Phil Merwin: Book Launch | Reading from his debut book of poems, "Songs For Hungry Ghosts" with Sean Croghan

Dec 19
5 pm

Phil Merwin has always lived at the intersection of poetry and punk rock, 
a place where words burn as intensely as amplifiers. 
As the vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the long-running Eugene, Oregon–based post-metal/post-punk trio dirtclodfight, Merwin has spent decades channeling emotional grit into heavy music. 

Now, with the release of his first poetry collection, Songs for Hungry Ghosts (Cavity Search Records), 
he turns that same raw honesty inward. 
The book is both an origin story and a homecoming - proof that before the tours, before the records, before the band became a cult name in underground heavy music, it all began with a poem.

The title itself comes from the book's opening piece, "Portland," in which Merwin explores the Buddhist idea of
"hungry ghosts," beings driven endlessly by craving.

For Merwin, the metaphor is personal. 
He and his close friend and drummer Eric Johnson - whose presence haunts the entire collection - 
once lived together while both were weathering turbulent periods of life. 
"We were hungry ghosts together," Merwin says.  "Trapped there, like we could never leave. 
And the whole point is: I'm not the Lone Ranger. We're all hungry ghosts.”

That understanding is the emotional nucleus of the book.
Songs for Hungry Ghosts is a work of grief, humor, memory, and survival - poetry built from the parts of a life that don't fit neatly into verse/chorus/verse. 
"This beautiful itch that can't quite be scratched, this emptiness that spills over everything,
" Merwin writes in "The Uninvited," a line he says might be the book's beating heart. 
It's the condition of living with what arrives unasked for: loss, madness, love, and the way poetry gives a shape to all of it.