PRESENTING CONRAD
VOICE OF A POET
An appreciation by Billy Marshall Stoneking
Christina Conrad has always been considered something of a phenomenon. That she was born and raised in New Zealand, let alone lived there for nearly fifty years, seems the ultimate aberration. Where New Zealand is prim and conservative, Conrad is outlandish and eccentric; where New Zealanders veer towards what is respectably “hip” (i.e.: 'art that comes from somewhere else besides New Zealand'), or rush headlong towards the “tried-and-true”, Conrad studiously disdains fashion and safety, and their consequent mediocrity.
Poet, painter, filmmaker, playwright, designer, performer & poet, Conrad underscores the esoteric wisdom that art – if it be art at all - is is both sacred and profane - at once occult and universal, and always spiritual. Her poetry, like her paintings and clay sculptures, is highly emotional and deeply philosophical - a curious combination in an age where poetry has been objectified or de-constructed by academia into a precious intellectualism devoid of almost everything but irrelevance.
Conrad’s poetry is outlaw poetry. It eschews all rules, habits, and conventions. And for this, it has been laregly ignored or under-valued. You can almost see the hairs rising on the necks of those irate academic poets who believe they are accomplishing something important by taking up arms against Conrad’s use of one-word lines and her lack of punctuation. As if these were issues that hadn’t already been put to rest years ago by the likes of cummings and others.
Instead of “correct” formalisms, one finds in Conrad’s poetry nuances of an old tribal feeling. Something which cannot be taught in Creative Writing 101, or prodded from mediocre minds intent on furthering their poetic ambitions.
Poet and Director of New Zealand’s Museum of Modern Art, Ian Wedde, has written:
"Conrad's art is never secular; it always conveys a deep tone of mystical or spiritual importance – (and) of the fundamental, factual, logical nature of such experience. Her art reaches back to a medieval, or Gothic, iconography…it returns the recent legacy of Modernist primitivism to a remote European history..(and) enters that visual language in a medieval drama in which no aspect of life, however domestic, was merely secular -- in which objects of domestic life were imbued with malevolent or benign powers, in which banal characters could be seen as satanic or saintly, in which sexual and religious forces ran back together toward some suppressed, pagan source."
“Groping in darkness,” she writes, “I erect MY BELOVED at the center of my creative life. Around this sticky mandala, I spin… the heart screaming in its rickety cage... It’s the idea behind the idea behind the idea that I so winsomely suckle.” Her’s is a poetry that in its written and oral form finds universal force in its careful attention to personal details. She knows intuitively what Charles Simic once said, that “poets are catchers not pitchers”.
For Conrad, the art of poetry, like the art of painting, resides in the ability to prise open the lid of the unconscious. And yet it is also more of a leaving-alone than an interfering-with. She - like every poet worthy of the title - is a listener, a channel, the vehicle through which the unheard is heard and the unseen is seen - a medium for wraiths. What bubbles up is the raw material of poetry… quite literally, the voices of the unconscious. “They well up out of the throat… the throat, an ancient instrument," she says. "A powerful chakra - a very sexual organ.”
Those who have been fortunate enough to hear Conrad read her poetry realize very quickly that they are in the presence of something quite special. Her voice and energy are deep, ancient, bardic; like the voice of a Dreamtime singer. In reading her poetry, or listening to her perform it, the de-tribalised mind cannot help but hear familiar echoes of that dim, almost forgotten tribal past that binds us to one another and to the Earth. At other times, one is reminded of Blake or Yeats - and yet, this is a woman’s voice, something not usually associated with the image of "the bard". Where are the great bardic voices of English-speaking women poets in this century? I can think of only one: Conrad’s.
Performing with Conrad can be a life-altering experience. The flow of words, like tidal waves, sweep across the room, picking up and depositing all before them on some shore foreign to the ken of those who haunt public readings. Even her so-called ordinary conversation is rich in metaphor and musical patterns. A woman in the audience at one of Conrad’s readings was heard whispering to her partner, “My god! It’s so damned emotional!” But then that is what poetry is for. A transcendental experience fashioned out of breath and sound and meaning.
