Recipient of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award
Growing up in a rural factory town I watched my
creative family extend the grind of their monotonous jobs outside the factory walls
and into their lives until they were no longer capable of accessing their
artistic abilities. The factory essentially divorced them from their sense of
their essential selves. This wouldn’t happen to me, I thought, and moved to a
large city to foster my skills as an artist and to surround myself with
like-minded people. For many years this was feeling right, that I was doing
exactly what I came to do, not working in the factory back home. But in 2005
when visiting my family for a reunion I listened again to their stories about
the factory, and as always these stories saddened me. On the train ride home I
had an epiphany that I had been treating my poetry like a factory, an assembly
line, and doing so in many different ways, from how I constructed the poems, to
my tabbed and sequenced folders for submissions to magazines, etc. This was a
crisis, and I stopped writing for nearly a month, needing to figure out how to
climb out of these factory-like structures, or to quit writing altogether. But
I wanted to thrive in the crisis rather than end the trajectory of
self-discovery the poems had set me on over the years. One morning I made a
list of the worst problems with the factory, and at the top of that list was
“lack of being present.” The more I thought about this the more I realized this
was what the factory robbed my family of the most, and the thing that
frightened me the most, this not being aware of place in the present. That
morning I started what I now call (Soma)tics, ritualized structures where being
anything but present was next to impossible. These rituals create what I refer
to as an “extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever
I am can come together through a sharper lens. It has been inspiriting that
(Soma)tics reveal the creative viability of everything around me. This book
contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic rituals and their resulting poems.
My deepest gratitude to everyone at Wave Books,
CAConrad
