Poems

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 

http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue12/interview.shtml

Some Conrad poems

 furs 

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

brush of thorns

(a song for stoneking) 

who braids your hair

who braids your hair

not your lover

not your lover

why vanity braids my silver hair

with toothless comb

brush of thorns

when i look in the mirror

i see

death straddling life

i see drowned ones

clutching

my silver hair

a headless man

in a horsehair coat

drags the pond

with a blood red net

who braids your hair

who braids your hair

not your lover

not your lover

why vanity braids my silver hair

with toothless comb

brush of thorns

love

each day

i wash

 your clothes

your hard

black socks

your white linen

shirts

slide

through my

hands

your  under pants

are

still 

blown up

with

your

shape

each day

i

stand

cold

before spurting

taps 

letter to miro

there was a storm here

a revengeful spirit entered

black cloak flung across stars

moon dead in a broken basket

in the old blue house

we sought shelter

in the iron teeth of a bed

groaning on its haunches

red velvet flapping

round a ghostly sliver

through night’s dark howl

great trees cracked

split

fell in ancient patterns

the cry of life’s warp

bloody stems

bark falling from flesh

in mirror’s cruel oval

no proof glimmered

of life’s cause

horror moving close

to sentimentality’s plush

night’s wail locked

as light shot

across darkness

we rose 

a white morn

took us

More Poems By Conrad