Just as one does not expect the voice of a bard from the throat of a woman, so too are Conrad’s images and grammatical dislocations unexpected and often unnerving. Critic, Douglas Barbour, writes: "Christina Conrad is a painter as well as a poet, and her strange little poems tend to deploy words and phrases the way her paintings deploy colours; her deliberate use of a single wrong and awkward word in every poem also throws each of them out of kilter in a most intriguing way..."
i cannot paint this woman
with your penis rising out of her head
her finger nails are black
this fig tree has thorns
there is none light
there is none light
this fig tree has thorns
i cannot paint this woman
(Yellow Pencils, 88)
Conrad’s own ideas about the nature of poetry and its expression are worth noting. She writes:
“Poetry is a very natural thing... it seeps out of the unconscious. To bring a lot of academic laws & rules down upon it - the hierarchical shape of education down upon it - is like bringing an expensive frost to a harvest... when i write i try to remain empty… there is always a struggle as the ego wants to tip one over the edge... the ego is cunning, clever, well-schooled... it is harnessed to the bloody vehicle and intends to take it over, to drive it. i work like a medium, secretly blind yet sharp as a hunter. locked in the slippery narrow tomb, i lurk, waiting to birth an idea. it's as if i am giving birth to myself each time, and in giving birth to myself i give birth to the world, this diseased and fascinating egg that never hatches. we're all dancing around it. it's like a mad opal shining in the unconscious, uneatable, indigestible... it's through the cracks of this egg we peer. one never knows what's going to spill out... in this way i often look to myself like a terrible fool... to create, one must relinquish all knowledge... i never seemed to have any to begin with... knowledge is the poison..."
What one finds in Conrad’s poetry is not knowledge but inspiration. It is in what she leaves unsaid, what she deftly alludes to but seldom expresses and never explains, that her poetry and art are most clearly perceived. But the perception that is there is made by the reader/listener/viewer of Conrad’s work, and in the way she fashions her verse, so that it continually invites the reader/audience to participate in the act of creation.
Those who find Conrad’s work dark and morbid or humorous and surreal, have themselves to blame. They are Conrad’s unwitting co-conspirators by virtue of what they bring to their perception of her vision and because she allows space for them to find in her poems what already resonates deep with themselves.
On the question of one-word lines in Conrad’s verse – something which she has been criticised for – she responds:
“this is a crazy thing to have to answer... being one of the ignorant, one of the lawless, i do whatever i like. i strike out suddenly. a sense of elation comes over me. i can only see that word, laid bare, and all the time i am thinking of speaking it...”
Conrad’s vision is unique, however it is not unlike the poetic vision one finds in every great artist. For those fearless few, one comes away from an encounter with Conrad's poetry and art, confident in the belief that the source from which she draws is the same source which all true poets draw. She encourages us to attend to the hidden facts of life, not to prove anything or even to explain or make meaningful this mystery we call life, but because she, herself, has made a lover of the unknown and takes obsessive pleasure in that love.
All works of art are works of love. They are at their base, profoundly religious. Not in the conventional sense of religion, but in what they encourage us to acknowledge and to doubt, as well as what they illuminate concerning the essential mysteries of the human soul. That such mysteries can be found in the ordinary events and objects of human existence is shown over and over again in all of Conrad's work. “i am very diligent,” she writes. “this is probably why i was obsessed with Atlas when i was a child. he was on the door of my mother's oven, and the thing that really excited me, even more than his burden, was the red dial that raced up an arc-shaped translucent fixture... if i put my finger in it the red stuff shot up the translucent arc, and fell back down again. all this was done with great secrecy. and all the while, Atlas crouched, holding the world. there was something terribly dark and fiendish about it. Not counting the fact that a butcher had once owned this stove. there were two deep cuts in the top which my mother lamented over and wiped continuously with a dish cloth.”
