Dear friends,

First and foremost, this week’s poet is the one and only CAConrad who makes me believe in everything good about this world, this life, even as it’s full of pain and suffering. Their poems are beautiful and very necessary in our times. I hope you’ll make time for them this week.

Now onto some other cool news:

This week we celebrated Leonard Cohen’s birthday and ONLY POEMS’ 3rd year anniversary and Strange Pilgrims’ 1st. We feel quite blessed with all the love our magazines have received during this time. Thank you.

Almost half of the poem recordings are now live on our site, which is kind of insane, given there are over a thousand poems. And our generous volunteers are currently recording the rest. You will soon be able to listen to all the poems we’ve ever published. Our hope is that this enriches your experience of language and meaning as it pertains to your spiritual understanding of the individual poem as well poetry as a whole.

In case you missed these other cool things earlier, we recently put (almost) all of our poets on the world map. If you want to see your beloved poets in context of where they’re from/where they live, you must visit this:

We also now have a wall of our poets – so you can see all our beautiful poets next to each other, and while you do that discover your next favorite poet. Make sure you click on poets that seem to be speaking to you and flip their cards around to read a poem:

All good things,

​Karan​

The official $3500 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize is now open for submissions! → Send us three pages of poetry on the intersections of love, faith & sex.

Poet of the Week

CAConrad

CAConrad works with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual and has been doing so for over 50 years. Their latest poetry collection is First Light (Wave Books / UK Penguin, 2027). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, and a Creative Capital grant. The Book of Frank is available in a dozen languages, with a forthcoming Korean translation in 2027. They exhibit their poems as sculpture with recent shows in Edinburgh, London, Hamburg, Melbourne, Porto, and Chicago. They teach at Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam, and at Bard College’s MFA program. They live in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

This is How We Audition for Our Lives

On (Soma)tic ritual, joy, and writing with the dead

After discovering that I had learned to avoid the present as a child, I knew I needed a new relationship with time. (Soma)tic poetry rituals create an extreme present, a place where I cannot focus on anything except what I am writing. Read the full interview →