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Songs For Hungry Ghosts Poetry Event
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.
Long before dirtclodfight ever existed, Merwin was a teenage kid in Long Beach, reading poems at open mics and trying to fuse the electricity of punk with the emotional directness of literature. He cites Bukowski, Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Jim Carroll, Ken Kesey, and Cormac McCarthy among his earliest influences - writers whose work carried the same wounded momentum he was feeling. "I wanted poetry inside punk rock music," he says. "I started the band to make that happen." One of his earliest poems, "Everything That Isn't," even became the blueprint for an early dirtclodfight song.
dirtclodfight itself began in 1987 in Long Beach when Merwin and Gary Walden met working as orderlies at a mental hospital. The band's first songs were shaped by conversations with patients, late-night shifts, and the restless energy of the L.A. punk underbelly. Shows at legendary Southern California venues soon followed, eventually leading to their 1988 debut EP Speak Tongue Man on Flipside Records. From the beginning, dirtclodfight balanced heaviness with emotional clarity - a sound later praised by Tad Doyle as "much respected among the punk genre" and, years later, described by Willamette Week's Nathan Carson as "balancing on the knife's edge of melody and heaviness."
After an extended hiatus, Merwin revived dirtclodfight in 2004 with a new lineup, continuing the intense, noise-driven style that defined their early material. Their 2016 EP The Reckoning (Cavity Search Records) marked a return to their 90s heaviness, reestablishing them as a force in the Pacific Northwest heavy-music underground. But even as the band evolved, poetry always remained the blueprint beneath the distortion.
That connection becomes a theme in Songs for Hungry Ghosts. Merwin insists that dirtclodfight fans will instantly feel at home in the book. "I'd tell them they've been fooled this whole time - it's always been poetry," he jokes. The book is, in many ways, the DNA of dirtclodfight's music: the internal monologue beneath the riffs, the quiet room behind the roar.
At its core, though, Songs for Hungry Ghosts is a memorial. The book was born from conversations in drummer Eric Johnson's kitchen - dreams the two shared before Johnson passed away. Determined to honor him, Merwin reached out to Denny Swofford of Cavity Search Records, who immediately agreed to help. "And that scared the s**t out of me," Merwin says. "Because if Denny says yes, it means it's actually going to happen." The finished book includes Swofford's photographs from the very first show Merwin and Johnson played together as dirtclodfight - images that made Merwin cry when he saw them in print.
Other longtime collaborators also appear in the story. Merwin credits Crackerbash/The Mistons' front man Sean Croghan for helping the band secure a booking agent in their early years - a moment that made them feel "like an actual band" - and for securing a Halloween show at Portland's legendary La Luna, something Merwin calls another "landing on the moon" moment of his life. And he acknowledges Johnny Eckenrode, whose layout and design work he says made the book "totally beautiful."
These "moon landings," as Merwin calls them, form the emotional architecture of the collection. One such moment was when Merwin was living with Eckenrode and Cavity Search Records' co-founder Christopher Cooper at what they called the "hippy hotel on Hawthorne." Elliott Smith was performing at the Oscars for his nomination for the song "Miss Misery" in Good Will Hunting, and Merwin was watching the ceremony with Cooper.
"We were baked, imagine that," chuckles Merwin. "Coop looked at me - getting all up in my face to testify, the way he would - and he goes, 'Dude, it's like one of us landed on the moon! Us, dude! Like one of us could be up there? So weird.'" For Merwin, those words echoed through years of touring, through shows with bands like the Melvins, The Jesus Lizard, NoMeansNo, Yob, and Victims Family - through every improbable moment his poems had carried him.
Writing the book required Merwin to battle his lifelong internal critic - the voice that makes him question every creative impulse. But he credits that same critic for pushing the work into existence. "It's the wheel," he says. "It's because of the critic - the asshole in my head - that anything gets done." Out of that conflict came a book that is fearless in its vulnerability.
If there is a message woven through Songs for Hungry Ghosts, Merwin says it's simple: "It's survivable - all of it. It doesn't feel like it is, but it can be done. There's some grace somewhere." It's the same ethos that runs through dirtclodfight's music - the idea that while no solutions are offered, the acknowledgment of our shared struggle is its own kind of salvation.
For new readers encountering Merwin's work for the first time, he hopes the book inspires action. "Do the thing, man," he says. "We're all gonna die. No one's gonna remember us. Do the goddamn thing. Do the thing that scares the shit out of you. Do the thing that makes you laugh until it hurts. And keep doing it." For dirtclodfight fans, the message is the same - but filtered through years of shared noise and sweat.
With the book now released into the world, Merwin feels his goals have already been fulfilled. "It honors my friend," he says. "Everything beyond that is icing on the cake." Still, the timing of this release feels particularly meaningful, coming as dirtclodfight prepares to enter the studio in January to record a new full-length album, their first major release since The Reckoning EP. The band also plans to return to the stage for live shows in 2026, marking an energizing new chapter for the long-running project.
In that sense, Songs for Hungry Ghosts is not an endpoint, but a bridge - a return to where it all began and a doorway to what comes next. The poems that once launched Merwin into the world are now launching something new again: a renewed dirtclodfight, a new record, a new era of creation rooted in the same hunger that sparked everything decades ago.
Seventeen-year-old Phil - the "corndog punker skateboard kid writing poetry in Long Beach" - would be proud. Maybe even astonished. Because he, like Merwin today, would recognize that feeling: like he'd landed on the goddamn moon.
