poetry foundation – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

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

Photographers Unknown, Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Reginald Shepherd, You, Therefore, 2007, Fata Morgana, Green Tower Press

Born in New York City in April of 1963, Reginald Shepherd was an American poet, essayist and educator. A careful observer of language, he was a skilled craftsman who could transform fragments of potential poetic material into cohesively molded poetry.

The son of Blanche Berry, Reginald Shepherd spent his early years with his sister Regina Graham in the housing projects of Bronx, New York. Although raised amid the hardships of the tenements, he found inspiration in the many books that his mother was able to afford. Following the death of his mother just prior to his fifteenth birthday, Shepherd and his sister were cared for by their aunt Mildred Swint at her crowded, three-room house in Macon, Georgia.

Shepherd earned his Bachelor of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, and his Master of Fine Arts degrees in Creative Writing at Rhode Island’s Brown University and the University of Iowa. In his last year at the University of Iowa, he was awarded the 1993 Discovery Prize by New York’s 92nd Street Y, a prominent arts and cultural center in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Reginald Shepherd published his first collection of poetry, “Some Are Drowning”, in 1994 through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This collection of passionate poems was chosen by poet and professor Carolyn Forché for the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Poetry Award. Shepherd’s second collection “Angel, Interrupted”, a volume of lyrical, introspective and streetwise poems, was published in 1996. This was followed three years later by “Wrong”, a poetic collection seen through a historical perspective of events marked by desire, disease, and difference, all aspects of human consciousness.

In 2003, Shepherd’s “Otherhood” was published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This fourth collection explored the issues of desire, power, blackness, whiteness and the relationship of man and the natural world. “Otherhood”, which referenced these themes through alternating rapid and hypnotic rhythms, was a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize administered by the Academy of American Poets.

Reginald Shepherd’s last volume of poetry in his lifetime, “Fata Morgana” was published in 2007 by Green Tower Press. An intense and mournful collection of lyrical poems fashioned from a mixture of mythology, personal experience, natural science and politics, “Fata Morgana” explored the journey through personal sorrow and loss until its transformative end. This collection by Shepherd was the winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards.

Shepherd was the editor of the 2004 “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries” and the 2008 “Lyric Postmodernisms”. He was the author of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” and its sequel “A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” published posthumously in 2010. A posthumous collection of Shepherd’s poetry, entitled “Red Clay Weather”, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011.

Reginald Shepherd died in Pensacola, Florida, on the tenth of September in 2008 after a long battle against colon cancer. He was survived by his long-term partner Robert Philen, his sister Regina Graham and his aunt Mildred Swint. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grant winner, Shepherd published over four-hundred poems in his career in both collections and anthologies.

Shepherd taught both Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, the University of West Florida, Northern Illinois University, and Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Iowa. He was the recipient of a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994-1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship in 1998, and a 2000 Saltonstall Foundation poetry grant.

“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon (struggle) between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”- Reginald Shepherd, “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse”, Blog Entry, January 2007

Notes: In addition to his poetic and essay writings, Reginald Shepherd authored a poetry, literature and art blog for many years. This site contains many articles discussing Shepherd’s own poetic thought-process as well as the work of those poets he admired. Reginald Shepherd’s Blog can be found at: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com

A review of Reginald Shepherd’s 2008 collection of essays “Orpheus in the Bronx” originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of “Rain Taxi”, a Minneapolis-based book review and literary quarterly publication. It is currently available for reading on The Mumpsimus blog located at: https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/07/orpheus-in-bronx-by-reginald-shepherd.html

On the Poetry Foundation site, there several poems as well as a section in which Shepherd offers a revealing portrait of himself and his poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/reginald-shepherd

A 2003 extensive interview between Reginald Shepherd and writer Brenda Gaines Hunter for Pleiades Magazine has been reissued through the Medium site at: https://medium.com/@bgaineshunter/an-interview-with-reginald-shepherd-e4c60dd328df

Tag: poetry foundation

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

Reginald Shepherd: “Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind”