There’s a lot of talk currently surrounding a recent article in Philadelphia Magazine and the public confrontation between the publication and CA Conrad.  In the magazine’s December “List” issue, the Philly mag devoted one list to things the city would be better off without, i.e. “10 Things We Need to Get Rid Of” (seemingly available in print only).  Included on the chopping block was the city’s long-running tradition of the Mummers Parade.  The Philadelphia poet disapproved, claiming that the Mummers was a street level, middle class event dear to the city, its history, and its people and that the magazine was exercising a characteristically elitist, classist, 1% attitude.  He first voiced his complaints on the Philadelphia Magazine Facebook page requesting they apologize to Mummers.  The magazine’s online editor eventually blocked him from commenting, which resulted in Conrad visiting the office to speak with the magazine personally and subsequently being removed by security.  You can begin to follow the story with the editor’s PR-ish letter on CA Conrad’s comments and behavior, then move to CA Conrad’s account of the event and his being escorted out of the office building.  I would also encourage you look at the comments made by the public on these articles and the action on the magazine’s Facebook page; the majority seems to be supporting Conrad.  Some are especially outraged that editor Tom McGrath (as a Philly culture editor) didn’t even know who CA Conrad was, or that the magazine would Facebook-flaunt that Conrad had been removed from their offices.

Personally, upon just hearing this story, I admire Conrad’s determination to voice his opinion, objecting to and requesting dialogue about the magazine’s choices.  His walk to the Philadelphia Magazine’s offices on behalf of a cultural tradition or group of people he values is a tangible, powerful act.  I like the artist like this, refusing to be safely contained as the Philadelphia Magazine attempted to do in denying Conrad visibility on Facebook or in an office, instead requesting he write an e-mail (which basically doesn’t exist in the public realm).  I think his choice solidifies the role of the artist or poet in his/her city.  He expanded the immediacy and impact of his voice by committing the physicality to back it.

But this event also raises a lot of questions for me about the responsibility of an artist or individual to their community, about the visibility or method of communication being given, taken, or denied here, etc.  I’d love some thoughts as this sinks in.

***

Katie Smither is an artist and writer living in Austin.  She works at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and does a lot of things on the side, or strike that and reverse it.

Here’s an example:

Go to your local graveyard, spend some time searching for a spot to sit. Find a spot where no one will pester you, you’re busy, you’re here to write poetry, not to be pestered with small talk! When you have found your spot sit down on the ground. Take time to look closely at ALL OBJECTS at your feet, in the trees, etc. Find three objects, one of them on the ground, or at least touching the ground: your feet, a grave marker, tree trunk or roots, etc. The other two off the ground in a tree, a building, but make them things which are stationary so you can stay focused on them. Draw a triangle between these three objects. Focus hard on the contents of your triangle, keeping in mind that the ground object you have chosen connects to the dead. Imagine your triangle in different forms of light, darkness, weather, and seasons. Imagine someone you love inside the triangle dying. Imagine yourself inside it dying. Gather notes in this process, take notes, as many notes as you can about how you feel and what you feel. Then PAUSE from these notes to focus again on your triangle, THEN write QUICKLY AND WITHOUT THINKING for as much time as you can manage. Often it’s these spontaneous notes which dislodge important information for us. DO NOT HESITATE to write the most brutal things that come to mind, HESITATE at nothing for that matter. Take some deep breaths and think about death by murder, war, cancer, suicide, accidents, knives, fire, drowning, crushing, decapitation, torture, plagues, animal attacks, dehydration, guns, stones, tanks, bombs, genocide, strokes, explosions, electrocutions, guillotine, firing squads, parasites, suffocation, flash floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, cyanide, poison, capital punishment, falling, stampedes, strangulation, freezing, baseball bats, overdose, plane crashes, fist fights, choking, etc., imagine every possible form of death. Take notes on your feelings for death at this point, DO NOT HESITATE. Now, TAKE ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS “QUICKEN” and “EMBLEM” shape your poem.

Not all of them are that brutal. Some are about carrots and bananas.

Heavily recommend checking the rest of these out, and perhaps putting them to use? Bloodfun.

Also, if you haven’t read CA’s The Book of Frank, make it a priority.

