Finding Our Spirit in Poetry

On Sunday, April 25th at 4pm, Christ Church Westerly will host a poetry event titled “Finding Our Spirit in Poetry”.  The event will feature readings by our Seminarian Spencer Reece, whose work has been compared to Gerald Manley Hopkins, James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop.  His poems have recently been published in the New Yorker and his first volume of poetry, “The Clerks Tale” was selected to win the Bakeless Prize.  The signature poem from the volume is currently being made into a short film by the actor James Franco.  In 2009, Spencer won a Pushcart Prize, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award, and National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship.  Spencer is currently attending Yale’s Berkeley Divinity School and is postulant for the Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church.  For the past year, Spencer has been the visiting seminarian for Christ Church Westerly and has been leading a poetry discussion group at the church on Sunday mornings.

Also reading at the event will be Langdon Hammer, who is a distinguished English professor at Yale and is a poetry reviewer for the New York Times and the poetry editor for The American Scholar.  He will be reading a chapter from his upcoming biography on James Merrill.

The event is free and all are welcome.