{"id":112279,"date":"2017-07-06T13:14:38","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T17:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112279"},"modified":"2017-07-06T14:31:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T18:31:30","slug":"queer-bubbles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Bubbles"},"content":{"rendered":"

How CAConrad turns ritual into poetry.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

CAConrad in a still from The Book of Conrad<\/i>, a 2015 documentary by Delinquent Films.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last year, I attended a reading at Over the Eight, the now-defunct Williamsburg bar and performance space. Eileen Myles was headlining. But another poet, CAConrad, a close friend of Myles, captured my attention. He took his place at center stage, a large man draped in billowy clothes and what he calls his \u201cwar hair,\u201d which he hasn\u2019t cut since 2006, on the three-year anniversary of the United States\u2019 invasion of Baghdad. He read from a piece entitled \u201cPower Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.\u201d It began with what sounded like a short story or anecdote: \u201cI occupied a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina,\u201d he said, \u201cto bless children with bubbles that will make them queer.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on to describe the reactions of passersby as he blew bubbles, shouting that they had magical properties to \u201chelp rid the world of homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of stupidity.\u201d The audience laughed. Some cheered. Conrad smiled. \u201cBubbles, of course, do not have such powers,\u201d he acknowledged\u2014but he was serious, serious about the act of standing on a corner blowing bubbles and watching how the world responded.<\/p>\n

After relating the anecdote, he told us that he\u2019d taken notes on the experience. These notes became a poem, which he read aloud. The poem was completely unexpected\u2014it was not in any way about bubbles, for one thing\u2014but it was funny, angry, shot through with violence and informed by a reverence for nature. The first lines stuck with me: \u201cI was naked \/ on a mountaintop \/ kissing someone \/ who loved me,\u201d and the last: \u201cthere is nothing little about the cicada revving up while \/ we think our car horns \/ are so impressive.<\/em>\u201d The audience was rapt. You could hear the uninitiated whispering: Who is <\/em>this guy?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CAConrad was born January 1, 1966, at Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas, the son of a fourteen-year-old runaway and a Vietnam veteran. He grew up in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, the hometown of his mother\u2019s second husband. Boyertown, with a population of about four thousand, was, during Conrad\u2019s youth, a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan. Most of his adoptive family worked for the Boyertown Burial Casket Company, assembling coffins. Conrad has written that \u201cthe factory destroyed my family\u201d; it has since closed, and is now a nursing home, housing many of the people who once labored there.<\/p>\n

In 1974, when he was eight, his mother put him to work selling bouquets along Route 309. He toiled all weekend long, carrying buckets of flowers up and down the highway. At age nine, he discovered Emily Dickinson in the public library, then Vladimir Mayakovsky\u2019s How Verses Are Made<\/em>. (\u201cNo one read in that town,\u201d Conrad told me: \u201cno one had bookshelves, just the Bible and TV Guide.\u201d) He began writing poems of his own, there by the side of the road.<\/p>\n

That was also the year he got a rifle for his birthday. It came in handy. Conrad\u2019s mother remarried a third time, and her new husband had a habit of coming home drunk and trying to molest his six-year-old stepdaughter. Conrad shut his sister in a closet and camped out in front of it, guarding her with his birthday present.<\/p>\n

Conrad sold flowers for eight years until, at sixteen, he took off for Philadelphia. Before leaving rural Pennsylvania he\u2019d been outed by bullies at his high school, which Conrad describes as \u201ca horrible experience.\u201d But he found a community in Philly. He lived in an artist-friendly apartment block for $210 per month, attending parties and readings, and writing poems\u2014Gil Ott was an early mentor. He lived among drag queens and sex workers who kept an eye on him, the \u201ccute, na\u00efve\u201d country boy. The building super, \u201cHot Johnny,\u201d armed himself and his friends with bats and knives to defend them from local skinheads. At night, painters, poets, musicians, and bikers gathered at the Bacchanal, a bar run by artist Joseph Tiberino. \u201cPhiladelphia,\u201d Conrad says, \u201ctaught me how to love the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was no outrunning the HIV epidemic. Conrad\u2019s boyfriend at the time, Tommy, died of AIDS<\/small>, along with countless other friends, plus his coworkers at the go-go clubs where Conrad sometimes danced for cash. He estimates that he attended fifty-four funerals in 1991. And the specter of homophobia was never far: In 1998, another boyfriend, Mark, who called himself Earth, was found dead. There was evidence that he had been bound, raped, and set on fire. The police ruled it a suicide.<\/p>\n