Rauan Klassnik recently lived through and posted up an interview with http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.com/2009/05/eating-kafka-etc-interview-with-ca.htmlCAConrad re his wonderful book of poems The Book of Frank. http://BOOKofFRANK.blogspot.com

After all the dust had settled and all the fluids dried (blood, cum, sweat, disgust and hate, etc, etc) they went at it again.

Here, then, is the 2^nd interview : Eating, Kafka II

This is the Bio that CAConrad provided:

CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009).  He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED:  Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010).  CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.  He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.comand also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com

RK: I love the poem where Frank fucks a Coca Cola bottle:Frank loves his Coca Cola bottle

She loves him

he loves her fine lean waist

she loves his rock hard nipples

he shoves his cock in her little glass mouth

she cracks and

they’re both in trouble

But, isn’t this, in a way, a nod to “The Man?” And The Book of Frank is, as you say, a “piss in the holy water.” And a piss in The Man’s water. But isn’t Coca Cola, that scourge of smiley faces and absolutely worthless fucking fluid, The Man? So is fucking The-Man here (even though the bottle in yr poem is feminized) a kind of revenge taking? A revenge on The System and all those sons of bitches that thrust Coca Cola on us? By the way, I’m fucking The Man right now. I’ve poured its dark evil stickiness all over my chest and I’m wooing it, wooing it hard and woolly. And, now, I’m abusing (with rigor and tender surges) its poor, empty skeletal bottle-body. And I’m… And I’m… And I’m… (imagine a huge Coca Cola party. People on water slides. Thousands of bottles. Frothing like a colored fountain show with Mozart playing. And the sun like a big fat God grinning down his Love. Love. Love. Steamy and sticky. Coke is it! Coke is it!) Okay, that’s all besides the point. Can you talk about negative capability and how its at work in yr Frank fucking a coke bottle poem? That seems to be the truth.

CAC:  This is LOVE, REAL LOVE, as only human and glass can possibly manage to procure, ESPECIALLY after draining one’s contents then fucking one’s glass mouth.  THE UNSEEN part of the poem is the drinking of the soda before fucking the bottle.  The soda sex is PURELY bisexual hermaphrodite sex!  Frank sucks down the fluids from the opening, then treats the opening as a vagina.

Where I grew up, in rural Pennsylvania, we would sometimes visit cousins in a nearby town where bottles were made.  There was a MASSIVE HEAP of broken glass of every color behind the factory.  We boys were young at the time and enjoyed sticking our cocks in the bottles and swinging the bottles back and forth, it was one of those sports that never got old.  Then of course we would pee in the bottles and smash them against the remains of an old brick chimney nearby, one of those chimneys left standing after the house around it burned down.  It was a lot of fun.  We all got rifles when we turned nine, that was also fun, and I was a pretty good shot.

So that was on my mind, BUT ALSO on my mind when writing this was the experience of meeting a man at the queer bookstore where I worked who was looking for what he referred to as a “gauge.”  They’re lubricated metal spikes of some sort that men shove in their penises.  These spikes widen the urethra.  You keep adding wider and wider spikes to widen the urethra.  He said he was doing this so his boyfriend could fuck his penis, actually shove his penis inside the other penis and fuck it.  THAT WAS AMAZING!  I don’t want to ever insert these spike things inside of me, but I wouldn’t mind being with someone who has!  SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF FUN!

RK: In yr recent interview with that fucking idiot and Rabbi-impersonator Rauan Klassnik you talked about yr love for Franz Kafka. A deep and touching love. And you said you’d like to eat Franz Kafka. And you said you’d like to fuck Franz Kafka. Now I like Franz Kafka and I know you’re not the only person who wants to fuck and/or eat Franz Kafka. But, I’m suspicious. Can all this lusting and salivating over a man whose name sounds just like “French KaKa” just be a coincidence? (Think of the perfect Madonna Video: the Moulin Rouge. A huge banquet-canopied bed. And a glittering chorus of French Kaka, French Kaka, French Kaka!! And every one breaks out their napkins! Their cutlery! Their cunts and their cocks! Excrement. Excrement. Excrement.)

CAC: YES I’M SEEING IT, IT’S BEAUTIFUL!  Excrement though.  I’m not into excrement.  I know some people are, but no thanks.  Cutlery and cocks are always nice though.

