CAConrad writes poetry using (Soma)tic rituals that he develops for a given location or series of verse. In describing his process, he quotes Annie Dillard’s reflection on the differences between presence and productivity: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
“I decided to take that to task,” he says, and so in 2005 he began a practice of “creating rituals so that while I’m doing them I can’t be anywhere but there … finding the extreme present.” During his first MacDowell residency, CAConrad undertook a practice of meditating on Mount Monadnock each day from the stone amphitheater on the Colony grounds. He would sit with a quartz crystal given him by his late partner that he held under his head wrap, and afterward would listen to glass harmonica music and write under the steady gaze of two Hindu deities in an alter he created back at his studio. Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance and prosperity, and Ganesh, the god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles, occupied space near his writing desk. In his writing practice, Conrad takes copious notes, often ending up with more than a dozen pages of single spaced lines from which, he says, “I scrape away all of the excrescence and am left with a poem.”
His most recent book ECODEVIANCE (Wave Books), which was worked on at MacDowell, won the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.
