhere completely different each day. Before reading from HELLIONS, and the next book of poetry, and fondling an object in your box, read the Loy quote aloud, and watch Wigman's HEXENTANZ dance. Let these brilliant grandmothers loosen any knots, and always remember as Laura Riding says, "the words are only part of the poetic formula: the rest is ritual, and the reason in them must contend with the mechanics of magic-making in it – and must not win." Your notes might seem an endless chore of notes once you've completed your twelve days, but carry them around with you, and take more notes while reading them, putting them into a frame. The poem will come to you from those notes, it's in there, no doubt about it. You've infused the (Soma)tic with these others, and now your new poem is waiting.

#42 TRECARTIN ALLELUJIAH DEVIANT

2010-06-01T00:18:00.004-04:00

for Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch

(Soma)tic #42 was written by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun.
There were three Trecartin films in Philadelphia in May of 2010 at The ICA, VOX Populi, and The Fabric Workshop Museum.

2 DAYS viewing Trecartin's films. DAY ONE: Before leaving home read from Franz Kafka's short story collection, if you don't own a copy, STOP, go buy one. Find a favorite sentence, like this one from Kafka's In the Penal Colony, "The Condemned Man especially seemed to be struck by a premonition of some sort of significant transformation." Cut this favorite sentence out, then cut this favorite sentence in half for later. Shred the rest of the book, pausing to TAKE NOTES about the love it takes to chop a book to pieces. Pages torn, sliced, then stuffed in your underwear, socks, bra (if you're a "man" get one, or find something to hold shreds of Kafka around your nipples). Wear something LOOSE so ONLY YOU know you are wearing Kafka, and let bits of the paper fall to the sidewalk as you walk to the gallery. And DO WALK to the gallery, working up a sweat with Kafka stuffed in your arm pits. At the gallery go into the restroom and suck on one half of your favorite sentence you cut earlier, then wrap it around a jelly bean or other candy YOU LOVE, making a Kafka candy decoupage. Do the same with the other half. NOW DRINK A FIVE HOUR ENERGY DRINK, then shove one of the Kafka candies up your ass, the Kafka candy decoupage now magically transformed into the Kafka candy decoupage suppository. Pop the other candy in your mouth. You now have your favorite Kafka sentence in you mouth, and up your ass. Sit down and watch the Trecartin film. TAKE NOTES TAKES NOTES. Grind
slowly in your seat, HOW DOES IT FEEL to have Kafka up inside your asshole while watching the Trecartin film? How does THAT feel? How is it? TAKE NOTES. When the Kafka candy in your mouth is gone TAKE NOTES and then suck the end of a chocolate bar, then write instant commands on your arm with the chocolate, like, "ENGINES RIP A PURR," or, "CRYSTAL FREQUENCIES," or "MAGICIAN'S ELIXIR," or, "ASCENDED BLOOD," then lick it off, suck it off, eat if off your arm your words. TAKE NOTES. Where are you in the film? Where are you actually? TAKE NOTES. Chew strands of Kafka shreds, then shove the wet balls up your nose. Breathe through your mouth and TAKES NOTES inside the Trecartin film, the film, Trecartin, it's there THE POEM IN THE NOTES. DAY TWO: Of course, it all starts, then, with a vision of Huckleberry's pelvis. & you're under his blankets, but those blankets are really the Mississippi River. For a moment, too, they are the Delaware, & then the Schuykill. And you're swimming but floating. This is to visualize first thing in the morning on the day you set aside for the (Soma)tic. Breathe thru your nose, and out through your mouth, and picture Huckleberry and then a boy from the future, however you imagine him. Become him and become the eye thru which he sees. See Huckleberry and then the boy from the future and then yourself getting stuck in the Mississipedia... or web-internet river, for lack of a better term. Feel your body turn to cobblestone and then to rust and then to internet marginalia. Say your favorite god's name three times, and then light a candle. Go to the computer screen and dial up Youtube. First watch Nick Cave singing "Saint Huck" live. Then, watch a video of people voguing. Next, leave your home. Walk to a store where they sell balloons, and select a balloon that speaks to you. It must be one you can blow up yourself. Then, go to a Philadelphia tourist shop and buy a fake copy of the Declaration of Independence. Write the words "Jingo," "oil spill," and "hallucinogen" somewhere on it. Then, roll it up like a scroll and put it in your underwear. Next, as you walk or ride to the museum, appreciate your body as a steamship. Feel steam emanating from all of your orbs. Buy some Wild Turkey whiskey on your way. Take a swig in a secret location of your choice somewhere near the museum, and spill an offering of it on the ground. Say, "to the cattle. to crazy horse." Go to the museum. Sit and watch the Trecartin film transfixed. Take notes that feel like ether. Take notes that feel like gut dust. scattalogical notes. remember there is the declaration of independence at your base. write about this. let your writing come from the steam of the body and from the base of the heart. take notes until you feel like you might disappear. Somewhere in the middle of all this writing, take a break to blow up the balloon. Notice your breath and how blowing up this balloon relates to the film at hand. Write about this. Know that you are every person in the Trecartin film. When you are finished writing, prick your finger with a small blade of some kind, and mark the last page with your blood. Become blood brothers with the page. Dot the page with memory blood. NOW take your notes YOUR NOTES from both days of TRECARTIN ALLELUJIAH DEVIANCE and find the poem that poem, find, it, it is in there, the poem.

JULY 2010 Philadelphia workshop

2010-05-31T19:30:00.000-04:00

REGISTER SOON

There are a limited number of participants for the July 11th (Soma)tic Poetry Workshop. ALL DETAILS ARE HERE.

Thanks, see you soon,
CAConrad

COURTNEY, thanks again!

2010-05-26T12:02:00.000-04:00

Courtney Shumway continues an amazing (Soma)tic study through film. This is with Jordon Cecil, and is based on (Soma)tic Exercise #23, click HERE. Thank you for this!

#41 MOTHER TASTES FAMILIAR BECAUSE SHE'S MOTHER

2010-05-24T21:25:00.000-04:00

for David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson

Before taking a trip to San Francisco I purchased garlic and crackers from plants grown and harvested in California, then shipped 3,000 miles to Philadelphia. I asked the pilot to tell us when we were over California, and he was nice and did so. After millions of years of evolution we can fly thousands of feet above the earth. NO I don't want to watch a stupid movie during the flight, NO I don't want to read a stupid magazine, I'm THOUSANDS of feet in the air LOOK at those clouds! Don't be so stupid, look at the clouds! When our rotten bodies die and evaporate we will join them. Clouds are trillions of cells of water who were once dinosaurs, eagles, and many stupid and brilliant people. All rotten in the end, festering into a final breath, the final breath itself a wisp of vapor that rose to join our family of clouds. It's so disgusting it becomes its own special beauty! I want to vomit, a sickness the ultimate honor bestowed! Is there something wrong with the word "nice?" Well I like it, and the pilot was nice and announced when we were flying over California. Everyone around me was hypnotized by the stupid movie, the beautiful actors speaking the writer's boring script about relationships and dishonesty. It's true, as a species we are so narcissistic the planet stands little chance surviving unless it can prove to make us more beautiful and improve our love lives. And I pressed the garlic against the window, garlic that traveled 6,000 miles round trip, California to Philadelphia, and back again, what a ridiculous world! Little bit of garlic soaring thousands of feet above the fields where it was born, and I licked it and sucked it, finally bit it in half and chewed it. I brought it all the way back home to eat it and make it become my body, feed my cells. And the crackers. Chewing and slowly tasting the soil and texture of the land. Tasting the wind that blew its fingers through the stalks and stems, cricket songs, birds, all these vibrations are in the plants quietly growing with an enormous family of plants in the moonlight and rain and metallic scent of lightning. It's all in there, chewing it all in there. I chew it and chew it and my rotten body will die one day but I love it here. I love this world, I'm so angry that I have to die and leave it. Suicides irritate me the most, I wish I could take their unwanted leftovers, stupid fucking idiot suicides as though life isn't short enough. Chew this world, it's incredibly delicious. Fuck you for not paying attention. Don't speak to me if all you have is something stupid to say. I chewed the inside of my mouth, chewed some of my meat loose and mixed it with garlic and chips, went into the bathroom and spit it into the toilet, added piss, snot and semen. Then flushed it into the sky, rushed back to the window as the movie credits played and everyone told everyone how good the movie was. My notes from practicing this exercise became a poem.