Kafka is in everything I write.  He’s in my first book Deviant Propulsion.  And in my newest book Advanced Elvis Course a few times.  In the Elvis book Kafka is in two dreams I had about Elvis.  One where I would hold Elvis’ printed name to a mirror and it would spell Kafka in the reflection, giving me a TOTAL MELTDOWN of desirous ideas in the piece about a musical version of The Metamorphosis with Elvis playing the role of Gregor Samsa COMPLETE with songs for Elvis to sing while in his cockroach costume.

In THE BOOK OF FRANK Kafka’s Metamorphosis appears when Frank is reading to his thousands of tiny cockroach friends in bed, laughing with them.  It’s love without any disgust.

When the HELL are these time machines going to be available???!!!  Is everybody as tired as I am of time machines not being invented yet???!!!  Oh to go back and see Kafka!  I would LOVE to bring Kafka back to Philadelphia with me, and make out on Benjamin Franklin’s grave.

CAConrad photo by Stacy Szymaszek

RK: I like clichés. I like to fuck them. Cuddle them. Wine them and dine them. Replace their blood with bits of glass and bury them in a pile of pink roses. So, let’s talk about the Gay Cowboy Cliché. Here, first, is a wonderful Frank poem. One of my favorites in The Book of Frank. And, seriously, this isn’t because of my filthy brain.

Frank added milk to the
instant Cowboy Mix and
herded himself into
the living room
mooing

the cowboy rode him slowly
around the TV playing a
lonesome guitar

when this was finally too
sad and boring
Frank ignored the warning label
and stirred a few more cowboys

his wife came home
to find him snoring
tied naked to the ceiling
bleeding from the rump
with a smile on his face and
a fresh brand upon his thigh

Now, you don’t have to talk about the Village People or Brokeback Mountain if you don’t want to. And you don’t have to talk about yr fucking the Cowboy Cliché. Fucking it good. Hard and rough. And leaving it, the cliché (like Frank), “bleeding from the rump/with a smile on his face/and a fresh brand upon his thigh.” But you can if you want. You can stand on it and jingle yr chaps. And drip with triumph. Because, in the end, you own that cliché. Yes, you own that little steer-bitch! And all the penguins and long gowns are screaming: Encore, Frank,
Encore!

CAC: HEHEHEHEHE!  OK!  You’ve got me cracking up again Ron!  Glad you like this poem.  Filthy brain is redundant of course, right?  I mean, that’s why it’s EASY to control us, saying how BAD a thought is and what it can lead to.  Cowboys, REAL cowboys in the Old West were far removed from such order, and were men who wanted themselves removed.  Being THAT removed led to all kinds of love opening up.  The evolution of the male asshole having as many nerve endings as it does is no joke.  Yeah, sure it hurts the first few times, but if you’re lucky you’re with a guy who is yelling, “DON’T BE SUCH A SISSY!”  And that seems to make it all better.  FRANK LOVES IT!

RK: Elvis. In the lead-up to the forementioned interview with that demented rabbit Rauan Klassnik you told ignorant prick-brain that you planned on answering questions about Frank with the most insane part of your brain. Ok. And, you then said that yr other book “Elvis” is the REAL piss in the Holy water. The real LOVE and the real INSANITY. Can you tease us a bit with Elvis? Can you break out some Elvis Cock and piss (a few drops even, please) in this the pristine HTMLGIANT water?

CAC: DEMENTED RABBIT!  HEHEHE! http://ADVANCEDElvis.blogspot.com

This book is now available through any bookstore, it’s from Soft Skull and is easy to find anywhere.  Here’s a sample of The Holy One’s spiritual garnish of total self-actualization:

from Advanced Elvis Course:

more than anything, anything at all

I want permission from Lisa Marie to

spend one night in His bedroom,

on the floor, next to His bed,

naked, dressed in a body condom,

imagining I’m His happy little sperm,

after He’s gone to sleep,

pressed to my condom wall,

looking to the moonlit window,

quietly, peacefully turning from a

thick, white, almond flavored cream

to a clear, sticky puddle,

the expired egg seeker,

once blissfully shot from

His hardened, kingly shaft,

oh man what a ride!

