This week: George Spencer

Join us this week for spotlight poet George Spencer and an open reading.

George Spencer graduated from a famous college when it was easy to get in, hard to get thrown out. He was a very bad student; mostly drank, played billards, examined his sexuality and went to poetry readings. He has always painted and made collages. A couple of years ago he started
writing poetry. He lives in Ecuador 6 months each year. Among the dead (this refers to the writers not him) he is a great fan of all the Elizabethans, ee cummings, Philip Larkin, Baudelaire, Celine, some of the Language Poets, etc. He has or will have poems in Poetry Midwest, Nomad's Choir, Caveat Lector, Rain Tiger, Asinine Poetry, clwdwr, and Phoenix. He has read his work at Cafe Libro in Quito as well as at various venues in NYC. He has an Eiffel Tower of rejections. He is working on a chapbook to be called The Obscene Richness of Our Times.

Phoenix maganie reviewed by Hugh Fox

Phoenix magazine received this lovely review recently:

Phoenix #2.
Edited by Michael Graves
2-4/yr; 28pp; PO Box 84,
Dyker Heights Station,
Brooklyn, NY 11228.
&10/issue.
Reviewer: Hugh Fox

Phoenix is a relatively new magazine, but it has a feeling of great depth and breadth about it. Like a well-done translation of a poem by Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian (1878-1937), who introduced French Modernism into Polish literature: “ Imperceptibly in the deep it builds...//Looming silent over all its lifeless sisters,/Till it breaks...in ringlets, tresses/Then, smelling the death beneath it, roars,/And strikes the shore in a last throe.” (“The Wave,” p.15, trans.by Michael Kandel. It wouldn’t hurt to number the pages, though, and perhaps give a bit of bio about Lesmian himself.Most of the poetry very accessible, an excellent Haiku by Herbert Miller: “My shield when lifted,/blocking swords that may split me,/slashes my own throat.” (Herbert Miller, “Haiku for Michael,” p.23). Not names you see everywhere, but perhaps they should be: Charles Pierre, Hugh Hennedy,Rose Bernal.And this issue begins with an extremely demanding poem by editor Graves all about Adam and Eve, also masterfully written, and after three or four readings (like reading Wordsworth or Shelley) you begin to fathom what it’s all about: the horrifying world that mankind met after leaving Eden.

This week: Pat Duffy, Michael Morical, and Ellen Peckham

This week at Phoenix we're thrilled to have three very exciting spotlight readers. Their bios appear below.

As always, there will be an open mic following the spotlight readers, and copies of the new annual Phoenix review will be available.

Pat Duffy is the author of the book Blue Cats, which is about synesthesia--the phenomenon where people can experience words as having color or music as having shapes. Pat has been interivewed about her research in this area by media including NPR, Newsweek, and the Discovery Channel. Pat's special interest is in what she terms "personal coding": the unique way in which each person codes information and makes a one-of-a-kind "inner map" of the world around them.

Michael Morical has been writing since he was eight years old. He has made a living as an English teacher, tester of hay fever medication and assistant mis-translator of B movie scripts for Chinese subtitles. He lives in Taipei. His work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattapallax, The Antigonish Review, and other publications. His chapbook, Sharing Solitaire, will be published in September, 2008.

Ellen Peckham is a painter and poet whose work is being collected and archived at the Harry Ransome Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas--Austin. With her husband Anson she opened AEAtelier the first gallery in Chelsea, NY.