Workshop: CRYSTAL CONJUNCTION with CAConrad
February 8, 2025
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
FREE with RSVP
Join MOCA Tucson & the University of Arizona Poetry Center for two free public workshops with poet and MOCA exhibiting artist CAConrad. Focused on unblocking and resourcing our creativity, Conrad returns just before their exhibition closes and during Tucson’s Gem and Mineral Show to offer their unique (Soma)tic Rituals as tools for freeing creative expression.
Conrad’s (Soma)tic Rituals help us see the creative viability in everything around us––the poet has created writing rituals using the night sky to design constellations, to dream with crows, to talk with trees and ghosts, to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets with crystals, and to cope with the destroyed wilderness of our planet.
In this special pair of workshops Facing INTRUSIONS on Thursday, February 6 at 6pm and CRYSTAL CONJUNCTION on Saturday, February 8 at 3pm, the (Soma)tic rituals will help address the inner critic, unblocking artists from the negative energies that slow and stop creative practice; and the rituals will help counteract and engage the energies of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, happening concurrently.
About the workshop:
(Soma)tic Poetry Ritual Workshop: CRYSTAL CONJUNCTION
Supplies needed: Please bring a crystal from the Gem Show or from your personal collection as well as your preferred writing materials.
Because of the Tucson Gem Show, we are offering CRYSTAL CONUNCTION. All participants are asked to bring a crystal to the workshop. We will work together in various writing rituals, from tossing our crystals on a map of the MOCA grounds to using them to perform “haptics” with one another. In each ritual, we will be writing, so please also bring notebooks and pens.
About CA:
Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, “CAConrad’s poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.”
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
This workshop is presented in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center.