Hi All-
Please, tell everyone you know, CAConrad is coming to Boston
for a (Soma)tics Workshop and a BASH poetry reading at the Brookline Booksmith.
Thursday 11/8 at 7:30PM: (Soma)tic Workshop at The
Distillery Gallery, 516 E. 2nd Street, South Boston. There’s a
suggested donation of $5-10, but we’d rather you come and not donate then not
come because you can’t. CA will be making up a brand new (Soma)tic exercise on
his train ride up from Philly, so this is gonna be awesome. It should run no
later than 9, I would imagine, and it’s open to everyone – poet, artist,
person, even a nine-to-fiver like me. If you’d like to have a chance to learn
and create something new from the master and inventor of a type of creative
exercise, or just have a really fun time, you should absolutely come.
Friday 11/9 at 7PM: BASH #6: CAConrad and YOU! At the
Brookline Booksmith. CA’s opener will be poems and poets from the workshop
attendees the night before, presenting the poems written to or inspired by the
(soma)tic exercise CA comes up with the night before. Free, as always.
This is gonna be the last BASH for 2012, so let’s make these
two events a complete blow out. Please let me know if you have any questions,
and spread the word to all your friends and co-conspirators.
CACONRAD is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial
Afternoon, (Wave Books, 2011), and The Book of Frank (Wave
Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a
collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titledThe
City Real & Imagined (Factory
School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included
selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.
He’s also a 2011 PEW Fellow, a 2012 RADAR and UCROSS Fellow, and a 2013
BANFF Fellow.
In the words of CA, a (Soma)tic exercise is as follows.
“Soma is an Indo-Iranian ritual drink made from pressing particular psychedelic
and energizing plants together. In Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions the drink
is identified with the divine. The word Soma is derived from the Sanskrit and
Indo-European tongues meaning "to press and be newly born."
Somatic is derived from the Greek, meaning the body. In different medical disciplines it can mean different things, from a cell or tissue, or to the part of the nervous system that controls sensations and movements.
My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.”
Somatic is derived from the Greek, meaning the body. In different medical disciplines it can mean different things, from a cell or tissue, or to the part of the nervous system that controls sensations and movements.
My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.”
I really hope to see you there!
Jon Papas