Rage, vengeance, survivor\u2019s guilt\u2014it\u2019s all there in Conrad\u2019s poems, which took decades to find a publisher. After two promising collections, Deviant Propulsion <\/em>(2006) and Advanced Elvis Course <\/em>(2009), which came out in Conrad\u2019s forties, he published his breakout work, The Book of Frank<\/a><\/em>, also in 2009. It had taken eighteen years to write and originally comprised 1,584 poems. (The published version contains 130.) Each Frank <\/em>poem, he says, came to him all at once.<\/p>\n

The Book of Frank <\/em>reads like a novel written by a John Waters character, the Divine of Mondo Trasho <\/em>or Pink Flamingos.<\/em> There are miscarriages kept in formaldehyde, fragrant bibles, and lesbian ventriloquists. One poem reads in full: \u201c \u2018peas take \/ a deep \/ breath when \/ you open \/ their cans\u2019 \/ Frank said \/\/ \u2018Pea Activism \/ is your courage \/ and a \/ concealed \/ can opener in \/ supermarket \/ aisles.\u2019 \u201d But a current of sincerity animates these poems. Conrad\u2019s love of the natural world and his identification with marginalized characters keep the book from veering into camp. As Myles puts it in the collection\u2019s afterword, \u201cWhat\u2019s most impressive here is how well-tweaked kitsch yields such quiet profundity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2005, while working on Frank, <\/em>Conrad returned to Boyertown for a family reunion. On the train ride home, it occurred to him that he hadn\u2019t escaped the coffin factory at all. \u201cI had an epiphany,\u201d he told an interviewer, \u201cthat I had been treating my poetry like a factory, an assembly line, and doing so in many different ways \u2026 When I got home and threw the door to my apartment open I could see the factory on my desk.\u201d<\/p>\n

What bothered him the most, he realized, was that this factory mentality had led him to remove himself from his writing\u2014he felt he wasn\u2019t present in his words. He began to create rituals, exercises that demanded his absolute attention. Afterward, having situated himself in the \u201cextreme present,\u201d he took extensive notes. These provided the basis for new poems. He called the process \u201c(Soma)tic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In practice, the rituals run the tonal gamut. Some are comic, some tragic, some impassioned, some absurd. One ritual begins:<\/p>\n

Go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the parked cars to create this poem. Find a tree you connect with, feel it out, bark, branches, leaves. Sit on its 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\u2019t pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you\u2019re here to write poetry, not to worry about what a lunatic you appear to be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that Conrad, with his war hair, androgynously soft features, painted nails, bright shirts, and quartz crystal necklaces, might certainly appear to some as a \u201clunatic\u201d\u2014but his rituals are not about stealth. Conrad\u2019s presence is so striking that it\u2019s almost confrontational. He insists on being seen.<\/p>\n