#40 BETWEEN CORRESPONDING WAVES

2010-04-02T00:33:00.000-04:00

for Jocelyn Saidenberg & Rob Halpern

Gather sand from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When I collected sand in Atlantic City I meditated with the ocean for an hour, then dug a hole, placed a quartz crystal in the hole, covered it with sand and crystal-infused water (Fiji water). I repeated this ritual at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. During both rituals I was conscious of facing AWAY from America. East and AWAY! West and AWAY! Migration of senses, their capacities perceived and pursued. Back home, using a compass, I positioned the head of my bed north for 4 nights of concentrated ocean dream enhancement. Night 1: Atlantic sand in a cloth under my pillow with a continuous recording of ocean tides playing from the east. I drank crystal-infused water to better remember my dreams. As soon as I woke I took my notes DO NOT DO ANYTHING PEE CRY ANSWER THE PHONE MAKE LOVE until you have taken your notes. Night 2: Repeat ritual, except use Pacific sand in a fresh cloth under the pillow and play ocean tide from the west. Night 3: Repeat ritual, except have both cloths of sand under the pillow and play ocean tides from east and west. As you begin to doze, listen for when the tides match pace, your body between them, America between them. Night 4: Mix the sand in a fresh cloth for the pillow, then play ocean tides from east, west, north, and south. Set the alarm to wake in the middle of the night, move your head south, sand now at your feet in the north. Gather your four rounds of notes and sculpt your poem.

THE AMAZING Courtney Shumway!!!!

2010-03-30T15:02:00.000-04:00

CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ THE WORDS

This beautiful digital art is by Courtney Shumway, using a bit of my (Soma)tic text. Below is Courtney's (Soma)tic Project with video! ENJOY!

Thanks Courtney for making my day!!!!
CAConrad

-------------

The first in the new series of videos is up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKAuTMk457Y&aia=true

For those of you who I haven't talked to about this project, I am working on a series of videos based off of poet CA Conrad's (Soma)tic Poetry exercises - more information on these works can be found here:

http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/

For the videos, I am engaging in each of the (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises ( http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/ ) with individual artists, in whatever way seems appropriate, remains true to the practice, and results in some digital poetic love.

Ideally, each experiment will result in:
1) a unique interpersonal experience
2) a poem
3) a video

As with the Four Seasons piece, this project is being organized in an "Object-Free" manner, so if you are interested in participating, however you choose to interface with it will work. For example, here's a link to a video my friend Narayan did to kick us off a few weeks ago:

http://www.youtube.com/user/narayanr#p/u/88/-XBY1dL-0lI

Does it fit the structure of the piece? Not a bit. Is it part of the experiment? Obviously...

I hope all of you will consider joining this project as participating artists. There is room within the structure for all manner of performers, artists, dreamers, and risk-takers, even if you have never identified as a poet. Keep in touch regarding scheduling over the next several months. If you are out-of-state...whatever...let's work something out...we're creative people, right?

Incredible, abundant love and thanks to Quinn Myers, for being the first to offer up his time, experience, and poetry to my digital machine.

Let the new cycle begin!
~ Revolotus

#39 EVERGREEN SENSES

2010-03-15T23:23:00.000-04:00

This new (Soma)tic was created by THE AMAZING students at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. Students who created it include Camille Euritt, Maren Anderson, Jane Rubinstein, Ally Simmons, Will Owen, Franny Waldear, Zoe Hosmer-Dillard, Erin Tanner, Paige Clifton-Steele, Brian Fligner, Alexa Carson, Maryam Gunja, Kate Robinson, Nicky Tiso, Nicolas Lofredo, Adrienne Wilson, LeiF NePstad, Alex Dreyer, Maxamia Codella, Zach Fraser, Aba Kiser, Philip G. Taylor, Sean Ray ariel Caining, Duncan Wold Marsh. Many thanks to professors David Wolach and Elizabeth Williamson for inviting me to conduct the workshop.

Find something in your fridge. Smell it. Listen. Find a sound. Get as close to the sound as possible. Imitate the sound as you smell the object. Take notes. (Notes should mimic the sound. Continue taking notes until the smell has faded completely.) Leave the object, go to a familiar place with grass in an urban environment. Think about how it would taste. Now taste it. Lie on the grass and look out through the grass. Slowly tilt your head upward – expanding your horizon. Close your eyes and chew the grass slowly. Spit the grass out and look carefully at the grass, the dirt, the grubs, the sky. Alternate between seeing and tasting, tasting and seeing, both, neither. Taste the grass at a variance of altitudes. Standing, sitting, kneeling, prone. Taste all the parts of the grass, leaf, stock, root. Clutch the grass in your hand while concealing your left eye. Migrate the grass from your navel up to your pupil and then exchange the role of the hand from covering to embracing the object. Take your notes and using the THE FILTERS "Crystal" and "Altitude" write your poem.

#38 RADIANT ELVIS MRI

2010-02-06T20:17:00.000-05:00

for the psychic legacy of Hannah Weiner

Don't be afraid of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine, it's an amazing opportunity for a poem. I created this exercise after my knee was injured by a homophobic bus driver in Philadelphia. Astral travel is possible with some dedicated preparation. The MRI machine needs our water molecules in our bodies for the imaging process, the electromagnetic field literally shifting the alignment of the protons of our body-water. Drink only crystal-infused water for a week before your MRI, drink no other water, and drink it as often as you can. Look at the label for "silica" content, found in such brands as Evian and Fiji. It's important to saturate the body with as much crystal water as possible leading up to the day of the MRI. Choose a place you will visit for your psychic or astral visit (a room in your home for instance). For the week leading up to your MRI, each time you enter your chosen space STOP at the entrance, and take a long look around. Then close your eyes and imagine what you saw. Open your eyes and notice what you missed when imagining what you saw, for it is the missing things you will incorporate each time you repeat this exercise until you have gathered the entire space in your mind. The space I chose is a street in Philadelphia, a place I know more than any other place on our planet. For years I have been gathering the minute details of this one stretch of street: gutters, glass, bricks, trees, newspaper boxes, all the many details. Every time I walk to this street I prepare myself to STOP and drink it in, and notice something new to add to this growing landscape in my mind. On the day of your MRI sit and listen to music by Elvis Presley for an hour or so. Elvis Presley is being used ALL OVER OUR PLANET for healing. When I wrote my book Advanced Elvis Course there were many people I met who use Elvis to heal bodies and spirits, and when you listen to Elvis you tap into that collective use of His powers. The song I listened to on repeat before my MRI was "I Got A Feeling In My Body," with the refrain, "I got a feeling in my body / This will be our lucky day / We'll be releasing all our sorrow / Leave it layin' along the way." Elvis assists in setting the crystal-infused water molecules right for the MRI machine. Take notes take many notes all week long leading up to your RADIANT ELVIS MRI. Depending on the type of scan which is needed you may have as much as half an hour in the machine, and this is good! Let yourself relax for a few minutes. Take some deep breaths and relax. When the pulse of the machine amps up and begins to shift the alignment of your crystal-laden water molecules SEE the space you have been memorizing for the past week. SEE IT. Look at all the details you have been studying. The longer you keep inside this space the quicker and easier you will GO THERE. Go, and don't be afraid to leave your body behind you to do so. Make yourself sit, stand, jump, float, BE in that space in all ways. Find words if you can, like Hannah Weiner found on foreheads, look for words to remember. You'll know how to come back, don't worry yourself. Make sure you have a notebook ready to write in as soon as you get out of the machine. Leave the office and find a place to sit and take notes about your experience for your poem.

#37 TOUCH YOURSELF FOR ART

2010-01-04T00:47:00.000-05:00

for THE AMAZING Penny Arcade

(this exercise's poems are a chapbook from MONDO BUMMER)

(the photo of Penny by Jasmine Hirst)

There must be a piece of art near where you live that you enjoy, even LOVE! A piece of art that IF THERE WAS WAR you would steal it and hide it in your little apartment. I'm going to PACK my apartment TO THE ROOF when war comes! This exercise needs 7 days, but not 7 consecutive days as most museums and galleries are not open 7 days a week. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art hangs the Mark Rothko "Orange, Red and Yellow, 1961," a painting I would marry and cherish in sickness and in health, have its little Rothko babies, hang them on the wall with their father, and a portrait of my breasts to feed them at any hour. For 7 days I sat with my dearest Rothko. The security guards will think you're odd when you come for 7 days to sit and meditate. Never mind that, bribe them with candy, cigarettes or soda, whatever it takes to be left in peace. Bring binoculars because you will get closer to the painting than anyone else in the room! Feel free to fall in love with what you see, you're a poet, you're writing a poem, go ahead and fall in love! Feel free to go to the museum restroom and touch yourself in the stall, you may not be allowed to touch the paintings but they can't stop you from touching yourself, fantasizing touching and being touched by them. And be sure to write on the restroom wall that you were there and what you were doing as everyone enjoys a dedication to the details in museums. And be certain to leave your number, you never know what other art lover will be reading. When you return REMEMBER THAT there is no museum in the world with rules against the use of binoculars, information you may need for the guards if you run out of cigarettes and candy. Map your 7 days with extravagant enhancements: mint leaves to suck, chocolate liqueurs, cotton balls between your toes, firm-fitting satin underwear, things you can rock-out with (in secret) for the art you love. Take notes, there must be a concentration in note-taking in your pleasure-making. Never mind how horrifying your notes may become, horror and pleasure have an illogical mix when you touch yourself for art. Once you gather your 7 days of notes together you will see the poem waiting to be pulled out of a long and energizing dream.

