Public Lecture on "Occult Poetics" by CAConrad
Oct. 29, 5–7 p.m.
MOSAIC EventSpace
49 Main St. North Adams, MA
In this talk, CAConrad will discuss how poets' occult and paranormal experiences and
practices in the past show us how to trust that these same forces are alive and at
work today. Rumi, Hannah Weiner, Will Alexander, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, and Ariana
Reines are some poets whose work and practices we will investigate.
CA will also discuss (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals as a practice for all writers and artists.
These rituals provide a window into the creative viability of everything around us,
initiating an "extreme present," where we learn how, even in crisis, we can thrive
through the poems and learn to collaborate in unexpected ways with other artistic
disciplines.
Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems
invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of
passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975.
Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN
Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award.
The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION:
Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with
recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach
at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://www.caconrad.com/.
