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Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which he pushes his political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics.
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 9, 2014
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707 people want to read
About the author
C.A. Conrad
45 books581 followersCAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays the latest While Standing In Line For Death is forthcoming from Wave Books in September 2017. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Ojbect and Ucross. For his books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 25, 2017
I'm not sure there is a way to write responsibly about this collection of instructions, poems, and meditations. Like all of my favorite poetry, I can only really express my feelings in exasperated sighs and starts of statements. CAConrad's work follows a series of explorations that the author began after returning to his hometown and discovering how much his poetic process mimicked the factory that ruled over his small town's life. The result is beautiful reminders to take life a little more slowly and observe things in a new way and write about it. Ecodeviance serves as a sort of scientific notebook with specific laboratory instructions and then the poetic results. If only more mainstream science was more like Conrad and took into account emotional energies, relationships, and our subconscious. The volume is layered & gorgeous with a surprisingly informative introduction to crystals. Highly recommend.
February 26, 2021
Thank goodness for embodied instruction on how to write poems (I say as a witch). Thank goodness for the forthright politics of this—not just to talk to trees but to SCREAM about all the injustice you witness. This book is poetry as unapologetic witness.
“i am not a
family-friendly
f*ggot i tell
your children
about war”
Withholding one star only because this much c*ck/semen talk is boring to me (I say as a dyke).
“i am not a
family-friendly
f*ggot i tell
your children
about war”
Withholding one star only because this much c*ck/semen talk is boring to me (I say as a dyke).
October 19, 2017
His method is very idiosyncratic: he bases his poems on ritual exercises that he conducts to focus the act of attention. He strikes me as a contemporary equivalent of Ginsberg, but he doesn't sacrifice the aesthetic for the political. His language is quite deliberately unstable and prismatic; it doesn't look like a consciously literary language--more like a bricolage shaped into calligrams. This book departs significantly from his previous one, The Book of Frank, which contained the imprimatur and influence of Jonathan Williams and his deployment of the minimal and vernacular, far trickier than you would imagine.
January 26, 2015
(Soma)tic rituals to emancipate you poetic body! Each ritual is a mini-poetic ad an extension of the language that gives shape and coordinate to the poem that follows. The poems are funny, heartbreaking, angry, surreal, and beautiful.
February 19, 2018
imaginative, transgressive, wildly strange and beautiful. will keep coming back to this one.
September 9, 2024
Saving all my in-depth thoughts for the class I read this book for but I just need to put somewhere that some sort of Poem Switch flipped in my brain while reading this & I think I am fundamentally changed as a writer & a human being? So: that feels very meaningful, to say the least.
October 4, 2017
the final series, on "act like..." haunts me!
August 26, 2015
I couldn't figure out if I wanted to read this in one go or in pieces. had I read it slower the works would have resonated more-- but each break I took required readjusting to CA's use of the line. I also wish I were able to perform the rituals as well-- too bad this is a library book-- maybe in the future. I appreciated the flow and unfolding of the story/memoir. Granted I was already aware of most of it-- but the way is brought the book together was beautiful. great read and I definitely recommend it.
December 17, 2015
This guy, THIS GUY! I swear to god he just gets under your skin, Im not usually a fan of this style of poetry but he is just soooooo good. Seriously if you've never heard of him give him a shot. I first stumbled upon his Emily Dickinson poem and he just rocked me. Wonderful, fabulous, staggering, heartbreaking....
June 15, 2021
Content warnings for the collection: homophobia and anti-queer slurs; parental abuse and sexualization of a child in Healing for a Pedophile; torture and murder of a loved one described in I Loved Earth Years Ago (and mentioned throughout); cultural appropriation of the “spirit animal” in Cormorant Stagecraft.
It took me a long time while reading to see as Conrad sees. In the latter half, I found so much joy, humour, celebration, wonder, dense weight, anger, pain and grief in the pages.
The process of these poems involved Conrad making in intention for the day or a longer period—often interacting with people, nature, bodies, or spiritual ideas—during which they took notes, and using those notes to write one or more poem(s). The process is unique to me and inspiring. Many of the exercises delighted or otherwise moved me. Their spirituality is often present, and is unlike mine—I have difficulty seeing meaning through crystals or clairvoyant means—so many of the exercises left me behind. There were moments I found ridiculous, but others I appreciated even though I didn’t understand. Two of these were: reading a poem to a natural object and interpreting it in new language in Quartz Crystal Shakespeare Sonnet Translation, and the reiki in Healing for a Pedophile (sending healing to another person, an analogue to prayer that is not a shame or command on the recipient).