...in Scythe Literary Journal...

2009-12-16T11:55:00.000-05:00

Scythe Literary Journal has just published 2 (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises and their resulting poems. Click on "Scythe Volume 1" and then you can click on my name to read. MANY THANKS to the editors and publishers of Scythe Literary Journal

#36 CONFETTI ALLEGIANCE

2009-12-01T13:36:00.001-05:00

Is there a deceased poet who was alive in your lifetime but you never met, and you wish you had met? A poet you would LOVE to correspond with, but it's too late? Take notes about this missed opportunity. What is your favorite poem by this poet? Write it on unlined paper by hand (no typing). If we were gods we wouldn't need to invent beautiful poems, and that's why our lives are more interesting, and that's why the gods are always meddling in our affairs out of boredom. It's like the fascination the rich have with the poor, as Alice Notley says, "the poor are more interesting than others, almost uniformly." This poem was written by a human poet, and we humans love our poets, if we have any sense. Does something strike flint in you from the process of engaging your body to write this poem you know and love? Notes, notes, take notes. The poet for me in doing this exercise is Jim Brodey, and his poem "Little Light," which he wrote in the bathtub while listening to the music of Eric Dolphy, masturbating in the middle of the poem, "while the soot-tinted noise of too-full streets echoes / and I pick up the quietly diminishing soap & do / myself again." Take your handwritten version of the poem and cut it into tiny confetti. Heat olive oil in a frying pan and toss the confetti poem in. Add garlic, onion, parsnip, whatever you want, pepper it, salt it, serve it over noodles or rice. Eat the delicious poem with a nice glass of red wine, pausing to read it out loud and toast the poet, "MANY APOLOGIES FOR NOT TOASTING YOU WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE!" Take notes while slowly chewing the poem. Chew slowly so your saliva breaks the poem down before it slides into your belly to feed your blood and cells of your body. Gather your notes, write your poem.

#35 ANOINT THYSELF

2009-11-03T20:46:00.000-05:00

for John Coletti & Jess Mynes

Visit the home of a deceased poet you admire and bring some natural thing back with you. I went to Emily Dickinson's house the day after a reading event with my friend Susie Timmons. I scraped dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. We then drove into the woods where we found miniature pears, apples and cherries to eat. I meditated in the arms of an oak tree with the pot of Emily's dirt, waking to the flutter of a red cardinal on a branch a foot or so from my face, staring, showing me his little tongue. When I returned to Philadelphia I didn't shower for three days, then rubbed Emily's dirt all over my body, kneaded her rich Massachusetts soil deeply into my flesh, then put on my clothes and went out into the world. Every once in awhile I stuck my nose inside the neck of my shirt to inhale her delicious, sweet earth covering me. I felt revirginized through the ceremony of my senses, I could feel her power tell me these are the ways to walk and speak and shift each glance into total concentration for maximum usage of our little allotment of time on a planet. LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME POET! Lose and waste no more time she said to me as I took note after note on the world around me for the poem.

giant HTML webpage!

2009-10-23T00:10:00.000-04:00

THIS MADE MY DAY! Blake Butler's GIANT HTML site just featured this page of (Soma)tics, click HERE!

#34 Seance Your Own Way

2009-10-14T22:14:00.000-04:00

This particular exercise is meant to encourage everyone to find their own way to communicate with loved ones who have died. A month before my friend kari edwards died she gave me a packet of incense made in the community in India where she and her life partner Fran Blau had lived for a short time. It was a sampler packet with 14 different scents. When kari died the incense developed a force field of psychic barbed wire around it for me, sitting on my desk. She gave this to me just before hugging me and saying goodbye before getting on an airplane which would fly her away from Philadelphia for the last time. After news of her death, burning the incense, even TOUCHING the incense would seem an extraordinary event for me. Then I decided that there was NO BETTER WAY to communicate with a dead poet than through the process of creating poetry with them, and for them. I chose 7 of the 14 different incense flavors, wanting to use the number 7 because as a symbol, it's designed for energy to rise up the stem and fly off the top, the top serving as a psychic catapult. This is why 7 is considered very fortunate, as it sends messages, wishes, whatever's put into it STRAIGHT up into the air. For 7 days I would meditate with each of the 7 scents, and chose the order of the scents for a communication magic spell. For instance, Day One: CEDAR is a scent associated with the god Mercury, and used to close the gap of time and space between you and the one you wish to contact. Day Two: FRANKINCENSE is a tree resin used to purify and to honor the divine. Day Three: MUSK, a scent belonging to the planet Saturn to aid in making inquiries about evolutionary spiritual responsibilities on planet Earth in this life-cycle. Day Four: EUCALYPTUS is used for many things, but in this case I was using it to firm my own resolve to become macrobiotic again, telling kari that I wanted to and needed to return to total health (it worked as I've been macrobiotic for 6 months now). Day Five: LEMONGRASS is used to dispel negative charges left behind after the healing invocations of eucalyptus. Day Six: OPIUM invokes Binah on the Tree of Life, and Binah helps the questioner understand information, and in this case understand more clearly what the messages from kari for the poems mean. Day Seven: MYRRH is the scent for the goddess Isis, the High Priestess, and I could think of no better way than to honor kari with the scent of Isis, She the great patron of nature and art, and She who puts the dead back together to live again. Each day I would UNPLUG THE PHONE, create a quiet space, then put kari's music CD on (experimental electronic music she created), then burn the incense, and WAIT IN THAT SPACE for the words to come. In my essay MACRO (Soma)tics published by Rob Halpern I discuss the uses of sound in (Soma)tic practice. The resulting poem from this communication with kari is called "kari7" and can be seen here, and was published as part of the anthology NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards (edited by J.T.Brolaski, e. kaufman, & E.T.Grinnell, published by Litmus Press/Belladonna Books).

#33 ANTENNA JIVE

2009-09-28T19:50:00.000-04:00

for Ben Malkin
Find a small tree, prepare the ground with blankets for you and your partner on either side of the tree. Get undressed, completely, get on your blanket, your partner facing you. Have the flats of your feet pressed together, the tree in between your pairs of legs. Both of you rest on your backs, and press your feet, press them with legs raised, then lowered. For a little while work together in this meditation of pressing and moving legs and feet with the tree quietly growing between them. Take notes about how you're feeling. Make it clear ahead of time that he or she working with you is free to do, say, sing whatever they want, so long as you keep the bottoms of your feet connected around the tree. My boyfriend Rich did this with me, singing, humming, and finally masturbating, sitting up and smearing his semen on the bark. His orgasm PUSHED our feet together at a critical moment of note taking for me, good for my note taking. Let this (Soma)tic exercise have as much freedom for the two of you as possible, the frequency given and taken and shared with the tree between you, a living antenna between you, pulling nutrients from the earth and sun rays. The tree between us is where the notes came most clearly for me. WHATEVER YOU DO please do not give any additional instructions to your partner, let THEM do EXACTLY what they want to do once you're both on the ground naked together with the tree between you. THEIR freedom to express themselves depends upon this poem as much as your feet pressing together between the tree. But take notes, take many many notes. Now take all of your notes and use THE FILTERS "Handful" and "Overtone" to shape your poem.

(Soma)tic Reading Enhancements

2009-09-28T00:22:00.000-04:00

THIS JUST OUT from Attention Span 2009, My enhancements, click HERE

MACRO (Soma)tics

2009-08-21T15:39:00.000-04:00

NON SITE COLLECTIVE posted this HERE
MANY THANKS to Rob Halpern!

#32 YOU IN YOUR SOUP

2009-08-09T23:29:00.000-04:00

for Juliana Spahr & David Buuck

First we must gather ingredients for the soup. It's whatever you want, but my soup included: carrots, onions, beets, burdock root, celery, kale, mustard greens, chard (4 roots, 4 stalks and greens, or, an even exchange with yang underground and yin above-ground), salt and water. Before chopping, sit with all the ingredients in your lap, or at least near you while you meditate however it is you meditate. But try to meditate on how this FOOD SOURCE is about to become your body. Chop and cook your soup. After soup has cooled, place the soup in a deep bowl, deep enough that you can submerge your hand. Unplug the phone, ignore the world. If you are right-handed then your left hand will be submerged into the soup, or the reverse, if the reverse. Sit for awhile with eyes closed, FEELING the soup with the submerged hand, pinch bits of carrot, or whatever is in there, FEEL it FEEL it, feel IT before IT'S eaten. Take notes about your body and the soup in the bowl before it becomes your body. The roots have recently been HUMMING underground forging themselves; stalks and leaves stretching into the light, and rain, and slight flutter of insect wings, ALL have now COOKED TOGETHER to become YOU. Take notes, take notes, many notes. Use a HUGE spoon if you have one, this to reduce your sense of your own size. Take notes about what THIS MEANS TO YOU to reduce your sense of your own size. Dip the spoon into the soup, scraping your hand, eat. Take notes about how this tastes, take notes about YOUR marinated hand-soup. Are the ingredients organic? Take notes, take notes, source of THE SOURCE is for the notes now. If ingredients are not organic, were there labels at the store telling where they were from? Take notes. Were any ingredients GMO? How do you feel about GMO foods? Notes, notes. Cup your submerged hand and eat from it. Run your tongue along the surface of your hand, and lick your fingers clean. Put your hand back in your soup. Can you feel the soup in your body, in your blood, coursing through you, can you feel this yet? Eat your soup with your HUGE spoon and cupped hand eat it eat it eat it all, licking the bowl and licking your hand CLEAN. Take notes about ANYTHING that comes to mind, pressing your now SOUPLESS hand to your forehead thinking thinking thinking about ANYTHING at all running your now SOUPLESS hand ALL OVER YOUR HEAD while thinking and writing. Now take all of your notes and use THE FILTERS "ACCENTUATE" and "ENGINE" to shape your poem.

