Phoenixii Issue 1

phoenixiizine@googlemail.com

I think I’ve mentioned before how poetry and song lyrics don’t really register with me. In university I was about two thirds of the way through the epic poem Ruslan and Lyudmilla by Alexander Pushkin before I realized I’d read it before. This is a poem several hundred pages long that I had studied in class and possible even written an essay about, yet I remembered absolutely nothing about it. Even now I don’t recall very much. There was a witch I think.

As you can probably tell by that intro, this zine features a bunch of poetry and song lyrics that I have completely forgotten. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy these forms of art, more that I find them hard to absorb in the written form. I’ve enjoyed listening to poets perform their work, and think that the rhythm and cadence in their voice while performing can play a major part in how a work is absorbed.

This zine does feature more than just poetry though, there’s also a rather depressing short story about loneliness, drug abuse, and raves. It’s not the most comforting of reading material, and the stilted way many of the characters talk kind of draws you out of it. Prose writers (including me) should read their dialogue out loud first. People don’t talk in grammatically correct sentences all the time.