Live Poetry: Elliott Levin, Ursula Rucker, and Yolanda Wisher

Wednesday January 10, 2024 – 7pm

Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street

And on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcoc-msrDgjGNDxkIxf_eV0ZxVv2dn-IOG61/17/2024

Elliott Levin, author of does it swing and his newest poetry CD A Word by Any Other Name is a Philadelphia jazz legend. Whatever it is jazz performers do when they blow into their horn as Levin does a lot of it, on tenor saxophone and flute. He has a quite active career as a published poet and likes to combine the two aesthetics in his performances, much to the delight of the growing live poetry audience and to the chagrin of hipsters who insist jazz poetry is a form of torture, worse than cold showers. Other listeners might find the entire free jazz experience itself torture, in which case it’s back to the beginning as far as advice regarding Levin: there is nothing watered-down or weak about his performances, no attempt to make the music a bit more accessible to the novices, tender-hearted or just plain wimpy.

Ursula Rucker is an interdisciplinary poet, performer, and recording artist whose work reflects on personal history, family, and place. She characterizes her work as situated “along the edge of the terrains of poetry.” Rucker has released five albums and collaborated with a wide range of artists outside of the field of poetry, including The Roots, musicians and Pew Fellows Jamaaladeen Tacuma and King Britt, and, most recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Clarence Williams III.

“I stand for poetry as a source of profound truth. That truth, for me, is connected to the idea that cities are places that redeem our strivings and leave us longing; the ways family life shapes and shakes us, and brings us back; and the thought that artists safeguard stories and struggles” Ursula Rucker

Yolanda Wisher was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, and currently serves as chair of the Philadelphia Poet Laureate Governing Committee. She is the author of Monk Eats an Afro and co-editor of the anthology Peace is a Haiku Song with mentor Sonia Sanchez. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters. She co-founded Germantown Poetry Festival and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts from, founded of School of Guerrilla Poetics, a training ground for folks interested in nurturing and mobilizing communities through poetryand with Trapeta B. Mayson she co-founded ConsenSIS, an initiative that seeks to count, gather, and memorialize Black femme poets in the Philadelphia area. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change, and last year, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.

Larry Robin, Host