Tuesday, May 12, 2009

C.A. Conrad Reads the Color of Food

The night of Sunday, March 8th saw Philadelphian C.A. Conrad reading
at the University of Iowa's Shambaugh House before a small, rain-soaked audience. Conrad, a short and hefty fellow with long brown hair and who speaks with a soft lisp, introduced himself to those gathered by starting at his very beginnings: "My childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for my mother and helping her shoplift. I escaped to Philadelphia the first chance I got and live and write there today with others in the PhillySound Poet gang." With the audience now sufficiently prepared for the eccentricities that would follow (and after listing all the important blogs to which he contributes), Conrad began to read a series of poems from his just-published chapbook, "Deviant Propulsion."

"I only eat one color of food a day." he assured the audience. "Some days I eat red, some days I eat the color yellow. This series of poems is about that." This listener may have heard incorrectly, but the poems were as such introduced as "Red" or "Magenta", and the poem's words sometimes evoked something directly culinary, such as "Red" including the line: "A scalpal makes Italian seasoning on the Chinese food." At other moments, this was less the case: food that is the color yellow was represented by a short poem that featured the phrase "Fading cow not far from our dragon-headed sperm stains." In the time that has elapsed since the reading that night I have in fact tried to imagine exactly what a dragon-headed sperm stain would be or look like, but I will admit I've come up short. Maybe if someone was to sperm directly into a dragon-head shaped stencil?

The two dozen or so seated, mainly undergraduates, appreciated moments like these best, and they were often, and Conrad affected a reading style that sometimes, raising from the pleasant softness of his speaking voice to a harsh glee, relished in the staccato delivery of some particularly absurd or fecal image. Iowa City's own Amish Trivedi, the organizer of the reading and the very friendly person that checks out DVD's for me at the University Library's Media Services, was invited on stage by Conrad mid-delivery of a food poem to read a recent piece of his own, whose title I have unfortunately forgotten, about oceans and his childhood.

When Conrad had finished reading from "Deviant Propulsion", he introduced a previous series of his entitled "(Soma)tic Midge," a book of exercises "based on a series of astral projections I recently underwent." It is my opinion that we should all be so fortunate as to undergo even one astral projection in our own life; having a series to speak about, to me, is damn near miraculous.

I think this is a good word on which to end a review of this reading... Miraculous.

Liam Neff

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