Click HERE to read (Soma)tic Poetics Outline
Click HERE to see the book (Soma)tic Midge

#31 WHITE HELIUM

2009-07-09T23:35:00.000-04:00

for Sharon Mesmer

Take a white helium balloon with a red string into a private room where no one can see you or bother you. Don't even let them know you have it, and hide it in a closet when it's not in use. You need four consecutive days for this exercise. DAY ONE chew your favorite gum while naked in bed, or on the floor, but on your back, arms behind your head, legs spread apart, relaxed with your balloon on the ceiling above you. After your gum is sufficiently chewed and soft, stick the end of the red string into the gum, then shove the gum into your navel. WORK IT IN THERE. Relax again with the balloon above you, now attached to your navel. Navels are scars from birth, scars which are the center of gravity. Take notes about your navel now filled with gum and balloon string. MOTHER FED YOU through this before you were born, chocolates, spaghetti, tangerines, mayonnaise and turnips and cashews and pickled beets! You processed shit and other excretions through this YOU LIVED THROUGH THIS HOLE WITH THE BALLOON NOW HOLDING ON! Take many notes. DAY TWO sit naked on the floor while holding the balloon to your forehead, rub it into your third eye, bouncing your head gently into it over and over. Hum into it while thinking about your day, especially something that might have irritated you, hum LOUDER when irritating thoughts come to mind. Take notes. Now tie the red string around your penis, if you don't have a penis tie it around a dildo inserted into your vagina, or around your thigh, then walk around with your balloon bouncing above you. Read a favorite VERY FAVORITE book of poetry, stopping from time to time to take notes about reading this book naked with your balloon attached to you. How is it different reading this book naked with your balloon? Now read your favorite poem in the book backwards out loud, last word first, even read the title backwards. Take notes. DAY THREE cut a little hair from your head and pubic hair, and tape it to your balloon. Let the balloon rest on the ceiling while you sit on the floor naked, looking up at your bits of hair above you. Bring your balloon down slowly and study the hair and let it float back to the ceiling. Bring it down again and WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT WHAT TO DRAW draw spontaneous drawings with several different colored magic markers. Let it float back to the ceiling. While it's on the ceiling take notes about what you've just drawn. What does it look like? How do you feel about what you've drawn? Take notes about each color and how you used each color. Bring your balloon back down by the string and study it closer. DAY FOUR smear snot or blood or semen or pussy juice or ear wax or piss or vomit or shit or spit or sweat or whatever excretion you have available onto your balloon. Hold onto the string as it floats above you. Relax on your back on the floor. Hold the string by your toes with your legs extended. Look at the balloon with binoculars. What emblem is this? What Jolly Roger? What letter of love or apology is this? What declaration? Take notes, take notes. Slowly let the air out and put the balloon with all the hair and drawings and secretions into a sock, and put the sock under your pillow. In the morning take notes about dreams you had, especially if the balloon appeared. Your excretions had just been floating above you the night before, what was in your dreams? Take notes. Now take all your notes and use THE FILTERS "River" and "Basket" to shape your poem.

Click HERE to read (Soma)tic Poetics Outline
Click HERE to see the book (Soma)tic Midge

VERY HAPPY TO...

2009-07-05T13:16:00.001-04:00

...SAY that (Soma)tics appear in the new issue of MARK(S), edited by the one and only Ted Pearson! Click HERE to read!

#30 OAKENWOLF

2009-06-05T01:50:00.000-04:00

for Dorothea Lasky and Thom Donovan

This exercise needs nine consecutive days. Take nine books of poetry by LIVING POETS ONLY, but choose books of poetry you turn to again and again. Choose the order of the books for the nine days, then place an oak leaf (preferably late Spring leaf) in the first book. Sleep with the book under your pillow. Next day take the oak leaf from the book and bite a chunk off and keep it in your mouth. Find a recording of wolves howling from natural recordings, or even a recording you made yourself of friends howling. But if you make the recording, direct your friends to a Rallying Howl, then a Defensive Howl; let them decide what that means. Listen to the recording on headphones and go outside chewing your leaf, keeping the book on you, in a bag, under your arm, between your ass cheeks, it's up to you. Walk where there are people, walk where you can find THE MOST people. Keep chewing with the howling while studying faces and arms, studying how they move with one another, move around one another. Take notes, take as many notes as you can. When you're tired of chewing your leaf move it between your teeth and gums, but don't spit, swallow, don't spit. Remember that this leaf has been soaked in the book while you were dreaming. This isn't about appropriating text, it's about text absorption, the leaf taking on vibratory elements. Take notes about how the leaf tastes while thinking about how the book made you feel the first time you read it. SUDDENLY look up and find someone you are sure would howl a howl you would recognize as one of your tribe, your pack. Take notes about them to you in your world. Repeat this exercise for the nine days, a different book each day, the same leaf though, it's important to keep the same leaf, the leaf building layers of absorption. Now take all your notes from the nine days to make either one poem from all the notes, or nine different poems, it's up to you. If you use all the notes for one poem choose at least 2 FILTER WORDS, but if you write nine different poems choose at least 2 different FILTER WORDS for each poem, keeping in mind that the filter words are merely filters and guides for shaping. Don't worry about poem length, length is more important in bed than the poem.

Click HERE to read (Soma)tic Poetics Outline
Click HERE to see the book (Soma)tic Midge

OY!

2009-05-28T00:50:00.000-04:00

VERY EXCITED that my (Soma)tic Exercises just made it into STEPHANIE & STELLA'S HUMP DAY HUSTLER, I'M HONORED! CAConrad

#29 SHOPPING MALL TREES

2009-05-11T23:28:00.000-04:00

Go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the cars to create this poem. Find a tree you connect with, feel it out, bark, branches, leaves. Sit on it's roots to see if it wants you OFF! These trees are SICK WITH converting car exhaust and shopper exhale all fucking day! Sit with your tree friend. Don't pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you're here to write poetry, not to worry about what a lunatic you appear to be. Remember what our QUEEN poet of merging celestial bodies Mina Loy said, "If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction." Public Space is not easy in shopping mall parking lots, but calmly explain yourself to the security guard like I did when creating this exercise. They will train a camera on you, but the sooner you get rid of them the sooner you can train the camera of your brain. Take notes, feverishly at first. Use a magnifying glass to study the dirt, trunk, to look carefully at leaf veins and bark structure. Notes, take notes, writing quickly, as if you've just discovered a sleeping creature that may wake at any moment and ATTACK YOU! Smell your hand, smell a branch. Study then the sky and buildings and people and everything, every detail. Face one direction and stare for a few seconds. Close your eyes and while they're closed imagine what you saw. Open your eyes and notice what you missed when imagining what you saw. Study what was missed and where and how it exists in relation to your tree friend. Take notes. If you are right-handed then touch the tree with your left hand, for your left hand is the hand which absorbs the world. Then walk to other trees in the parking lot and touch them with your right hand, for your right hand is the hand which sends your messages OUT of you. Touching your right hand to the other trees sends OUT of you the message your tree friend put into you through your left hand. Take notes on what was said from tree to tree. What message were you carrying? Take notes while leaving. Later, at home, close your eyes and remember your tree friend, take more notes from this visit with your memory. Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "TRACT" and "INITIATE," shape your poem.

