CAConrad and Angela Hume
Monday, November 16, 2015 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) is the winner of the 2015
Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR, and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage; he conducts workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com.
(Soma)tic 1: Anoint Thyself
—for John Coletti & Jess Mynes
Visit the home of a deceased poet you admire and bring some natural thing back with you. I went to Emily Dickinson’s house the day after a reading event with my friend Susie Timmons. I scraped dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. We then drove into the woods where we found miniature pears, apples, and cherries to eat. I meditated in the arms of an oak tree with the pot of Emily’s dirt, waking to the flutter of a red cardinal on a branch a foot or so from my face, staring, showing me his little tongue.
When I returned to Philadelphia I didn’t shower for three days, then rubbed Emily’s dirt all over my body, kneaded her rich Massachusetts soil deeply into my flesh, then put on my clothes and went out into the world. Every once in a while I stuck my nose inside the neck of my shirt to inhale her delicious, sweet earth covering me. I felt revirginized through the ceremony of my senses. I could feel her power tell me these are the ways to walk and speak and shift each glance into total concentration for maximum usage of our little allotment of time on a planet. LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME POET! Lose and waste no more time she said to me as I took note after note on the world around me for the poem.
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your sweaty party dress and my sweaty party dress lasted a few minutes until the tomato was gone someday they will disambiguate you but not while I’m around our species won Emily we won it feels so good to be winning the flame of victory pass it around it never goes out dinosaurs ruled Massachusetts dinosaurs fucking and laying eggs in Amherst Boston Mount Holyoke then you appeared high priestess pulling it out of the goddamned garden with both hands you Emily remembered the first time comprehending a struck match can spread a flame it feels good to win this fair and square protest my assessment all you want but not needing to dream is like not needing to see the world awaken to itself indestructible epiphanies consume the path and just because you’re having fun doesn’t mean you’re not going to die recrimination is the fruit to defy with unexpected appetite I will be your outsider if that’s how you need me electric company’s stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet who has faced death
From A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
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Angela Hume lives in Oakland. She is the author of the chapbook Second Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs 2011) and The Middle (winner of the 2012 of the Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry Prize). Her first full-length collection, Middle Time, will be published by Omnidawn in April 2016. Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in such journals as Little Red Leaves, Mrs. Maybe, RealPoetik, ecolinguistics, Zoland Poetry, and Spinning Jenny. Critical work appears or will appear in ISLAE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Evental Aesthetics, Jacket 2, The Volta, and ecopoetics. Angela holds an MFA from St. Mary’s College of California and is currently working toward a Ph.D. in English at University of California at Davis. Her critical project examines the transformation of lyric poetry under the environmental crisis conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Late September
1.
Is it possible—
unwanted light strikes her clear
void eyes
and refracts,
tinks
the glass case, the clean
wood.
Is it?
She is calling out to you. She is
a pool
of white.
2.
Who is the man who enters
your house
a yellow sweetness
about him—
skin, or yeast, or cigarettes.
He is not
a young man anymore.
Twelve years old—
A wild bleating
so riven with pneumonia
(he should have—).
She said a figure
came to the room.
She said, I felt
warm, at peace.
You said:
Since then, we think
he hasn’t been
the same.
3.
I’ll ask:
Does your text fill
like a house
slung open—
and they pursued after him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and his great toes
Do you wait for the text
to speak
to you—
but they let go the man and all his family
What are you looking for, i.e., what are
the signs.
Ridden with belief
you finish out
your life.
