CAConrad: “Be the Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home”

Photographers Unknown, The Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home

I do not take any
calls except from
the century we are in
when there is no bible in my hotel room
it makes me sad to have no place to put
my filthy poems for future guests
it is important to let them know
everyone should bum with abandon as soon as the heat is available
be a self-styled alarm clock no one can shut off
be the storm Love places in someone’s home
are you sure we can handle this
because I am absolutely certain
c’mon wind knock us around
we are a tide that cures ills
look at us in the mirror
as soon as the invented language enters
us something else will vibrate in our skin
opening door with teeth of the future to
the place where we let the freer feeling go
when you told me you had been looking for me
we pressed through every
invisible barrier between us
I watched you gently let the gods
know you are ready to win the lottery
there were people from the
19th century alive in my
lifetime many years ago
I met some of them
they are all gone now
as we hold on to
the side of one
another howling down
the velocity of seconds

CAConrad, Acclimating to Discomfort of the System Breaking Beneath Us, Amanda Paradise, 2021, Wave Books

Born in Topeka, Kansas in January of 1966, CAConrad is an American poet and professor currently teaching poetry at New York’s Columbia University and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Having worked with the processes of poetry and rituals since 1975, CAConrad is the originator of the poetic format known as “(Soma)tics”, a meditative writing exercise that emphasizes personal perception and experience.

The child of a Vietnam War veteran and his wife, CAConrad’s early years were spent in the small factory town of Boyertown, Pennsylvania where bullying often occurred. CAConrad began writing poetry while in high school during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a time in which the AIDS epidemic emerged and friends began dying. Placing poetry as the focus of his life, CAConrad relocated to the city of Philadelphia in 1984 to live openly in a queer neighborhood.

In Philadelphia, CAConrad began a member of its poetry community and met such writers as Etheridge Knight and Sonia Sanches, both important members of the Black Art Movement, poet and performer Essex Hemphill, and poet and essayist Gil Ott, who founded Philadelphia’s Singing Horse Press. Other influences on CAConrad’s work include those works by poets Emily Dickinson and Audra Lorde, poet and novelist Eileen Myles, narrative poet Alice Notley, and writer Will Alexander who later became a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize.

In 2005, CAConrad began writing poetry in the (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual format, a personal process of writing focused on one’s engagement in the present moment. The first publication of CAConrad’s poetry was the 2006 “Deviant Propulsion” printed through Soft Skull Press. The poems in this collection examined the repression inflicted on queer culture by society and the elimination of the fear produced by that repression. To date, CAConrad has published seven collections of poetry. Among these are the 2017 “While Standing in Line for Death”, winner of a 2018 Lambda Book Award, and the 2021 “Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, a 2022 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award winner.

CAConrad appeared as Jeremiah in the 2015 short film “Boyland”, directed by Gabe Rubin and Felix Bernstein for the Brooklyn Film Festival. CAConrad was also approached by directors Belinda Schmid and David Cranstoun Welch, both who had seen the poet’s performances in New York and published works, for the production of a documentary. The resulting film “The Book of Conrad”, released in 2016 by Delinquent Films, examined CAConrad’s life and work as well as the horrific murder in Tennessee of his boyfriend Mark Holmes, known as Earth. In 2018, CAConrad and poet Eileen Myles read their work in filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s 2018 short resistance-documentary “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead”, a montage of photos overlaid with poetry and music.

“Felix Bernstein interviewed me for The New Museum and he asked me what philosophy has to do with my work. I told him I believe poetry is strong enough. The power of poetry has not failed me like it has failed some poets in recent decades who hoist philosophy to buttress the poem. It is misogynistic to say poetry is too feminine, too weak, needs a man’s ideas to move forward. Love philosophy–go ahead, I am not the least bit anti-intellectual; I simply do not need philosophy to make poetry appear more masculine. Sigmund Freud said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Not philosopher, but poet. And you can have whatever feelings you want about Freud but no one can disagree that he changed how we view the landscape of human emotion and the origins of feeling. “Everywhere I go” is bold. It is direct and from a man who was as careful with his words as a poet.” —CAConrad, September 10, 2013 Interview with Christopher Soto, The LAMBDA Literary Review

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has an April 2020 essay article written by CAConrad entitled “Sin Bug: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia” which recounts the poet’s life experiences in that city from 1982 during the AIDS epidemic that led to the deaths of many of his close friends. The article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/83869/sin-bug-aids-poetry-and-queer-resilience-in-philadelphia

The Poetry Foundation also has a selection of CAConrad’s poems as well as several podcasts produced by the poet which include group discussions and readings from CAConrad’s 2024 “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-a-conrad

The Lambda Literary online site has a September 2015 interview between CAConrad and Christopher Soto that discussed the film “The Book of Conrad” and the poet’s belief in the power of poetry as a healing ritual: https://lambdaliteraryreview.org/2015/09/ca-conrad-on-the-film-the-book-of-conrad-and-his-life-in-poetry/

