Joe Roarty was born in 1953 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has lived in Pittsburgh, Pa., Cleveland, Ohio, Boston, Mass., and Chicago, IL. and Philadelphia. “Moritat (German for “street ballad”) is 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”.
- Moritat