Read Conrad's interview for MadHatter's Press -
"The Stolen Wig of a Million Judges"
Gene Tanta interviews Christina Conrad
for River & the wet butterflys ah River we long for love Love Love eternally hidden in our terrible longing to possess Love we lounge in Loves shadow offering velvet veneer hearts in our fervid desire to possess Love we gnaw on Loves hard biscuits whimpering spilling crumbs harping on an ancient lament hanging on Illusion's flapping wings we clutch at his gigantic cod piece bathing our suppurating wounds in his glorious sperm ah the eternal song of Love unheard in the clambering, to suckle on Loves pinkedy pink tit ah Love Love in a craven jungle nearer nearer than a blue antelope amongst the great grey boulders of hearts discontent in torture chambers of minds shrink ah ah Loves Loves comely bread brooch doth tickle doth prick hearts velvet veneer ah Loves Loves hermaphrodidic shadow doth darkly shimmer high up in Lament valley ah Love Love in a forge of servitude the harrowed ones' long shadows fling sorrow at the feet of great trees ah Love Love in sight of a raging thirst shoals of intemperate tongues drown in the deep River
rolling melons in my family no one possessed large bosoms mine were small & hard later they grew from an ardent wish to possess melons they rolled on my mother’s oak table shocking her into removing bread & butter demanding to know if i was pregnant at 48 i who had given birth to so many nurturing each child to the age of 7 sorrow & guilt accumulated blowing up wickedness until she was disproportionate
antique swords i met a virgin she collected antique swords kept them in a blood red tower when a train shot by the tower shook the swords rattled she lost her virginity sold her swords gave birth to twins
white coral cunt when we were homeless every house we looked at you desired as if a woman offered her rooms spread out
i am just a figurehead in borrowed rooms my flesh has grown
i cut up cloth with blunt scissors thread rusty needles with blind eyes conduct fear as i slice the collar off a dying tiger coat
yesterday in a rag pickers market midst black bowler hats mens suits on wire coat hangers i saw a white coral cunt on a plastic dish
i asked you for five dollars to buy it
too expensive you said ive seen lots of these before
alone on a remorseless couch i fondle the white coral cunt put it in my glow mesh bag put it in
my long pink bag put it in my black antique box
doom prepares to give birth (for stoneking)
a bird twitters of cruelty eternal delay ah, how cold
Doom prepares to give birth to Love licking up the sperm of artifice wheedling the stick smashing the skull of justice
ah, beloved do you recognize the flower the flower concealed in a dry rasp? do you remember the honey we slurped
ah, let me wrap you in this weathered quilt stuffed with the fine feathers of a dead goose i shalt not harm or possess you i shalt not fix my eye there shalt be no burning the body hollow for the white flame to leap
last song
you come you and your claustrophobia to drop in my lap you never thought I could have changed from a wooden martyr in a bath of your blood my feet thorns
your moon is not in the same place as mine the river flows fast over smooth rock where you lie that red fish you catch with your hands gapes from a bowl of rock I never saw the snakes that glide round you your letter comes from a summer far away you cannot feel the winter that has come down on me
fox glove poem it was last year same time same time as this the sweet peas were black by the side of the road I did not know the fox gloves then
last year same time same time as this I was hidden hidden by the walls dark red
a long road lay between us
the hills were burnt black black the manuka trees black black the sweet peas by the side of the road
I did not know the fox gloves then the throats of the fox gloves are spotted spotted inside the black storm has passed leaving the river yellow & swollen at the foot of the house
the leaves of the fox gloves are pale fur between the hills
I shall never know the river yet I bathe my head in its waters walk on its smooth stones
I shall never know the trees that stand on the other side I know only the fox gloves the fox gloves |
to Stoneking 1993 in my 50th year my teeth are still sharp i slowly devour the flesh of my heart
i was ill when i only ate pasta it was so white under the hood of a black dish i dreamed all my teeth fell out brush of thorns(a song for stoneking)who braids your hairwho braids your hairnot your lovernot your loverwhy vanity braids my silver hairwith toothless combbrush of thornswhen i look in the mirrori seedeath straddling lifei see drowned onesclutchingmy silver haira headless manin a horsehair coatdrags the pondwith a blood red netwho braids your hairwho braids your hairnot your lovernot your loverwhy vanity braids my silver hairwith toothless combbrush of thornsloveeach dayi washyour clothesyour hardblack socksyour white linenshirtsslidethrough myhandsyour under pantsarestillblown upwithyourshapeeach dayistandcoldbefore spurtingtapsletter to mirothere was a storm herea revengeful spirit enteredblack cloak flung across starsmoon dead in a broken basketin the old blue housewe sought shelterin the iron teeth of a bedgroaning on its haunchesred velvet flappinground a ghostly sliverthrough night’s dark howlgreat trees crackedsplitfell in ancient patternsthe cry of life’s warpbloody stemsbark falling from fleshin mirror’s cruel ovalno proof glimmeredof life’s causehorror moving closeto sentimentality’s plushnight’s wail lockedas light shotacross darknesswe rosea white morntook useskimo baby(to my first born – miro)your room is a theatreyour bed – a collapsible stagethe siren singsyou wakerising above crowdsin your satin underwearyour face is lit like a golden eskimothose golden eskimo babiesmade out of sugary stuffin secret, white paper bagsone devoured them slowlylollies hung like dreamssilver balls one could never crunchpeople said they were made out of mercurythey tore around in one’s moutheven at an early age desire was consideredthose all-day suckers one longed to possessone licked though never tastedchocolate bearswere satisfactory lovers –their paper aurasrustling |