Click HERE to read (Soma)tic Poetics Outline
Click HERE to see the book (Soma)tic Midge

#28 AMERICAN poem, AMERICAN poet, the roots the roots the roots there are roots

2009-04-25T15:06:00.001-04:00

Go to a local government building or monument, courthouse, statue or prison, but a government structure, one paid for by all tax payers. This monument or building is something you paid to create, something you pay to upkeep. It stands for the collective stronghold of our nation, as Americans, as America moves and removes our collective fingerprints around the world as a military, as a business, as a structure of faces supplanting trust and empathy with a guise of trust and empathy under the guise of one flag. This is not to say an angry poem must ensue. This is just saying LET'S GET CLEAR. This is not to suggest you read up on American assassinations of leftist governments in South America, this is just saying KNOW what you already know to be true when coming to this poem. We're here as Americans. It's an American poem in a way that has roots, literally roots. Study the plants if there are plants. Study the grass around this government building or monument. Smell samples of the soil. What's around? See everything as best as you can, sit very still and look closely at the world as it always is around this structure you have come to today. DO NOT ENGAGE IN COVERSATION WITH OTHERS. You're here for how you see it, how you see this structure, how you see our country. This is personal. The date presently is April, 2009. We are at war on more than one front, millions of lives have been lost, and who knows how many more are at stake as our tax dollars purchase bullets and bombs, prisons and worse. Look at this structure you have come to, and know you are paying for its upkeep. You have a claim to it today. Take a list of notes about the structure, but these will be the notes you glean from later, as these are not the real notes for the poem. Take another list of notes while investigating the plant life, the soil, the natural surroundings. Take yet another list of notes about the government structure, only this time take notes about WHAT it is made from. Is there wood? Is there metal? Write in your notes about trees and rocks, iron and oil. Write about the elements all these parts of the structure originated from, and how they arrived here by boat and truck. Take the notes of the government structure broken down into the finer notes of the natural elements the structure originated from, and combine those notes with the notes of the natural world surrounding the structure today. Weave these notes, as this is an exercise in weaving notes. Now with the FEELINGS you have of being an American TODAY, whose tax dollars continue to pay for the cost TRUE HUMAN COST of two wars, form these final notes into a poem BUT WITHOUT EVER mentioning the government structure. And without directly involving America by name. Write a poem as a poet of the world with feelings for our collective human costs of war. Write this poem through THE GRASS AND TREES you see around you. Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "ALERT" and "EXILE" shape your poem.

#27 IRON AND SOAP! a collaborative exercise by CAConrad & Maria Mirabal

2009-03-25T17:12:00.000-04:00

Take a square foot of white fabric and iron it on an ironing board until it's HOT and perfectly smooth. Make a fold and iron the fold into place. Put the warm fabric to your cheek and hold it there with your eyes closed. What are you thinking about? How does this make you feel? Lightly rub the freshly made crease against your nose and cheek and neck and forehead with your eyes closed. Take notes about how you are feeling. Make another crease over the first crease and iron that into place, then repeat the meditation of holding and lightly rubbing against your face. Take more notes, take notes, take even more notes. Make more creases over the other creases, iron, repeat, take notes, repeat, take notes AND DO NOT ANSWER THE PHONE or the door, ignore everyone. Take more notes. When you are finished taking notes, open your eyes. Take 7 steps to your left (if you can.) Now go wash your hands. Go to the nearest sink, or water fountain, or fire hydrant, or fountain. Use soap. Liquid soap: something that moisturizes. If you don’t have soap, go buy it and return to your found source of water. Good. Now wash your hands 7 times with the soap. If you are in a public place and people look at you, offer them some soap so they can wash their hands too. After the 7th wash, shake your hands as fast and as hard as you can. Count to 70 then stop. Take more notes and remember to NOT answer the phone! Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "LINES" and "SMOKE" get to work shaping your poem.

#26 CRYSTAL MAPS

2009-02-25T09:46:00.000-05:00

Do you have a favorite gemstone? Do you know its properties for healing? Do you know its mythology, how it received its name and properties? Amethyst, Rose Quartz, Emerald, Ruby, Hematite, Garnet, Tiger's Eye, and hundreds of others are easily found in jewelry shops and New Age shops these days. You can find gemstone guide books, or even search online to learn about your favorite stone's properties. It's important to educate yourself and know this information in order to be able to do this particular (Soma)tic Poetry Exercise. Once you have a stone you want to work with, and know enough about, take a sheet of blank white paper. Draw a map of the streets or roads surrounding your home. Once your map is drawn, sit very quietly with your stone, the map in front of you. Close your eyes and meditate on your stone, thinking about the healing properties and other legends pertaining to your stone's world history. When you feel ready, open your eyes AND WITHOUT THINKING throw the stone onto the map. Now, go to that location with the stone. When you arrive at the location drink in the landscape. Be quiet, be invisible. Stand there, or sit there and be quiet, the stone in your hand. In your notebook take notes about what you see, feel, hear, smell, take it all in and write it all down. Then IMAGINE how the properties of your stone FIT into the world before you. For instance, if your stone is Garnet, this stone is known for the ability to maintain psychic protection, so, how would psychic protection be useful for what you see in front of you and around you? Take notes, LOTS OF NOTES! Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "SOFTEN" and "VICTOR" get to work shaping your poem.

#25 legs do it all!

2009-01-10T10:47:00.000-05:00

legs do
it all
head bobbing
a free ride

it's no
telephone she
holds a dying
bird to her
ear as legs
get them
there the
whispered
names of
you 'n' me

This poem from my book DEVIANT PROPULSION inspired our new exercise. First put pen and paper in four locations around your home. Make sure you do this when you are completely alone, and ignore the doorbell, ignore the phone. In fact unplug the phone. Now get naked and position your upper body in a pose, HOWEVER YOU WANT, limbs above your head, our out to the side, head tilted if you want, but find a pose, and make certain it's a pose which is unusual for your body. Then STIFFEN into place! All muscles above your waist should be stiff and frozen into place. Let you legs walk you around your home like this. Your legs can skip, run, or slowly, slowly move your body through the rooms. Your eyes can move in your skull, but don't move your neck at all. Have your legs and waist bend you into things like lamps and shelves, have your body touch things by the strength of legs and waist. Go over to your first set of pen and paper. Walk around the pen and paper, touch it with a foot, or knee. Then relax your upper body, sit down and WRITE NOTES! Sit there and write and write and write! Then find a new pose and dance through the house again. Go through this process untill you have taken notes at all four locations with four different, stiffened poses. Now take all of your notes, and using THE FILTERS "CLENCH" and "VANTAGE" get to work shaping your poem.

for (Soma)tic Poetics OUTLINE click HERE
for details on the book (Soma)tic Midge click HERE

#24 THROUGH THE REMAINS

2008-11-16T23:01:00.000-05:00

(Dedicated to Dodie Bellamy for her essay, "Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff"). Read this interview with Dodie Bellamy for an introduction to the exercise. Choose an article of clothing that holds special meaning to you, especially if it's something someone you love gave to you. Wear it all day the day before the exercise, infusing the article of clothing with your body by living your day EXACTLY how you want to live. Give the clothes a full day of LIVING with your body, eating, drinking, loving how you want to. The next day take the clothes out into the world with you wherever you go with your notebook. Drape them on a tree, or bench, keep them near you like a doppelganger, like an old friend, like someone you need to know better. Take notes about how you're feeling about the clothes being in your life. What are all of these feelings? Was it given to you by someone you love? If so, when did you last see them? What were you talking about? Take notes, lots of notes. Place the clothes in a bag, keep the bag near you. Meditate on the bag. Then have just a portion of the clothes poke out of the bag. What can you see about them like this that you hadn't noticed before? Study the textures, and, what is it made from? Leather, wool, silk, what is it? Imagine the animals or plants it was made from. Can you see these animals and plants in the world before they were your clothes? Trains, boats, trucks, imagine these forms of transportation bringing the raw materials into the hands or machines that made these clothes you love. Take note, lots of notes. Wrap the clothes on you in a way you don't usually wear them. Take notes while they are on you. Wrap them around your head, and take many more notes. Hold them in your hands, close your eyes, imagine where they will go when you die. Imagine them in the world without you. Take notes, and if anyone interrupts you SHOO THEM AWAY, politely if you want, but get rid of them, YOU'RE BUSY! Now take all of your notes, and using THE FILTERS "FRICTION" and "HALLUCINATION" get to work shaping your poem.

for (Soma)tic Poetics OUTLINE click HERE
for details on the book (Soma)tic Midge click HERE

#23 DEATH as DIRT as POETRY is

2008-10-31T18:58:00.000-04:00

Go to your local graveyard, spend some time searching for a spot to sit. Find a spot where no one will pester you, you're busy, you're here to write poetry, not to be pestered with small talk! When you have found your spot sit down on the ground. Take time to look closely at ALL OBJECTS at your feet, in the trees, etc. Find three objects, one of them on the ground, or at least touching the ground: your feet, a grave marker, tree trunk or roots, etc. The other two off the ground in a tree, a building, but make them things which are stationary so you can stay focused on them. Draw a triangle between these three objects. Focus hard on the contents of your triangle, keeping in mind that the ground object you have chosen connects to the dead. Imagine your triangle in different forms of light, darkness, weather, and seasons. Imagine someone you love inside the triangle dying. Imagine yourself inside it dying. Gather notes in this process, take notes, as many notes as you can about how you feel and what you feel. Then PAUSE from these notes to focus again on your triangle, THEN write QUICKLY AND WITHOUT THINKING for as much time as you can manage. Often it's these spontaneous notes which dislodge important information for us. DO NOT HESITATE to write the most brutal things that come to mind, HESITATE at nothing for that matter. Take some deep breaths and think about death by murder, war, cancer, suicide, accidents, knives, fire, drowning, crushing, decapitation, torture, plagues, animal attacks, dehydration, guns, stones, tanks, bombs, genocide, strokes, explosions, electrocutions, guillotine, firing squads, parasites, suffocation, flash floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, cyanide, poison, capital punishment, falling, stampedes, strangulation, freezing, baseball bats, overdose, plane crashes, fist fights, choking, etc., imagine every possible form of death. Take notes on your feelings for death at this point, DO NOT HESITATE. Now, TAKE ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS "QUICKEN" and "EMBLEM" shape your poem.