Conrad’s thoughts about war, love, and queerness (gender and sexuality) were especially interesting to me. Love continuing, entering dreams, pasts, between realms of life and death. War marring the history of America, of so much history. Gender entering, moving into and across binaries. Queerness bringing hatred and closeness, new kinds of being and connecting. I liked how they showed these concepts as mattering, as being continual, coexisting, important weights and ways of living.
Part of my initial frustration with Conrad’s writing was the freedom from structural or thematic organization. It seems likely that drugs accompanied at least some of the writing (a theory I developed in part because rereading many of the poems while high helped me to interpret their parts and wholes). The chaotic quality is, I think, one goal of the project; however, knowing that the poems were birthed from unfiltered thoughts and impulses, many of them seemed to still be in that form.
They were sometimes starkly emotional and layered with dreams and subconscious ideas. They were sometimes silly or derivative or didn’t quite tap into any language/ideas of value. All of the titles were an overwrought mystery.
I’m glad I read the collection. I feel I’ll be returning to Conrad’s glittering lines and open psyche in a few places, while a great deal of the collection is shrugged off.
Some favourite exercises:
MIA Escalator
Equinox Eve (I want to try this kind of silence)
Unknown Duration of Fear
Arboreal Crystal Aria
Cormorant Stagecraft
Restoration Fiber Song
Healing for a Pedophile (painfully hard to read)
I Loved Earth Years Ago
Some favourite pieces:
Six
Ecodeviance
I Want to Do Everything Wrong Just Once
Reading Starlight With One Eye…
Lonely Deep Affection
Now Only 30% Taphephobic… (grief)
What Is Bribery In Poetry Going To Prove
Be a Monster…
Laugh Into Soil then Sow Seeds
No More Songs for My Dirty Little Wow
Poem as Sconce for Some Light
Ariana Reines Showed Me…
Act Like Flower Pulling His Petals Out
Act Like Polka Dot…
Act Like Head Louse…
It took me a long time while reading to see as Conrad sees. In the latter half, I found so much joy, humour, celebration, wonder, dense weight, anger, pain and grief in the pages.
The process of these poems involved Conrad making in intention for the day or a longer period—often interacting with people, nature, bodies, or spiritual ideas—during which they took notes, and using those notes to write one or more poem(s). The process is unique to me and inspiring. Many of the exercises delighted or otherwise moved me. Their spirituality is often present, and is unlike mine—I have difficulty seeing meaning through crystals or clairvoyant means—so many of the exercises left me behind. There were moments I found ridiculous, but others I appreciated even though I didn’t understand. Two of these were: reading a poem to a natural object and interpreting it in new language in Quartz Crystal Shakespeare Sonnet Translation, and the reiki in Healing for a Pedophile (sending healing to another person, an analogue to prayer that is not a shame or command on the recipient).
Conrad’s thoughts about war, love, and queerness (gender and sexuality) were especially interesting to me. Love continuing, entering dreams, pasts, between realms of life and death. War marring the history of America, of so much history. Gender entering, moving into and across binaries. Queerness bringing hatred and closeness, new kinds of being and connecting. I liked how they showed these concepts as mattering, as being continual, coexisting, important weights and ways of living.
Part of my initial frustration with Conrad’s writing was the freedom from structural or thematic organization. It seems likely that drugs accompanied at least some of the writing (a theory I developed in part because rereading many of the poems while high helped me to interpret their parts and wholes). The chaotic quality is, I think, one goal of the project; however, knowing that the poems were birthed from unfiltered thoughts and impulses, many of them seemed to still be in that form.
They were sometimes starkly emotional and layered with dreams and subconscious ideas. They were sometimes silly or derivative or didn’t quite tap into any language/ideas of value. All of the titles were an overwrought mystery.
I’m glad I read the collection. I feel I’ll be returning to Conrad’s glittering lines and open psyche in a few places, while a great deal of the collection is shrugged off.