Rachel Zucker of the Commonplace Podcast has an interview with CAConrad that discusses the poet’s life, writings and the (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals at: https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast/episode-49-caconrad

For those interested, Delinquent Films’s 2016 “The Book of Conrad”, directed by Schmid and Welch, is available for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime. Filmmaker Matthew Thompson’s short film for the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival presents CAConrad reading his poem “Golden in the Morning Crane Our Necks”. The film is available for viewing at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s site: https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/golden-in-the-morning-crane-our-necks

Top Insert Image: Matthew Thompson, “CAConrad”, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print, The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation

Second Insert Image: CAConrad, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”, 2024, Wave Books, Seattle, Washington

Third Insert Image: CAConrad, “You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemisis and Other (Soma)tics”., 2023, Penguin Imprint

Bottom Insert Image: Eve Ariza, “CtConrad”, 2019, Color Print, Neopajamas Magazine

Essex Hemphill: “Our Kisses Are Petals, Our Tongues Caress the Bloom”

Photographers Unknown, Our Kisses Are Petals

Times are lean,
Pretty Baby,
the beans are burnt
to the bottom
of the battered pot.
Let’s make fierce love
on the over-stuffed,
hand-me-down sofa.
We can burn it up, too.
Our hungers
will evaporate like-money.
I smell your lust,
not the pot burnt black
with tonight’s meager meal.
So we can’t buy flowers
for our table
Our kisses are petals,
our tongues caress the bloom.
Who dares to tell us
we are poor and powerless?
We keep treasure
any king would count as dear.
Come on, Pretty Baby.
Our souls can’t be crushed
like cats crossing streets too soon.
Let the beans burn all night long.
Our chipped water glasses are filled
with wine from our loving.
And the burnt black beans-
caviar

Essex Hemphill, Black Beans, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, 2000

Born in Chicago in April of 1957, Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist known for his contributions to Washington D.C.’s art scene in the 1980s. In his early years, Hemphill moved with his family to Washington D.C. where he attended Ballou High School in Congress Heights. Already having written poetry since the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the University of Maryland to study journalism. Hemphill left the university after his freshman year and enrolled at the University of the District of Columbia, where he graduated with a degree in English. Throughout his college years, he interacted with the local art scene, gave spoken word performances, and began to publish poetry chapbooks.

Known for the political edge of his performances, Hemphill openly addressed the issues of race, identity, sexuality, HIV and AIDS, and the concept of family in his work, all issues central to the African American gay community. In 1979, he became a co-founder of the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature, a publication to showcase modern black artists. Through an arrangement by Nethula co-editor and educator Eugene Ethelbert Miller, Hemphill performed one of his first public readings, along with filmmaker Michella Parkerson, at Howard University’s Founder Library.

In 1982, Essex Hemphill, along with Larry Duckett and Wayson Jones, founded ”Cinque”, a spoken word group which performed in the Washington D. C. area. The following year he received a grant from the non-profit Washington Project for the Arts for “Murder on Glass”, an experimental poetry dramatization which he performed alongside Wayson Jones and Michelle Parkerson. Their work was later featured in two documentaries by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, the 1989 “Tongues Untied” and the 1994 “Black Is. . .Black Ain’t”, which won the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival.

Hemphill’s first published poetry collections were two chapbooks, “Earth Life” in 1985 and “Conditions” in 1986. His work received additional attention with its inclusion in the 1986 anthology “In the Life”, a collection of poems from gay, black artists, compiled by Hemphill’s fellow author and lover, the gay rights activist Joseph F. Beam. Hemphill’s first full-length collection, entitled “Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry”, was published in 1992 and won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. His editing credits include the 1991 anthology “Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men”, which won the Lambda Literary Award.

Many of Essex Hemphill’s poetry and spoken word works were autobiographical and portrayed his experiences as a minority in both the African-American and LGBTQ communities. His pieces conveyed his frustrations about bigotry, the relationships among gay black men and non-gay black men, the effect of HIV/AIDS on the black community, and the meaning of one’s family, community and support.

In the decade of the 1990s, Hemphill rarely gave information on his health, only talking occasionally about being a person with AIDS. He did not write about his experience with the disease until his 1994 poem “Vital Signs”. Hemphill died the following year on the 4th of November, at the age of fifty-eight, of AIDS related complications. In June of 2019, he was one of the fifty inaugural American pioneers and heroes inducted on the National LBGTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. It is the first United States national monument dedicated to LBGTQ rights and history.

Note: A suggested article is J. T. Roane’s 2017 “The Poetic Theology of Essex Hemphill”, which was published in the African American Intellectual History Society’s online publication “Black Perspectives”. The article is located at: https://www.aaihs.org/the-poetic-theology-of-essex-hemphill/