#22 FROM YOUR STORM-SOAKED BREAD

2008-09-07T13:41:00.000-04:00

(This exercise was created when Hurricane Hanna arrived in Philadelphia in the form of a tropical storm. This is dedicated to the hundreds of people and animals who lost their lives in Haiti and elsewhere when Hanna had been a full-blown hurricane. My joy and pleasure for the remnants of Hanna's warm, windblown rains refuses to ignore the danger and suffering it brought days before arriving in my city.)

Sit outside under shelter of a doorway, or pavilion, or umbrella on a park bench, but SOMEWHERE outside where you can easily touch, smell, taste, FEEL the storm. Lean your face into the weather, face pointed UP into the storm, stay there for a bit with eyes closed while water fills the wells of your eyes. Come back into the shelter properly baptized in the beauty of pure elements and be quiet and still for a few minutes. Take some preliminary notes about your surroundings. Try not to engage with others who might run to your shelter for cover. If they insist on talking MOVE somewhere else, you are a poet with a storm to digest, this isn't time for small talk! You are not running from the storm, you are opening to it, you are IN IT! Stick a bare arm or foot into the storm, let your skin take in a meditative measure of wind and rain. If you are someone who RAN from storms in the past take time to examine the joys of the experience. Remind yourself you are a human being who is 80% water SO WHAT'S THE HARM OF A FEW DROPS ON THE OUTSIDE ON YOUR SKIN AND HAIR!? Right? YES! Pause, hold your breath for a count of 4, then write with FURY and without thinking, just let it FLOW OUT OF YOU, write, write, WRITE! Set an empty cup in the storm, hold a slice of bread in the storm. Then put a little salt and pepper on your storm-soaked bread, maybe some oregano and garlic. With deliberate SLOOOOOOOOOWNESS chew your storm bread and drink the storm captured in your cup. Slowly. So slowly please. With a slowness which is foreign to you. THINK the whole slow time of chewing and drinking how this water has been in a cycle for MILLIONS OF YEARS, falling to Earth, being drunk, quenching horses, lizards, dinosaurs, humans. They pissed, they died, their water evaporated and gathered again into clouds to pour down STORM DOWN into rivers, puddles, aqueducts and ancient cupped hands. Humans who have LOVED who are long dead, humans who thieved, raped, murdered, were musicians, generous, playful, disappointed, fearful, each of them dying in their own way, their water coming to your bread, to your lips, to your stomach, to feed your sinew, your brain, your living, beautiful day. Take your notes POET, IT IS YOUR DAY to be totally aware, completely awake! Now, take ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS "PILGRIM" and "STAINED" shape your poem.

#21 LET YOUR TOES KNOW THE TRUTH!

2008-08-12T15:19:00.000-04:00

Take account of how many times you're not saying or doing EXACTLY what you want to say or do in a day. How many times do you use a tone in your voice which is not honest? How many times are you polite when you want TO SCREAM? How much compromise does your day comprise? Take CLOSE account of this. DON'T LIE ABOUT IT EITHER! This is for you, no one else will know SO BE TOTALLY HONEST! What is your body like when you're not being who you are? How does it feel? Are your hands doing something in particular each time? Your feet? Your groin, your stomach, how does your body react when you are not REALLY you? At the end of the day take notes about this. These notes will be the formal outline for this exercise. After that, EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 7 days you will pay attention to the SIGNS OF DISHONESTY in your voice and your body, and whenever you are not who you REALLY WANT TO BE at any moment in the day. Each time you are being polite to your boss, or the baby-sitter, or don't say FUCK because there's a child in the room, EACH TIME you are not you, CLENCH YOUR TOES! CLENCH THEM! Every time, CLENCH THEM! At the end of the day are your toes tired of this? Are they feeling BETTER maybe? Soak your feet in hot salt water and WRITE WRITE WRITE as quickly as you can, EACH NIGHT for 7 nights after a day of TOE CLENCHING DISHONESTY soak them in hot salt water and WRITE with the pace only a FURIOUS YOU would know how to do! OPEN YOUR EYES wider than they're used to being open and WRITE, WRITE WITHOUT BLINKING if you can. WRITE! At the end of 7 days take a long time staring at your feet, your toes, look at them. Stick them in your face if you can, right up to your face and look at them. Take a magnifying glass and look at your feet. For 7 days your toes have been taking the brunt of your dishonest actions. How does that look? Take notes. How does that feel? Take many notes. STICK YOUR TOES IN YOUR MOUTH if you can. How does that taste? Now, take ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS "ARREST" and "BASE" shape your poem.

#20 BETWEEN GENDERS THE ROSEMARY

2008-07-29T17:23:00.000-04:00

(Rosemary is a foundation herb used in many different magic spells.) Pick a destination outside. Be OUT in the world for this one. Bring FRESH rosemary with you (if you can only find dried rosemary, please soak it in water overnight). While walking to your destination rub the leaves between your fingers, then sniff your fingers, then rub a leaf into the center of your forehead. Take notes whenever thoughts come to you. When you arrive, sit down if you can. It's best to sit, and be out of the way of traffic where no one will bother you, you're a poet with poems in mind, this is not time for socializing. After you have spent some time relaxing at your destination then sniff deeply on the rosemary and imagine you are the opposite sex. Imagine a different body, a different societal gender conditioning. Get inside this Other. Look at the traffic, the buildings, or trees, or whatever's around you, and imagine how angles and speed, how color, and textures might be different to you. Choose a name for your Other, take a deep sniff of rosemary, then SAY the name of your Other out loud. How would your writing be different? Sniff the herbs on your fingers often while thinking and writing from your Other. Write carefully and slowly, then QUICKLY, slow, QUICK, then write very very slowly, take 30 seconds to write a single word, THEN QUICKLY, the SPEED, the slow, is everything. These notes might also contain something you feel is NOT discussed, or NOT discussed enough concerning gender. When you have taken all the notes you feel you can take, let the notes rest for a few days, MAYBE EVEN a week. At the end of that time take ALL THE NOTES, sit down with them in a quiet place and make a poem from them with THE FILTERS "INCUBATE" and "HAZARD" or ("HAZARDOUS").

#19 your garbage SPEAKS!

2008-06-30T01:43:00.000-04:00

(for Ish Klein who sees art in garbage)

SAVE YOUR garbage for a week, every wrapper, every box, carton, save it all. Rinse it out if you must, but it's better if you don't, better to SMELL it. At the end of the week go through each item, slowly, carefully, do it in a closed room, don't let anyone bother you. Don't answer the door or the phone, IGNORE THEM, you're busy looking at garbage to build a poem! Take some notes, write down interesting facts from labels, or the size of things, how they look, how you remember them before discarding them. Imagine where this packaging came from, factories, and before that fields and trucks and many many hands picking them, grinding them, printing with color and black ink. Take notes when thinking about these things. SMELL them one at a time with eyes closed, eyes opened, eyes closed again SMELLING, deeply SMELLING. Notes, take your notes. NOW GET NAKED AND GET IN THE BATHTUB, and go under water, blow bubbles. Go under again and stay under a little longer. DO THIS several more times then COME UP, dry your hands on the side of the tub and grab your notes, and grab your pen and paper and WRITE about drowning, pull your notes together to write a poem about drowning and you're about to die drowning BUT THIS IS what you want to share at the end. GO BACK UNDER the water again, then COME UP AGAIN and WRITE!

#18 WOLF RECORDING

2008-05-31T23:29:00.000-04:00

Don't be afraid this one is too difficult, just do it! Wolf recordings are available from different nature recording companies. OR, have your friends get together and howlHOWL around a recorder. People sound like wolves when we want to. Take your wolf recordings howlingHOWLING out onto the streets. If you live in a city BUSY CITY it's especially disturbing. Turn the volume up a bit to hear howls at lunch carts and subway stairs. Turn the volume down a bit to hear background howls, the everyday howls. Bring something to chew. Lunge at doorways. Don't worry, no one will bother you, you're a poet, just say you're a poet writing a poem, they will understand. Have some coffee beans to smell once in awhile so you can break your nose open. Get your nose OPEN. Then SNIFF everything, SNIFF yourself! Did you bathe before leaving? Well if so SNIFF others SNIFF your pencil SNIFF your books SNIFF metal SNIFF grass! Sit where you can drift out of view to watch everyone in the howling frame. How do you fit into the world you see? How you do not fit into the world? Wolves worry about such things all the time, making certain to understand where they fit. Do you eat meat? You don't need to eat meat, but if you do, eat your meat. I'm a vegetarian wolf myself, but eat my carrots like they're legs of soft, jerking, gentle fawn! NOW WRITE, and WRITE for as long as you can, an automatic response to your time with the HOWLINGhowling ON THE streets, POET, you are a POET, a howling one! Now, take a DEEP SNIFF of coffee grounds, again, and loosen yourself, and listen again to the howlingHOWLING while you read through the writing, and find what is true, and remove it, and live with it, add to it, remove more if need be. Listen to the howlingHOWLING again, in the dark, let it lead you through the words by flashlight or candle! BE DRAMATIC, don't be afraid to BE DRAMATIC, poet, writing, poet writing!

