CAConrad in the studio

PennSound podcast #55

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CAConrad returned to the Kelly Writers House on January 27, 2016, to visit the Wexler Studio to speak with Julia Bloch and to read from ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, which appeared from Wave Books in 2014, as well as a number of new works generated from his ongoing performative and pedagogical practice of somatics and ecopoetics. CAConrad grew up in Pennsylvania and is the author of seven books, including ECODEVIANCE,  A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, The Book of Frank, and Advanced Elvis Course, all of which explore the place of poetry in social and political life. Eileen Myles wrote in 2010 in Jacket,“he’s the poet who always changes the room he enters. He’s poetry’s answer to relational aesthetics. Which is the movement camped out now at the center of the art world in which the audience becomes the inevitable workings of the piece.”

Conrad was a 2011 Pew Fellow and a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, and RADAR. He is currently living in Asheville, North Carolina. Conrad’s commitment to a poetic practice that can manifest change is legible as much on the page as it is in the actions and community workshops he leads around the country. When asked by the Pew Center in 2014, “If you could collaborate with anyone alive today (someone you don’t know personally), who would it be?” Conrad answered, “I want to write some poems with the President of the United States, to apologize together for the millions of lives we rip to shreds with bullets, bombs, and drones. Three children die of war-related injuries every single day in Afghanistan. Then I want to write poems with him in the broken streets of Philadelphia and Detroit. […] THEN I want to write poems with him in the hills of Tennessee where my boyfriend Mark (aka Earth) was murdered. To this day, the police have written off his death as a suicide because they can’t be bothered to investigate a hate crime. No one but the president will do.”