Flowers Dreaming the Elevation Allegiance:

CAConrad writes: “(Soma)tic poetry rituals aim our attention at two basic principles: (1)Everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output and (2)The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, humane changes to our world is creativity.”

In this program, based upon A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics, Conrad will lead us through his philosophy of poets and poetry as a means to help solve the planet’s ills and to “resist the urge to subdue our spirits and lose ourselves in the hypnotic beep of machines, of war, and the banal need for power, and things.”

CAConrad‘s books of poetry are A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (2012), The City Real & Imagined (2010), which he wrote with Frank Sherlock, The Book of Frank (2009), which won the Gil Ott Book Award, and Deviant Propulsion (2006). He is also the author of a book of essays, Advanced Elvis Course (2009). He has received fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Ucross Foundation, and the Banff Centre. He is a visiting faculty member at the Summer Writing Program of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He lives in Philadelphia.