RK: The Book of Frank contains Emily Dickinson’s breasts:

From the menu of

dead authors

Frank orders

Emily Dickinson’s

breasts with

dumplings and the

braised thigh of

Anaïs Nin

his wife orders

Leo Tolstoy’s

ring finger with

caviar and the

candied genitals of

Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s erection arrives

Shimmering in gravy

“Mmmm” she says

nibbling at the tip

Frank glares

and stabs

a breast

This is unusual. And sad. A sad commentary on the state of Poetry. I can’t recall a single other instance of a poem that includes Emily Dickinson’s breasts! How far have we fallen? What sort of gas-shrouded trench are we huddled down in. Bombs explode above us. They aren’t her breasts. Horses are writhing in Remarkable Agony. (All Quiet. All Quiet!) They aren’t her breasts. We lick barbed-wire. It’s not her breasts. We talked to Eric and kicked his ass: it was good, o it was good, but it wasn’t her breasts! And, how many breasts do you think she had? Just two? Or more, like a dog(or wolf)? Or a whole battalion? Like sticks of dynamite maybe?

CAC: OH YES THEY WERE HER BREASTS, Frank ate them!  Frank’s wife ate Kerouac’s delicious cock and he had only one!  It WOULD BE NICE though, wouldn’t it, to think of Kerouac as having a Medusa cock with a dozen writhing, fanged serpents waiting for the feast.  I like how much this poem upsets people.  Sex, food, and famous writers being the sex and food.  Now THERE’S A BANQUET!  Kafka’s on my plate!  A rack of Kafka-ribs with tiny potatoes and chives.

RK:  What, if anything, would you like to say or do to Charles Simic. His mother’s the “weather” of his poetry, ya know. Or so claims Tomaz Salamun when he’s not buying and nibbling down carrots. Do you think this is sexy? (Simic’s mother as poetry weather and/or Salamun nibbling on a very orange carrot. So orange in fact his eyes have turned orange. So orange in fact in fact in fact Charles Simic’s poems and mother have all turned orange too. A raining orange. A raining blood-orange apocalypse. A raining blood-orange prose poem apocalypse stolen from the French and Eastern Europeans. And there’s nothing, mind you, Dutch about this image. Nothing tulip. Or windmill. Or wooden shoed. Or red-light, about it. Nothing. Okay, maybe a little Van Gogh. In hospital. Hallucinating. Starry Sky. Whores and drink. Loading a gun. blah, blah. And would you like (as Rilke was to Rodin) to be Charles Simic’s secretary?

CAC: Dear Charles Simic, this afternoon you didn’t see this, at least I didn’t see you anywhere near the corner of 5th and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia by the Liberty Bell, BUT, a bum too sloshed to know how close to the Liberty Bell he was, took a piss against the building.  He was moving around like he was spelling something, and I thought, OH, it’s probably his name.  After the Liberty Bell police moved him along I walked by and saw the letters running into the bricks, and they read CHRLS SIMCC.  Was it a misspelling of Charles Simic that he wrote?  Was it you?  Seriously, was it you?  Or just another inebriated fan?  Are your fans generally inebriated Charles SIMCC?  Do you write your poems with the quill?  Fill the ink pot with piss?

I prefer blood in the ink pot, it’s American of me don’t you think?  I would make a TERRIBLE secretary, but Ron Klassnik thinks I should apply.  Oh CHRLS Simic, that WAS you this afternoon, I just know it.  You need more than a secretary man, you need a good bartender!  Stop wasting your liver on that cheap stuff, you’re filthy rich man, get some good bourbon, enough OF THIS plastic top sale shelf liquor!  Will you ignite our badlands with an eloquence of dreaming elsewhere soon?  How soon?  This hole in my sock keeps getting attacked by the mice of your poems.  Attack, retreat, attack, retreat.  Maybe you should be my secretary instead man, beat the broom against the walls to scare them back into the walls.  Elvis had a library of books from the future and I’m sad to say none of your books were there.  Mine were though, all of them, including the ones I haven’t written yet.  Wish I could find my way back to that library again, it was nice, it was cold, that cold of books before they are cried and vomited through their ink.

RK: Do you think a man needs to grow a cunt (or vagina, pussy, etc) on the palm of his hand to really write from a woman’s point of view? And does he need to lactate sweet generous milk? Or does he just need to shop more? Or drive badly?

CAC: This is always possible if we’re open to those crystal hemispheres ripping up and down the spine.  There’s a (Soma)tic Exercise I’ve created to at least OPEN the door, if even a little.  It’s #20, “BETWEEN GENDERS THE ROSEMARY” on this site: http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/ I intend to update this site with a new exercise monthly until I die.  There are future explorative gender exercises percolating.

