Moonstone Live Poetry Reading

Music and Poetry

Wednesday October 20, 2021 – 7pm

Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street

on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=RjJUdCtJVXRySjlvMHdXakJRRzVmUT09

Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: 678146

Lindsay Hargrave is a poet with recent publications in giallo, Button Eye Review, Maudlin House, Wrongdoing, Rust + Moth and more. They perform in the Philly area with improvised music collective Oarsman and indie pop band Mitamu and have a weekly tarot poetry column in the Philly Plain Dealer. Twitter: @notporkroll.

Elliott Levin is a Philadelphia jazz legend plays the saxophone and the flute and he’s also an abstract poet and often combines poetry and music during his performances. He has has toured and recorded with Cecil Taylor and The Arkestra’s Tyrone Hill and Marshal Allen, to name a few. 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. There is nothing watered-down or weak about his performances, no attempt to make the music a bit more accessible, tender-hearted or just plain wimpy. He also doesn’t seem to play music as if it was connected to some kind of career strategy, other than to just play all the time.

Joe Roarty was born in 1953 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has lived in Pittsburgh, Pa., Cleveland, Ohio, Boston, Mass., and Chicago, IL. and Philadelphia. He won the Moonstone Chapbook Contest in 2015 for Moritat (German for “street ballad”), poetry of high octane energy, passionate intelligence, supercharged, insistent blues, jazz and heightened speech rhythms, whose original language mixes dictions with masterful ease–at home on the street and in the stratosphere, a colloquial invention that uses texting’s phonetic spelling, omitting vowels in a way that drives the lines, while his images mix references in our polyglot way: “I hav hrd/ americn wrds”.