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| He will intimidate poems right out of you- The Lyric Chuck Norris |
I don't want to get too much into just telling you about CAconrad, I put the WiKi search bar on the right to encourage independent research- or check out his poorly laid out blog. What is immediately important to us is his (Soma)Tic exercises. The idea comes from the mashing of two words, Soma and Somatic. Soma is a ritualistic drink (in the simplest of terms), the word is derived from the Sanskrit and Indo-European tongues meaning "to press and be newly born."Somatic is a word derived from Greek, meaning the body. He describes the mashing up of these two words:
My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.
He then writes crazy exercises to help the poet into this "infinite space". I want to look specifically as (Soma)Tic exercise #29 the shopping mall tree exercise.
Go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the cars to create this poem. Find a tree you connect with, feel it out, bark, branches, leaves. Sit on it's roots to see if it wants you OFF! These trees are SICK WITH converting car exhaust and shopper exhale all fucking day! Sit with your tree friend. Don't pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you're here to write poetry, not to worry about what a lunatic you appear to be. Remember what our QUEEN poet of merging celestial bodies Mina Loy said, "If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction." Public Space is not easy in shopping mall parking lots, but calmly explain yourself to the security guard like I did when creating this exercise. They will train a camera on you, but the sooner you get rid of them the sooner you can train the camera of your brain. Take notes, feverishly at first. Use a magnifying glass to study the dirt, trunk, to look carefully at leaf veins and bark structure. Notes, take notes, writing quickly, as if you've just discovered a sleeping creature that may wake at any moment and ATTACK YOU! Smell your hand, smell a branch. Study then the sky and buildings and people and everything, every detail. Face one direction and stare for a few seconds. Close your eyes and while they're closed imagine what you saw. Open your eyes and notice what you missed when imagining what you saw. Study what was missed and where and how it exists in relation to your tree friend. Take notes. If you are right-handed then touch the tree with your left hand, for your left hand is the hand which absorbs the world. Then walk to other trees in the parking lot and touch them with your right hand, for your right hand is the hand which sends your messages OUT of you. Touching your right hand to the other trees sends OUT of you the message your tree friend put into you through your left hand. Take notes on what was said from tree to tree. What message were you carrying? Take notes while leaving. Later, at home, close your eyes and remember your tree friend, take more notes from this visit with your memory. Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "TRACT" and "INITIATE," shape your poem.
Quite the task master and quite the task. But after getting over being bossed around by CAconrad I went out and spent 45 minutes in my schools giant parking-The Disney Land lot, Lot 30 and befriended a tree. And yes if you read the whole exercise I did walk around and passage messages from tree to tree. Here is the poem that resulted from this treeship (breaking my personal no pun rule) and this (Soma)Tic exercise.
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| Semi-happy middle class mall trees |
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| And not so happy leaky flat tenement mall trees |
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| Here is Lot 30 photo-shopped to look half-way friendly |
At a Supermarket in California
This is a note carved in the death
of a moment in the memory of the memory of you.
A
jealous connection, its all over this paper.
Dear Margie, I couldn’t help
but
think is this is someone else’s home.
There’s black rivers lined with people
trees
hacked mid-limb, growing and decaying.
Some things are black stop and see:
168 mid-drifts—two-third
with pierced belly buttons
(only a quarter sterile).
18 dozen tank-wearing club
beat blaring snap
back/fresh tat
no class but the
off-brand-six pack
frat rat, homeboys, yelling— SHITS REAL LIFE
Young Menace of Society tatted on 9
unshaven-boot
wearing-ball-point-waving prophets
Angel headed
hipsters—raving, rhyming, rapping, Howling.
Black trees have branches
that fall in just a way too.
To shelter you from the
total animal soup of time.
—So we beat on, trees
against the tide—
walking on the highway across America
to
the door of my cottage in the Western night.
Margie I couldn’t help but
think
this
is someone else’s home.
While you are out and about this week, take a moment to notice the tree's in your target's parking lot. Asking him if he has anything to say to you. And if he does, write it down! And write a poem!
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