#17 a collaborative exercise created by Kendall Grady, CAConrad, and Monica McClure

2008-04-17T14:07:00.001-04:00

Open a closet or bureau or drawer or glove compartment or hidden shoe box. Pick out an old item of clothing. Maybe it looks like another decade. Maybe it's a childhood relic. At least one year must have passed since you have seriously engaged this item. Now wear it. Accommodate this item on your body even if you can no longer wear it as intended due to changes in the item's condition, your physical self, the weather, etc. Now grate one large carrot. Put the carrot in a new, clean nylon stocking and tie it around your head with the bulge of carrots against your upper lip where you can smell the carrots, and drops of their juice trickle into your mouth. Sit down in the sunlight, facing the sun with your eyes closed for fifteen minutes. Meditate on something you used to eat as a child. Think of the first thing you ever wanted to eat. Was it dirt, Styrofoam, play dough? Eat it slowly and in small doses. What is it like to believe that what you are eating is food? Pretend it is nourishment. Think about the material making changes in your body. What is it like to chew something into something else? What is that thing you eat when there is nothing else around? A tortilla and peanut butter? Now eat that thing and think about making something of nothing. While eating, move the carrot bulge to your forehead. The old item of clothing you found should now be tied around the arm you use to write with. Keep chewing while you write your poem!

#16 (your BANANA WORD MACHINE!)

2008-04-08T12:38:00.000-04:00

(This is primarily for poets living outside tropical regions) LOCK THE DOOR AND UNPLUG THE PHONE, KILL all outside interference, you must NOT be interrupted because YOU are about to build and ignite your BANANA WORD MACHINE, and once it gets started it doesn't like to stop, for anyone, for any reason! You need: a banana, and pictures of: parrots, boa constrictors, leopards, jaguars, banana trees, men and women carrying bananas to trucks for export, OR anything else which has to do with banana production, or wildlife or anything else native to where bananas grow. No music. No noise. If there is noise use ear plugs. Strip down naked and sit on the floor with your pictures, your banana, pen and paper. Smell the unpeeled banana while looking at each of the pictures you have chosen to build your BANANA WORD MACHINE. When you settle on your favorite picture slowly open the banana, staring at the picture. Imagine this picture ALIVE at the moment it was taken and BE THERE, slowly opening the banana skin, smelling, taking small tastes. When you have absorbed the picture thoroughly, and feel sufficiently transported mentally, get comfortable on your back, then slowly rub banana into your skin wherever you most want to, but make certain to coat your solar plexus, throat, and THOROUGHLY coat your forehead. Feet, genitals, ass, and wherever else you most want to of course since this is YOUR OWN PERSONAL BANANA WORD MACHINE! Slowly chew a little of the banana, and put the skin on your chest as you stretch out on your back with your eyes closed and FILL YOUR BODY with the LOWEST possible HUM you can muster! SUSTAIN THAT HUM! Then relax in your quiet, hum again, keeping eyes closed. Slowly chew a little more, smell, then just relax in your BRAND NEW BANANA WORD MACHINE! When you feel quiet, and your muscles quite limber, slowly massage the banana into your forehead, slowly, softly at first, then deeper and FASTER in a circular, clock-wise motion. THEN SUDDENLY SIT UP inside your BANANA WORD MACHINE and write write write write write WRITE! HUM and massage your forehead again to keep your BANANA WORD MACHINE fully in gear and energized! Write, hum, massage, relax, repeat, repeat, keep going, keep going, you, are, writing, in, your BANANA WORD MACHINE! You will write some of the BEST poems of your life TODAY! YOUR BANANA WORD MACHINE! LOVE YOUR BANANA WORD MACHINE! Yellow splendor!

#15

2008-02-28T11:07:00.001-05:00

If you are Right Handed write two words on your right arm that you will say to someone today (if you are Left Handed write on your left arm). Write these words where no one can see them. Your energy leaves your body through this arm, you point with it, you throw with it, this is the arm you use when the world receives from you. Keep these two words in mind all day, touch the words on your arm from time to time when no one is looking. Ask people questions using the two words. Don't ask them about the words, but use the words in your question. Remember what they answer and write it down later. Alone at night place the sheet of paper with answers from people where you can clearly read it. If you are Right Handed your left hand is where energy enters. (Or right if you are Left Handed). Hold your left hand overhead while you write on another sheet of paper. Rotate the hand overhead, and flex its muscles, open and close it, move it, constantly move it, and with the other hand WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! Pause from writing (but keep the other hand flexing and moving overhead) to read the answers from people again, then write, let whatever needs to come COME! This is going to be beautiful. Relax with it, see what you've made. See what poem or poems wait inside the writing. PLUCK THEM OUT!

#14

2008-01-19T14:38:00.001-05:00

Wear a shirt with a breast pocket over your heart. Put a dark chocolate candy bar in the pocket. Walk to a tree, study the bark, and branches, give it a proper hello. Press your left palm against the trunk for a little while, looking at the world around you. You are radar. Put your back against the tree, resting your body into its strength. With your right hand find your pulse in your left wrist. Keep a steady thought on the pulse and imagine your blood moving up to your heart, pumping beneath the chocolate bar in your breast pocket. Your blood, it's your blood, your heart, and they're saying hello to the chocolate bar, Hello Chocolate Bar, because they are saying Hello to themselves ahead of time. After a little while remove the chocolate bar from your pocket, break it in half. Drop one half at the foot of the tree, and let the other half slowly dissolve in your mouth. Don't be shy about the world of chocolate and all it wants of you once it's inside you. Your pen and paper GET YOUR PEN AND PAPER your blood your chocolate blood is ready! Write your poem RIGHT NOW!

#13

2007-12-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

Make little pictures you SHOW TO NO ONE! These are NOT useless, random doodles! These little pictures are your private declarative shit stains, blood splatters, tears, sperm, etc., fucking etc.! I mean to say that these little pictures are you in your greatest human element of the greater animal element we each push forward. Make little pictures. SHOW NO ONE! If someone finds it, burn it! Take your most recent little picture and place it under a glass of highly charged water at night near your head before you go to sleep. To charge the water take a piece of quartz crystal, place it in a glass (the water can also be high in silica already, check for silica content) and in the morning drink the water while looking at the little picture. NOW, after you have stared long and hard at the picture after drinking, begin writing. Fuck the alarm clock, BE LATE FOR WORK! Unless you drive an ambulance or fire truck YOU'RE ALLOWED TO BE LATE! Write, and write and write!

#12

2007-11-25T19:54:00.001-05:00

In a dark room shine a flashlight on a piece of paper. Inside the circle of light draw an X. Shut the light off. Then point the light to a random part of the room, turn it on for just one second, then shut it off. In that one second really SEE where the light shines. Now in one of the four sections of the X write one word of one thing you saw. Repeat this procedure a second time. On the third time write an emotion felt when seeing the light shine. On the fourth another emotion. Now you have two things and two emotions. Arrange and rearrange these words until you like how they sound in a particular order. This is now the title of a new poem by you. Write the poem, right then and there write it. No hesitation. No answering the phone. Everyone be damned, you have a poem to write.

#11

2007-10-15T21:44:00.000-04:00

Use blue or purple ink for this please, if you have it. (Purple is best!) You also need a sheet of white, unlined paper. Place the pen (purple ink the best!) and paper on the floor in front of a rocking chair. Sit in the chair very still for a few minutes with eyes closed, keeping track of your breath. Then breathe deeply three times, and begin rocking wildly, saying out loud as you rock, "OO-WAH" over and over, nine times. On the ninth count of rocking with "OO-WAH" throw yourself onto the floor and QUICKLY and without thinking draw an X then a line from the X, and where that line ends draw another X. Now repeat this procedure of rocking and "OO-WAH" but when you fling yourself at the pen and paper this time start from the X where the first line had stopped, then quickly draw another line, then put an X where that line stops. Continue repeating until you have nine lines on the page. Now you have a map. Follow your map in whatever location you want, it's your map after all. You can follow it outside by streets and blocks, or in an empty parking lot, or field, or in your bedroom or kitchen. Or have your finger follow the map on the naked body of your lover (this one is my favorite!). But when you come to an X on your map, stop, pause to reflect on this spot where you find yourself. Jot down a few notes. When you have finished your map-following and note-taking you can then squeeze the poem out of the experience. It's there, it's in there.