Some favourite exercises:
MIA Escalator
Equinox Eve (I want to try this kind of silence)
Unknown Duration of Fear
Arboreal Crystal Aria
Cormorant Stagecraft
Restoration Fiber Song
Healing for a Pedophile (painfully hard to read)
I Loved Earth Years Ago
Some favourite pieces:
Six
Ecodeviance
I Want to Do Everything Wrong Just Once
Reading Starlight With One Eye…
Lonely Deep Affection
Now Only 30% Taphephobic… (grief)
What Is Bribery In Poetry Going To Prove
Be a Monster…
Laugh Into Soil then Sow Seeds
No More Songs for My Dirty Little Wow
Poem as Sconce for Some Light
Ariana Reines Showed Me…
Act Like Flower Pulling His Petals Out
Act Like Polka Dot…
Act Like Head Louse…
April 25, 2025
Not impressed. Although C. A. Conrad strikes me more as a leftist than a liberal, his poetry reflects the contrary. As America is the communication and marketing capital of the world, it makes sense that the work of one of the most lauded contemporary poets resembles it in all its enjambment non-sequiturs that imitate senseless advertisements and “found” “content” (as in stuff that doesn’t engage but just fills the spaces)—making the actual poems devoid of any emotional, intellectual, or even political impact: everything is devoid of actual substance, and we are left to deal with pieces of an actual culture: very apt for an American poet. His (soma)tic exercises, on the other hand, are often quite beautiful. The search to find a sense of present in the most mundane or elaborate of ways, often turning into the subjective, creates a meaningful effect meaning or purpose in a life that seeks to destroy it (with its overabundance). Is that, then, the point of the book? To juxtapose reflection and quietness to the nonsensical acceleration of our post-modern world where every ounce of connection is sucked out in favor of glorified (and lauded) disconnection, a collage of “content”?
August 23, 2023
ritual poetics rooted in earth and so many feelings. really incensed i missed their presence in athens by about 3 years, though i would have been far too young and stupid to attempt to understand. truly a contemporary genius. i would give my left leg to get to attend an ecopoetics workshop. “I Loved Earth Years Ago” and the accompanying poem from the exercise nearly made me cry very loudly on the train home. I also throughly enjoyed “Gender Continuum” and the accompanying poem and “Grave A Hole As Dream A Hole” and the final poem in the book.
December 23, 2020
I got this book because it had "somatics" in the name and I checked out every book at my local library that had to do with somatics. I was not expecting poetry! It was a pleasant surprise. These poems ended up changing the way I think about things. The (Soma)tics practices were very interesting to read about as well. Time for me to go buy some crystals and write some poetry!
May 25, 2018
Rituals, instructions, and playfulness abound, but also lots of questioning, probing, anger, and grief. Easy to be enamored by the strangeness and beauty of someone who really sees the world differently on purpose and proudly.
July 14, 2023
In places it merits 4 or even 5 stars, but the challenge to the reader is sometimes too high for this reader, and the process becomes feels almost mechanical or routine, which would appear to be contrary to the desire of the author.
Read
March 14, 2024GLORIOUS personage
March 2, 2017
(3.5 stars :)
March 6, 2015
CA Conrad, Ecodeviance
(Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
Wave Books, 2014
Whenever I read CA Conrad, whose poems I find as potent and brave as anyone’s alive, I end up asking, “Who else is taking these kinds of risks?” I read a lot of poetry. I seem to be one of nine adults left on the planet who still subscribe to and read literary magazines. Most of the poems I read just seem so careful, so eager to flash knowledge and earn credentials. Not bad poems, not bad at all, just semi-dehydrated. Impeccable and careful poems suitable for publishing in a tasteful university press volume entitled, Poems For Tenure.
Then there’s CA Conrad. In Ecodeviance he describes an exercise wherein he approached men in suits on lunch break in Philadephia and asked them, “Excuse me sir, on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being thin and creamy, and 5 being cottage cheese, how do you rate your semen?” Conrad is unafraid to query businessmen, minerals or ghosts; the results are often spectacular.
As well as being precise, gorgeous and full of surprises, CA Conrad’s poems are marked by a willingness to take real risks and make respectable people uncomfortable. Yes, please! I want to read more poets like this! How can we go on primly celebrating beauty in our rarefied salons and not be pissed off by the poisoning of the natural world and the murder of innocent people? Real love does not shy away from fury. Neither do these poems.
The poems in Ecodeviance are the results of rituals created by CA Conrad called (Soma)tics, “ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible.” The rituals serve as the source for a body of notes that then become the basis of a poem. Each poem or set of poems in the book is presented with its ritual of origin. (I hereby predict that these rituals will soon be so frequently imitated and assigned in Creative Writing programs that a boomlet of CA Conrad imitations will result. This is not a bad thing. At very least it will provide a respite from Raymond Carver imitations.)