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.
Long before dirtclodfight ever existed, Merwin was a teenage kid in Long Beach, reading poems at open mics and trying to fuse the electricity of punk with the emotional directness of literature. He cites Bukowski, Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Jim Carroll, Ken Kesey, and Cormac McCarthy among his earliest influences - writers whose work carried the same wounded momentum he was feeling. "I wanted poetry inside punk rock music," he says. "I started the band to make that happen." One of his earliest poems, "Everything That Isn't," even became the blueprint for an early dirtclodfight song.
dirtclodfight itself began in 1987 in Long Beach when Merwin and Gary Walden met working as orderlies at a mental hospital. The band's first songs were shaped by conversations with patients, late-night shifts, and the restless energy of the L.A. punk underbelly. Shows at legendary Southern California venues soon followed, eventually leading to their 1988 debut EP Speak Tongue Man on Flipside Records. From the beginning, dirtclodfight balanced heaviness with emotional clarity - a sound later praised by Tad Doyle as "much respected among the punk genre" and, years later, described by Willamette Week's Nathan Carson as "balancing on the knife's edge of melody and heaviness."
After an extended hiatus, Merwin revived dirtclodfight in 2004 with a new lineup, continuing the intense, noise-driven style that defined their early material. Their 2016 EP The Reckoning (Cavity Search Records) marked a return to their 90s heaviness, reestablishing them as a force in the Pacific Northwest heavy-music underground. But even as the band evolved, poetry always remained the blueprint beneath the distortion.
That connection becomes a theme in Songs for Hungry Ghosts. Merwin insists that dirtclodfight fans will instantly feel at home in the book. "I'd tell them they've been fooled this whole time - it's always been poetry," he jokes. The book is, in many ways, the DNA of dirtclodfight's music: the internal monologue beneath the riffs, the quiet room behind the roar.
At its core, though, Songs for Hungry Ghosts is a memorial. The book was born from conversations in drummer Eric Johnson's kitchen - dreams the two shared before Johnson passed away. Determined to honor him, Merwin reached out to Denny Swofford of Cavity Search Records, who immediately agreed to help. "And that scared the s**t out of me," Merwin says. "Because if Denny says yes, it means it's actually going to happen." The finished book includes Swofford's photographs from the very first show Merwin and Johnson played together as dirtclodfight - images that made Merwin cry when he saw them in print.
Other longtime collaborators also appear in the story. Merwin credits Crackerbash/The Mistons' front man Sean Croghan for helping the band secure a booking agent in their early years - a moment that made them feel "like an actual band" - and for securing a Halloween show at Portland's legendary La Luna, something Merwin calls another "landing on the moon" moment of his life. And he acknowledges Johnny Eckenrode, whose layout and design work he says made the book "totally beautiful."
These "moon landings," as Merwin calls them, form the emotional architecture of the collection. One such moment was when Merwin was living with Eckenrode and Cavity Search Records' co-founder Christopher Cooper at what they called the "hippy hotel on Hawthorne." Elliott Smith was performing at the Oscars for his nomination for the song "Miss Misery" in Good Will Hunting, and Merwin was watching the ceremony with Cooper.
"We were baked, imagine that," chuckles Merwin. "Coop looked at me - getting all up in my face to testify, the way he would - and he goes, 'Dude, it's like one of us landed on the moon! Us, dude! Like one of us could be up there? So weird.'" For Merwin, those words echoed through years of touring, through shows with bands like the Melvins, The Jesus Lizard, NoMeansNo, Yob, and Victims Family - through every improbable moment his poems had carried him.
Writing the book required Merwin to battle his lifelong internal critic - the voice that makes him question every creative impulse. But he credits that same critic for pushing the work into existence. "It's the wheel," he says. "It's because of the critic - the asshole in my head - that anything gets done." Out of that conflict came a book that is fearless in its vulnerability.
If there is a message woven through Songs for Hungry Ghosts, Merwin says it's simple: "It's survivable - all of it. It doesn't feel like it is, but it can be done. There's some grace somewhere." It's the same ethos that runs through dirtclodfight's music - the idea that while no solutions are offered, the acknowledgment of our shared struggle is its own kind of salvation.
For new readers encountering Merwin's work for the first time, he hopes the book inspires action. "Do the thing, man," he says. "We're all gonna die. No one's gonna remember us. Do the goddamn thing. Do the thing that scares the shit out of you. Do the thing that makes you laugh until it hurts. And keep doing it." For dirtclodfight fans, the message is the same - but filtered through years of shared noise and sweat.
With the book now released into the world, Merwin feels his goals have already been fulfilled. "It honors my friend," he says. "Everything beyond that is icing on the cake." Still, the timing of this release feels particularly meaningful, coming as dirtclodfight prepares to enter the studio in January to record a new full-length album, their first major release since The Reckoning EP. The band also plans to return to the stage for live shows in 2026, marking an energizing new chapter for the long-running project.
In that sense, Songs for Hungry Ghosts is not an endpoint, but a bridge - a return to where it all began and a doorway to what comes next. The poems that once launched Merwin into the world are now launching something new again: a renewed dirtclodfight, a new record, a new era of creation rooted in the same hunger that sparked everything decades ago.
Seventeen-year-old Phil - the "corndog punker skateboard kid writing poetry in Long Beach" - would be proud. Maybe even astonished. Because he, like Merwin today, would recognize that feeling: like he'd landed on the goddamn moon.