In another ritual, he instructs readers to gather their weekly garbage and dump the trash in a wealthy neighborhood. \u201cTake 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poems that result from these exercises are frequently remarkable, full of inventive language and surprising turns. But the rituals are what most distinguish Conrad\u2019s work from other contemporary poets. Whether they entail blowing bubbles, inspecting parking-lot trees, or interviewing Philadelphia businessmen about the consistency of their semen (\u201cSuspension Fluid Magnificence\u201d), they are not just processes\u2014they are part of the poems themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love being inside the ritual,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like speaking in tongues. It\u2019s not just automatic writing \u2026 Every nuance, every adjustment to the ritual, alters the language that comes out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exercises like these are nothing new in poetry\u2014Conrad cites Bernadette Mayer and Charles Olson as two practitioners of similar methods\u2014but he insists that his rituals are chiefly inspired by his childhood, specifically the Pennsylvania Dutch Country where his grandmother taught him to meditate and where he took an interest in the occult, from local water diviners to the hex signs painted on barns. But as much as his work owes a debt to Boyertown, it is a deliberate rebuke to the bigotry, violence, and oppression he found there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In his two books of (Soma)tic rituals and poems, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon<\/em><\/a> and ECODEVIANCE<\/em><\/a>\u2014a third collection, While Standing in Line for Death<\/a>, <\/em>will be published this September\u2014the rituals and resulting poems appear opposite one another. Because the rituals are written in the second person, at times the books read like the world\u2019s most bizarre and inventive self-help guides, manuals for what you might call acute mindfulness. One ritual starts like this: \u201cEat a little dark chocolate before getting on the subway. Sit in the middle of the car \u2026\u00a0Then close your eyes, and as the car rolls on its tracks make a low hum from deep inside you \u2026 As soon as the car stops write 9 words as fast as you can before the train moves again \u2026\u00a0Repeat this humming and writing for 9 stops.\u201d He credits his rituals with lifting him out of depression and grief.<\/p>\n

Conrad has lived in Asheville, North Carolina, since 2013; there are \u201ctoo many ghosts\u201d in Philadelphia. Conrad is on the road a lot these days, teaching his (Soma)tic method and doing his best to live in the extreme present. He documents his travels on Facebook, often in the form of letters to Eileen Myles, which, like everything Conrad writes, find poetry in the cruelty of the human race:<\/p>\n

Dear Eileen \u2026<\/p>\n

The hundreds of dead deer along the highway in Montana look like the same broken friend over and over at a glance, frozen in different positions and if we photograph each one and project them on a screen they will dance for us the apocalypse we are working so hard to conjure.<\/p>\n

\u201cVacant Land\u201d means no people.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing but a few prairie dogs\u201d means no people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe swerved, hit a cat, but no one was hurt\u201d means no people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Ridker is the editor of <\/em>Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics<\/a>. He has written for the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times Magazine,<\/em> Guernica,<\/em> Boston Review,<\/em> The Believer,<\/em> and elsewhere. His debut novel is forthcoming from Viking.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blowing bubbles, inspecting parking-lot trees, interviewing businessmen about their semen\u2014Conrad\u2019s processes are a crucial part of his poems themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1188,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[29448,29451,29443,29442,29445,29447,5365,28878,29441,694,2047,15874,29450,29449,29270,29444,29446,919],"class_list":["post-112279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-a-beautiful-marsupial-afternoon","tag-boyertown","tag-c-a-conrad","tag-caconrad","tag-coffin-factory","tag-ecodeviance","tag-eileen-myles","tag-exercises","tag-over-the-eight","tag-philadelphia","tag-poets","tag-rituals","tag-the-book-of-conrad","tag-the-book-of-frank","tag-vladimir-mayakovsky","tag-wave-books","tag-while-standing-in-line-for-death","tag-williamsburg"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow CAConrad Makes Remarkable, Inventive Poems from Rituals<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Blowing bubbles, inspecting parking-lot trees, interviewing businessmen about their semen\u2014Conrad\u2019s processes are a crucial part of his poems themselves.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Queer Bubbles by Andrew Ridker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 6, 2017 \u2013 Blowing bubbles, inspecting parking-lot trees, interviewing businessmen about their semen\u2014Conrad\u2019s processes are a crucial part of his poems themselves.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-07-06T17:14:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-07-06T18:31:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/caconrad.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andrew Ridker\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Andrew Ridker\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Andrew Ridker\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6be9c476a9f95301c1c70e0e5e5642a6\"},\"headline\":\"Queer Bubbles\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-07-06T17:14:38+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-07-06T18:31:30+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/\"},\"wordCount\":1864,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/queer-bubbles\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/caconrad.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon\",\"Boyertown\",\"C. 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