You write what you eat

CAConrad's '(Soma)tic Midge' considered, plus links to all audio recordings of the poet reading the work

Al Filreis

The jacket of the Faux Press edition of "(Soma)tic Midge"

“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” Mark Twain wrote that. CAConrad’s book of poems (Soma)tic Midge proves that exactly the opposite (opposite in every element) is probably the truth. Eat what you must, and let the food fight it out on the outside. Fortunately for us, the outside is this writing.

The Faux Press of Cambridge, Mass., published Conrad’s chapbook, the earliest work in a series he has been writing under the general rubric “somatic poetics.” Poetry of the body, by the body, maybe even for the body — although while the first two effects can be discerned in the writing, the latter of course can only be guessed from it. But I'm guessing this work has felt to the poet to be for the body also. Work that is done to the body.

Before and after the Faux Press publication of the book, Conrad read parts of it at various readings, and PennSound’s Conrad author page features a number of recordings of these sections. See, below, for links to all these — brought together in one linked list.

In the (Soma)tic Midge sequence, Conrad writes whatever he wants under the vague (that is to say, only generally defined) somatic influence of foods of a certain color. To write the poem partly titled “distorted torque of FLORA’S red,” he ate only “red foods for a day” — and in that instance subjected himself to the additional rule or compositional constraint of being “under the influence of” a red wig, worn a certain way.

So these poems are rule-bound — procedural poetry — but the effect is left to the reader to understand according to his or her belief (if “belief” be the word) in the idea that we are what we eat. To exactly the extent one believes we are what we eat these poems will seem specifically somatic.

The poems don’t at all participate in the traditional symbolism of colors. The red (red food day) poem is not about love; the yellow poem is not about cowardice; the green poem is not any more verdant or natural than any of the others.

I dig rule-based verse at the level of the series/project, though sometimes less so at the level of the stanza and line in such a poem. But in (Soma)tic Midge I dig it sometimes at the level of the line as well. My mind is working all the time: this or that never-quite-explicable stanza always stands in some kind of relation to the poem's color, the food I'm imagining Conrad had to eat that day to write it. The juxtaposition doesn't keep the poem from going where it will go but commands alertness to juxtaposition--not juxtaposition of poetic elements set side by side and operating on same plane, but rather this: (1) words in front of you, “under the influence of” (2) the body consuming food of a certain resonant-but-not-symbolic color. The effect is hard to describe and I’m sure I have failed here. In the yellow poem, is the “something” in

     something
 might hinder this
emphasis of
   ferocity

all that yellow food — grits with butter, wax beans, bananas? Is “this” the poem that tries to stand against what yellow typically means? We ain't foolin’ around. The poet who wrote those lines spent the day eating yellow food (enough to make me feel a loose bowel movement coming on) and, I should add, “while under the influence” of a yellow condom tucked into his left sock. Anyone who met CAConrad that day wouldn't have known of the latter “influence” — it’s between us, shall we say; we are let in on a close-by secret and I for one find myself under its strange influence too. I too “look under / pain and / find me.”

As we move through these drastically colored days, the conditions seem to increase in extremity. For his blue day he subjects himself to the continuously looping sound of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet.” For white, the final poem, the food is at its most awful blandness (although I love turnips if they are pureed) and the ultimate bodily white — semen — is written on the poet’s forehead. A life-embracing somatic twist on Kafka’s notion of penal punishment. This final poem is devastating:

Dear Admiral White Pants
          thanks for   
         the field
       guide to
         extinct
       animals

  you make me the 
     belly who
       birds push
  through at last

White is war. It’s

also the color of the truce flag, announcing the withdrawal from the agonistic field. In CAConrad’s white (white food day) poem, the speaker is rebuked by a martial uncle who thinks his nephew would make a bad soldier, and we have no doubt by that point that he is right. But then again, think of the discipline required. That he’s got aplenty. He takes over white--takes it over from the militarizers. Finally, in the end, in the final lines, white is in fact peace, as “a dove / lands but / I say nothing” and “no spell [is] / broken.” We are back to the great traditions of poetry: the end of the poem is the coming down softly of language, swerving but with surprising grace, upon extended wings.

Here are links to recordings of Conrad reading parts of (Soma)tic Midge at various events, all of which are available, too, at PennSound:

Introduction (1:46): MP3
Distorted Torque of Flora’s Red (1:57): MP3
A Little Orange Bag, Believe it or Not, Can Hold all that Remains (2:22): MP3
We're on the Brink of Utter Befuddlement, Yellow Hanky Style (2:01): MP3
Say it with Green Paint for the Comfort and Healing of their Wounds (2:01): MP3
Rehab Saved his Life but Drugs Saved Mine at the Blue Hour (2:54): MP3
We're on the Brink of Utter Befuddlement, Yellow Hanky Style (2:31): MP3
Say it with Green Paint for the Comfort and Healing of their Wounds (1:53): MP3

distorted torque of FLORA’S red (1:46): MP3
a little orange bag believe it or not CAN hold all that remains (2:15): MP3
we're on the brink of UTTER befuddlement yellow hankie style (1:26): MP3
say it with grEEn paint for the comfort and healing of their wounds (2:03): MP3
rehab saved his life but drugs saved mine at the blue HOUR (1:54): MP3
smells of summer crotch smells of new car's purple MAjestY (2:05): MP3
from the womb not the anus WHITE asbestos snowfall on 911 (1:44): MP3

December 21, 2012

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.