In content and delivery, in ritual and result, Ecodeviance is a wake-up call and CA Conrad is our queer genius alarm clock. May we heed the call.
(Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
Wave Books, 2014
Whenever I read CA Conrad, whose poems I find as potent and brave as anyone’s alive, I end up asking, “Who else is taking these kinds of risks?” I read a lot of poetry. I seem to be one of nine adults left on the planet who still subscribe to and read literary magazines. Most of the poems I read just seem so careful, so eager to flash knowledge and earn credentials. Not bad poems, not bad at all, just semi-dehydrated. Impeccable and careful poems suitable for publishing in a tasteful university press volume entitled, Poems For Tenure.
Then there’s CA Conrad. In Ecodeviance he describes an exercise wherein he approached men in suits on lunch break in Philadephia and asked them, “Excuse me sir, on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being thin and creamy, and 5 being cottage cheese, how do you rate your semen?” Conrad is unafraid to query businessmen, minerals or ghosts; the results are often spectacular.
As well as being precise, gorgeous and full of surprises, CA Conrad’s poems are marked by a willingness to take real risks and make respectable people uncomfortable. Yes, please! I want to read more poets like this! How can we go on primly celebrating beauty in our rarefied salons and not be pissed off by the poisoning of the natural world and the murder of innocent people? Real love does not shy away from fury. Neither do these poems.
The poems in Ecodeviance are the results of rituals created by CA Conrad called (Soma)tics, “ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible.” The rituals serve as the source for a body of notes that then become the basis of a poem. Each poem or set of poems in the book is presented with its ritual of origin. (I hereby predict that these rituals will soon be so frequently imitated and assigned in Creative Writing programs that a boomlet of CA Conrad imitations will result. This is not a bad thing. At very least it will provide a respite from Raymond Carver imitations.)
In content and delivery, in ritual and result, Ecodeviance is a wake-up call and CA Conrad is our queer genius alarm clock. May we heed the call.
July 6, 2015
This is the real thing.
(due to GR formatting this poem is not exactly as it appears in print)
LAUGH INTO THE SOIL
THEN SOW SEEDS
he puts it
down in
front of
himself
instead of passing it
this is the way of
men all over
the world
a camera with a pen wrote this poem
bending back into giant sleep
ink on pillowcase
night leaks into
mind's library
things you won't be able to
open without a
gun would include
my dreambank
we promised to
shake one
another into
a new phase
every few years
I sewed this heckler-proof
suit for you sorry you get
so much shit onstage
Clyde Barrow you
faggot bank robber
in my dream every bullet flew
back into their little piggy guns
were you ever so
strong as this
on earth
(due to GR formatting this poem is not exactly as it appears in print)
LAUGH INTO THE SOIL
THEN SOW SEEDS
he puts it
down in
front of
himself
instead of passing it
this is the way of
men all over
the world
a camera with a pen wrote this poem
bending back into giant sleep
ink on pillowcase
night leaks into
mind's library
things you won't be able to
open without a
gun would include
my dreambank
we promised to
shake one
another into
a new phase
every few years
I sewed this heckler-proof
suit for you sorry you get
so much shit onstage
Clyde Barrow you
faggot bank robber
in my dream every bullet flew
back into their little piggy guns
were you ever so
strong as this
on earth
July 15, 2016
The 'rituals' he performed to write the texts are the most interesting thing of the book, fluxus happening scripts teeming with an imaginative interrogation of what it means to be present. The texts are too much an haphazardous dadaist hodgepodge to be worth rereading, I am afraid.
January 20, 2016
The book folds open easily, inviting you to read the (Soma)tics.
I return to this book often when I'm in a creative rut.
I return to this book often when I'm in a creative rut.
June 19, 2016
love.
September 25, 2015
Pretty hilarious and creative. This is hardcore art.
Read
November 7, 2017I want to hang there
bathe in the grunts of
your woeful fraternity
open the senses and
let us begin to begin
let it all belong in here
sometimes a cock up
your ass is all it
takes to get the
point across
the made in china
sticker pulled away to
reveal the made
up in your
head sticker
bathe in the grunts of
your woeful fraternity
open the senses and
let us begin to begin
let it all belong in here
sometimes a cock up
your ass is all it
takes to get the
point across
the made in china
sticker pulled away to
reveal the made
up in your
head sticker
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews