The Ritualistic Power of CAConrad’s Poetry

The poetry of CAConrad is written through a process the writer describes as ‘(soma)tic ritual’ – a term derived from the Ancient Greek for body – which involves a series of writing prompts rooted in the body. One ritual representative of Conrad’s technique, which the writer posted on their blog in 2007, begins with drawing the number nine on the chest with a red magic marker. Afterwards, participants are instructed to put on a shirt that covers the number and walk outside in any direction, changing with every corner they come to. ‘Now’, Conrad instructs, ‘go somewhere quickly and write.’ The journey becomes a starting point for poetry. 

This sense of poetry as something which must be grounded in the body reverberates through the ground floor of Champ Lacombe’s London space. A series of four of Conrad’s poems – texts made of short lines with rapid, breathless line breaks – take on a variety of fluid shapes. Expanded and printed onto sheets of chiffon, they dwarf and surround the viewer.  Beyond the gallery space, the sounds of the street can be heard, and any breeze finding its way through the open door can cause the texts to tremble. Yet, to be contained on all four sides by these works generates the feeling of being inside something akin to a prayer circle.

The texts themselves play a key role in this: the four poems on the gallery’s ground floor, taken together, offer something that feels like a cyclical narrative. Images from different work – of the sunrise, Thanatos and the possibility of time travel – flow into one another, evoking the circle of life, death and rebirth. This creates an ephemeral feeling in Conrad’s writing, such as in the text ‘everyone’s / drawing the / Death Card’ (2024), while another poem, positioned directly opposite this invocation of death, offers something more optimistic: ‘there is a / welcome / gesture / the sun does / I wait for it’ (2024). These contradictions – between life and death, between liberation and the threat of violence – cause the works on display to exist within a state of flux, alive with the constant possibility of transformation.

In contrast to the serenity of these floating poems is The Obituary Show (2022), a film by Augustx Cascales, adapted from a script by Conrad. This work is an unexpected addition, contrasting with the sincerity of Conrad’s poems: the cast, lit by roving spotlights, performs bizarre physical comedy with the sensibility of a drag show, their singing enhanced by auto-tune. One character begs his sister to ‘have some compassion’ – something which, though largely absent in The Obituary Show, is abundant in Conrad’s poetry. Cascales’s film offers an attempt to retreat into a world devoid of the extreme feelings that Conrad reckons with in the poems on display.

These darker aspects of our world – and the impossibility of looking away from them – are explored in greater depth in the gallery’s downstairs space, where another four texts are hung. One declares, ‘If you go / back into / the closet / you are not / even protecting / yourself’ before going on to ask, ‘but will / America / kill us / maybe’. In this basement room, without the street-level breeze to disturb them, the poems hang rigidly – an effect which mirrors the starker, less forgiving tone of the texts. 

In the act of expanding the size of their poems and altering their form, Conrad is able to enhance one of the core elements of their writing: illustrating what it feels like to move through the world either embraced by or confronted with such complex, precarious feelings.

‘CAConrad’ is on view at Champ Lacombe, London, until 1 June

^{Main image: CAConrad, exhibition view, 2025. Courtesy: Champ Lacombe, London and © CAConrad; photograph: © Andy Keate}