RK:  Do you think circumcision helps or hurts a writer? Some people think drugs generate creative thoughts? How about self mutilation (circumcision, etc) as a way to get the juices flowing? I saw my brother’s circumcision and it was quite a poem. But that little weasel hasn’t had a poetic thought since. Except when he dreamed he was being chased by a cloud of butterflies. And jumped on a pig and rode it off into bacon-heaven. And everything turned green. Like the inside of DNA. Why is it all so complicated, Frank? All so blood-of-the-lamb?

CAC: Circumcision is nothing but stupid, for both men and women.  Unless they want it, but who does?  It’s one of those IMPOSED stamps on the life of flesh as outdated as eating meat, war, racism, sexism, homophobia, God, especially God.  The sacrifice of Jesus was as ill planned as the dreams of suicide bombers.  Both forms of sacrifice have done nothing to calm our souls, in fact this violence has only exiled us further from our undivided splinters of origin, keeping the flesh separate, distant, filthy, undeserving desire.  BRING ALL the foreskin back to life, Jesus, suicide bombers, let it all be undone!

When I was a kid I had uncontrollable nose bleeds and the doctor would have to cauterize my nose with long sticks with tips of molten, melted cotton.  Did he know what the fuck he was even doing?  That’s what you get being white trash living in the sticks.  But these nose bleeds started at that time when a kid is young enough to remember, even reenact past lives on Earth.  I would run to the bathroom, strip naked, collect the blood in my cupped hands and cover my face, neck, arms, chest, basically everything I could see in the mirror above the sink while standing on the toilet.  It would dry quickly, crack, pull the skin tight.  Then I would wet my fingers in the sink and draw symbols through the blood, draw them all over my body, symbols I have no idea how to explain.  Kind of like Keith Harring drawings, or cave drawings, but not of animals, but symbols, squiggles with branching ribs and dots and slashes and curves.  Then I would jump in the shower and enjoy watching the blood run into the drain.  I was not insane, I was remembering.

RK: In yr interview with retard-dung-beetle Klassnik you talked about writing the notes from which you later gleaned a beautiful poem after having Fantastic Sex with yr boyfriend. Do you mean that the brain during and after Fantastic Sex stimulates the release of a happy drug that, then, in the blood, makes you kind of high: and hence the words and poetry flow?  Or instead are you talking about Sperm (or female juice) reabsorbed into the blood (through the blood vessels in the walls of the vagina, anus or mouth) and this magic blood then acting on the brain? And if cum was rubbed into your chest would that work best (as it would be right there, over the heart, which we know is the rag and bone shop where Poetry prances about on slow days)? Or?

CAC: Sex is magic, which is why I’ve always felt the American Neo-pagan term “sex-magic” to be redundant.  JUST say Sex!  In America we’re consuming the highest concentrations of testosterone and estrogen of any nation of humans ever.  The beef and milk consumption spikes the hormones in our blood, makes us the pathological family I have come to love.  But I haven’t eaten meat since 1988.  Testosterone, besides having the side effects of aggression, extends (so to speak) the orgasm cycle.  My old boyfriend Angel ate meat all day long and exercised incessantly, and was the most aggressive lover I’ve ever known.  He was psychotic from the meat he was eating, well, that and the cocaine.  He went to prison where I’m sure he became the monster he was on his way to becoming.

BUT YES, that particular Frank poem you’re speaking of ejaculated out of me after sex.  In my book (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), I would eat a single color of food all day, the color set to JAR poems loose from me at the end of the day.  WITHOUT A DOUBT the most delirious experience for me was the WHITE poem, titled, “from the womb not the anus WHITE asbestos snowfall on 911.” http://www.sinkreview.org/poetry/from-the-womb.html Besides eating only white foods all day I also spelled 108 on my forehead with my boyfriend’s semen, right in the middle of my forehead.  Resting on my back while it dried it was like a small hammer kept hammering hammering HAMMERING harder and harder.  It was as if his sperm were trying to gnaw their way into my third eye!  It gave me a headache, but I refused to wash it off, it’s POETRY that’s at stake after all!  When the poem’s coarse form was chiseled out at the end of the day my boyfriend licked my forehead clean, like cleaning a kitten, very nice way to end a day of poetry, no doubt about it man!  All poets should have their foreheads licked clean at the end of a poem!