First Light on Anafi, Greece
For Iordanis Kerenidis and Piergiorgio Pepe
About this (Soma)tic ritual
My installation included four poems on outdoor walls on the island of Anafi, Greece, as part of the biennial international art project PHENOMENON, organized and curated by Iordanis Kerenidis and Piergiorgio Pepe and their extraordinary team of people. It was such a joy working with everyone, and I miss them! It took several hours to install each poem, usually during the cooler morning hours. One of these poems is from my latest book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin Books, 2024). The other three poems are from my newest (Soma)tic poetry ritual, First Light, and here is how I wrote them:
Each morning, I walk outside to write while watching the sunrise. It takes nearly 9 minutes for the light leaving the Sun to travel to Earth, bringing warmth, illumination, and essential nutrients for the health of our bones, blood, and immune systems. Ignition of cells in humans, other creatures, and plants is my focus for writing.
Later in the day, I watch the sunrise on public outdoor webcams on other parts of our planet, like the Tokyo railyards, the astronomical clock of Prague, or the beautiful Byzantine Mosque of Istanbul called Hagia Sophia.
Through my accumulation of outdoor webcams across the planet, I am eventually preparing to write poems through a continuous sunrise for 24 hours. The plan is to begin by waiting for the Sun to appear outside my door and then watch it unfold around the world online until it returns to my door again. The next day, after my writing session through the nonstop sunrise, I will work with a hypnotherapist to search my memory for the first time I saw the Sun as a child. I will then use the video documentation of being placed into the trance to continue my writing. The recall of my earliest contact with our star will expand the experience of watching our planet's sunrise for a full day.
Each morning, I walk outside to write while watching the sunrise. It takes nearly 9 minutes for the light leaving the Sun to travel to Earth, bringing warmth, illumination, and essential nutrients for the health of our bones, blood, and immune systems. Ignition of cells in humans, other creatures, and plants is my focus for writing.
Later in the day, I watch the sunrise on public outdoor webcams on other parts of our planet, like the Tokyo railyards, the astronomical clock of Prague, or the beautiful Byzantine Mosque of Istanbul called Hagia Sophia.
Through my accumulation of outdoor webcams across the planet, I am eventually preparing to write poems through a continuous sunrise for 24 hours. The plan is to begin by waiting for the Sun to appear outside my door and then watch it unfold around the world online until it returns to my door again. The next day, after my writing session through the nonstop sunrise, I will work with a hypnotherapist to search my memory for the first time I saw the Sun as a child. I will then use the video documentation of being placed into the trance to continue my writing. The recall of my earliest contact with our star will expand the experience of watching our planet's sunrise for a full day.
CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. The Book of Frank is available in
9 different languages, most recently French and Italian, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://CAConrad.com