#10

2007-10-11T16:09:00.000-04:00

At a street corner pause to see how the sunlight comes down to enter the landscape just as it has for millions of years. After a little while imagine the fern or blackberries from before the buildings and sidewalks. Was there a nest of squirrels? The death of a snake? Where are you in time? After your time travel, sit the hell down and write a poem! Don't let anyone interrupt you! You're busy!

#9

2007-09-30T22:44:00.000-04:00

Write "silver tonic for a bronze day" on a tiny piece of paper. Put the tiny paper and one ice cube in a plastic baggie, then seal it tight. Where do you most need to wear this? In a back pocket? Shirt pocket? Carry it between your ass cheeks? Or crotch? Tie it around an ankle, or have it rest on your head under a hat -- it's your choice, it's your's to know where. Leave it in that spot for the duration of your walk outside in your neighborhood. Later, before going inside, go where no one can see you and SMASH the baggie to let the water wet yourself on the spot where it was carried. It's just a little water. Just a little tonic. Go home and write your poem.

#8

2007-09-19T11:25:00.000-04:00

Take a stroll and stay walking for this one. If you could have the clouds rain any fluid of your choice what would it be? Imagine it coming down on the street in front of you. How would the other people on the street react to your chosen liquid? Is it something they would fill mugs with and drink? Would they run screaming for cover? What if this liquid came down as a flash flood, how would the streets smell after the storm? What would the weather reports sound like on the news? If they interviewed a scientist what would be the expert opinion given? If the sun beat down 100 degrees everyday for a week how would it smell? Sit down somewhere and begin to write, but write about sandwiches, write about peanuts, write about apricots and sushi, then write about eating this, being thirsty, and filling a mug with the fluid of your choice. Write as much as you can as fast as you can no matter how silly it seems to you. A day later start to mine this writing to find the hidden poem.

#7

2007-09-11T12:44:00.000-04:00

Okay, so you find out you're going to die, or be killed later today. What meal would you like? What meal is your favorite? Make that meal for yourself. Sit and write a few lines from the smell and sight of it. Put your ear to the plate and move it around with your fingers or fork, or chopsticks. Listen, smell, look, and eat it, slowly, very, very, slow, ly, eat, it. It's your favorite meal, it's your last meal, enjoy every single flavor. Promise me you're slowly eating? Good. As soon as the last bite is gone move quickly into the bathroom. Blast the cold shower while you strip naked. As soon as your clothes are off then shut the water off. Light a candle, shut off all lights, then sit on the floor of the cold, wet shower with your candle and write your poem, addressing some of what you wrote earlier about your final meal. If someone should catch you and call you a weirdo yell back, "YES I AM NOW LEAVE ME ALONE I'M BUSY!" You are busy, and you are a weirdo, and it's a marvelous thing, now go back to your writing. Forget about them, it's not your fault you're more interesting than they are.

written at Jason Zuzga's request for FENCE Mag

2007-09-02T22:30:00.001-04:00

1.) Wash a penny, rinse it, slip it under your tongue and walk out the door. Copper is the metal of Aphrodite, never ever forget this, never, don't forget it, ever. Drink a little orange juice outside and let some of the juice rest in your mouth with the penny. Oranges are the fruit of Aphrodite, and she is the goddess of Love, but not fidelity. Go somewhere outside, go, get going with your penny and juice. Where do you want to sit? Find it, and sit there. What is the best Love you've ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you're busy, you're a poet with a penny in your mouth, idle chit chat is not your friend. Be quiet so quiet, let the very sounds of that Love be heard in your bones. After a little while take the penny out of your mouth and place it on the top of your head. Balance it there and sit still a little while, for you are now moving your own forces quietly about in your stillness. Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.

2.) In your home alone. Take a bucket or basin of room-temperature water to your front door and strip naked. Put a piece of paper or thin notepad under the bucket and lay a pen nearby. Stand in the water. Get used to being naked while standing in water at the front door. Look through the peep hole. Look for a long time at the world out there. Then look above you, and at the door, the walls, and make note of something you hadn't seen before -- maybe a cobweb or crack in the paint. Every once in a while stretch your arms over your head stretch as high as you can stretch stretch stretch then relax in your bucket. If someone knocks or rings the bell it's your good fortune! Look at them through the peep hole while saying nothing. Maybe have a friend come over at a certain time to knock and say, "Are you naked in your bucket of water?" Don't answer, you're a poet, this isn't time for idle chit chat, besides that you can warn them ahead of time that you won't be answering them. Stretch, and be quiet. Step out of the bucket and sit your poet ass on the floor, get the paper from under the bucket and whistle short, loud bursts of whistle four times. Then write. When you feel the need for more whistles, pause, whistle, then write some more.

3.) Eat a little dark chocolate before getting on the subway. Sit in the middle of the car, and don't get on a car where there are no seats for you. Sitting is best for this. Eat a little more dark chocolate. For the next few stops examine the interior of the car with care. Then close your eyes, and as the car rolls on its tracks make a low hum from deep inside you. Don't worry, no one can hear you, trust me, I've tested this with a friend. As soon as the car stops write nine words as fast as you can before the train moves again. These are not words you were thinking about, just write, don't question what you write, just write. Repeat this humming and writing for nine stops. Get off the train. Find a bench or patch of grass. Now look at that first set of nine words carefully, then write something about the words. What do they mean to you? Then move onto the next set of nine words and repeat. After this is finished poke around all this writing and see what kind of poem is hiding inside it. It's there, trust me it's there. You've just emerged from the underground, rumbling and grumbling and there is something waiting for you to discover it. (Please Note:) Try to not engage with anyone while in the car, or while leaving the subway. Don't break your concentration. Maybe have a little note prepared to hand a friend you might run into which explains why you can't talk to them. Don't wait for their response, just hand them the note and get about your business, you're busy. And they will understand, don't worry, just get going for your poem.

4.) Take a red magic marker and draw a 9 on your naked chest. Draw the 9 from the bottom up. Start the tip of its tail at your naval and sweep UP to have the round circle of its head in the middle of your breasts. Put on a shirt that conceals the 9 from other eyes. Go out to the corner and quickly choose a direction. At the next corner choose another direction. Don't think about where you are going, instead spend the time between corners looking carefully at the world. Finally come to a complete stop at the 9th corner. Look across the street and focus on four different objects. Draw a line to connect them, looking carefully at what's inside this square you've just made. What's outside it? What's half-in? Imagine you string lights to make the square. Imagine its contents at night, dimly lit. Imagine this square a year from now. Ten years from now. Now go somewhere quickly and write, run, run to a place where you can write. Suddenly the city, your city, is a place where places to write come to mind, you must always know those places at all times.

5.) Go to a bookstore. Go to the History Section. Close your eyes and randomly choose a book. Turn to page 108. Read that page and pull one word you like from it. Go to the Romance Section, repeat process. Then go to these other 7 sections and repeat process: Gardening, Religion, Biography, Children's, Cookbooks, Law, Horror. After you've collected these 9 words sit in the store, even if you must sit on the floor, then write a poem which includes these 9 words. This poem must be immediate, and it must be written in the store where the 9 words were found on page 108 of 9 different books. I hope you show me your poem one day. Thank you ahead of time.

6.) If you can be naked for this exercise it is best. Plan to be outside for 9 different sunsets. Get yourself comfortable and seated an hour before the sunset. For 50 minutes focus on your feet. Look at them. Where have they walked in this world? Are they tired? How do they smell? Can you suck your toes? Give them a good taste. But mostly give them some serious concentration, they're your feet, no one else's. This is a meditation for your feet. Imagine they had their own thoughts and told you some things about themselves you did not know. Think of nothing but your feet. Think about one, or both of them gone. Or damaged. Think of them in every way you can imagine thinking about them. Then for the remaining 10 minutes before sunset, just before twilight, write at a fever's pitch about some of those thoughts you have had about your feet. For the other 8 sunsets focus on each of these 8 different body sections, one per sunset: Legs, Genitals, Naval, Breasts, Arms, Hands, Neck, Head (exterior), Head (interior). If when you meditate on your genitals you feel the urge to masturbate that is fine, but try to not orgasm because we want to keep the energy challenged and in flux, not depleted. Of course if you do orgasm don't worry, no big deal. But try to keep yourself from doing so. And if you do masturbate try to not do it for the full 50 minutes, there are many things your genitals would like to tell you if you would only imagine that they could. After the 9 sunsets are completed, take your 9 feverish streams of writings and on a fresh piece of paper put the first word from the first sunset meditation, then the second word on the fresh piece of paper is the first word from the second meditation, and so on, keep going until all the words from all the writings are now fully mixed and on one document. From here you must become the natural editor you are, looking closely, moving words, removing words, working it into the poem that's waiting to be found. Take your time with this, it's nobody's business how long you take.