Our Frank

Poet CAConrad draws us in to his Kafka-esque dream state.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Sep 25, 2007

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Calling CAConrad "in your face" doesn't quite do it. If the Philadelphia poet had his way, he'd be down your throat, stuck in your gut and up your ass. The brutally honest yet smartly encouraging Conrad, 40, isn't self-involved, and his causes aren't limited to his goals. He travels in packs, with other writers whose work can be read on his various Web sites (start with caconrad.blogspot.com and go from there). His activism goes deepest when the conversations turns to gay rights, animal rights and the divide between the haves and have-nots of this city. And the only thing sharper than the visceral absurdist images that litter his empowered prose — check out his Kafka-obsessed Deviant Propulsion, published by Soft Skull last year — is the newly published The Frank Poems (YPOLITA) bilingual chapbook. That'd be a burst of tortured giddy emotionalism nestled within his poems. And, his tongue's pretty sharp, too.

City Paper: Why'd you move to Philadelphia from upstate in the '80s? Is it true your family made coffins?

CAConrad: I came here to escape fascism. I was a queer leaving rural, fascist Pennsylvania like Jews taking the midnight train to Denmark. The company was the Boyertown Casket Factory. My mother has a picture of me as a little boy dressed as a vampire in a coffin on Halloween, arms folded across my chest; another of me sitting in the coffin, fangs and claws and fake blood. Bela Lugosi. I loved that man — my first crush. I would have fixed his heroin for him so long as he wore his fangs and punished me like any boy growing up in the middle of fascism desires. I had my first kiss against the wall of that factory. I'm dead fucking serious. No one went near that factory unless they were working so it was safe. My cousin Dolly had a sex change while working there. David Conrad wasn't allowed to use the men's room regardless of how much he looked like a man after his surgery, and the women didn't want him anywhere near the women's room, either. So he had to use the hole in the janitor's closet floor that led out to the sewer. 

CP: I've known you and your work since you used to read at Bacchanal in the '80s. But only in the last two years has it picked up steam and piqued so many others curiosities. Why?

CC: I'm just patient and work and work and read and write and work and read and write. Poetry's the center of my world. So many people get into writing poetry then give up on it because it doesn't fulfill some external desire, whatever that is.

CP: Other than a love of Kafka, what set The Frank Poems in motion?

CC: Next to Lugosi can only be Kafka. Frank? He's a fictional character I know very well. Some of Frank is loosely based on my very base upbringing. Frank is white trash, I am white trash. Frank's scared of his white trash family. Me too. There's love in between. And surrealism. Surrealism is just Super Real — meaning it's real. Admitting dreams aren't real is like saying your sleeping self is a liar. We don't become liars when we sleep, we become the Super Self. Frank is the anti-superhero because life is base. And we want to be in denial about how evil and selfish we are. Frank is what happens when the medication wears off. Frank is the ultimate surrender. Frank is where everything is permitted. 

CP: I've heard you read these pieces. Absinthe Drinkers did a nice job rendering Frank poems during Songs from Under the Bed at the Fringe. What makes Frank's live renditions breathe as they do?

CC: One time my friend Susan was reading some of Frank out loud on the toilet while I had sex with her brother as quietly as we could in the other room. She was laughing, we were cumming, it was horrible, and beautiful.  

CP: You write, "It's just the condition of my soul ... It will pass." Though Frank is hard and harsh, these simple beautiful moments creep through. How?

CC: It's impossible to maintain even the most brutal path of self-mutilation without expecting some relief. And there is relief and love. But something gained is always at the expense of another's suffering. This tug of war is a game of balance that keeps its victims, I mean its players, from total destruction, and from total freedom.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

CAConrad will read Fri., Sept. 28, 6 p.m., free, with Eileen Myles and Hal Sirowitz, hosted by Frank Sherlock, Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St., 215-735-9600, www.robinsbookstore.com.

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