Rodeo for the Sheepish takes this listener back to the heady delights of the caffeinated conversations of grad school, referencing midnight movies and sharing passages from dog-eared paperbacks. The woman declaiming these poems with a defiant and radiant lilt takes all of life’s insults and disappointments and transforms them into songs which turn life on its head, creating a world that allows for possibilities belied by facts.

The music on the cd has a lite hip hop, r&b, jazzy beat. The background singers and music (keyboards, percussion, saxophone, trombone) weave in and around Maybe’s spoken words/lyrics. The voice and chorus and music sound fully integrated. Maybe’s lyrics are filled with longings for connections: with art, books, movies, people. Sexual yearning lies underneath many of the pieces, but above the body and sexual persona exists the artistic persona. One song/poem, “Being an Artist,” has one of the most emphatic rhythmic percussive breaks in any of the songs, something along the lines of African drumming, and the lines near the end of the poem suggest that the artist is inhabited by the Muse, her soul thieved as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “Being an artist / is an active verb / a noun / a consonant / an adjective in a world full of chaotic life sentences.” The pun of the last line makes clear that only the artist is truly free in this world; the rest are incarcerated in the routines of mass life.

Wry, emotional honesty underlies these poems. Whether spoofing with female sexual identity as defined by women (as opposed to definitions imposed by society) or playing with the dualities of mind and body, Maybe does not hold back on truths. One song acknowledges that “it’s not easy being a woman who knows the difference between / Gene Kelly and Gene Krupa. Miles Davis and Miles Traveled. / I know how men make women wear armor of all kinds.” Here’s the cat-call from the city street, a man yelling (still) at the 40-year-old, “Hey Mars Girl, get off the Earth.” There’s humor in the phrase, but there’s a sting in the phrasing.

Ellyn Maybe gives any number of shout-outs to influences and pleasures. She’s a fan of the Go-Go’s, Peggy Lee, the Supremes, B-52s, Henry Miller, Kubrick, Truffaut, Leonard Cohen, and others. How many times does one find Truffaut rhymed with 400 Blows? Leonard Cohen, in fact, is mentioned in two of the poem/songs. One poem is titled “Sylvia Plath”; another, “Picasso.” These references populate each song, serving as check points for the audience—a hipster gauge. Music, film, books evoke personal identity, as when Annie Ernaux writes in Simple Passion, “the cultural standards governing emotion which have influenced me since childhood (Gone with the Wind, Phedre or the songs of Edith Piaf) are just as decisive as the Oedipus complex.

“ Music’s got the power, in Maybe’s pantheon, and reverting to the origins of poem and music potentially doubles the poetic weight with the listener. (Others are pushing into these waters: Jeffery Beam and Asheville Poetry Review’s own Keith Flynn, among many.) Maybe corrals those made sheepish by the masses of society, lassoes the insults, and rides the herd, unable to be bucked by life, “as if she had a fly paper ass.”

J. W. Bonner reviews regularly for Asheville Poetry Review. He is working on a manuscript about the Sixties, examining more specifically the #1 AM radio hits of 1969. He teaches in the Humanities Department at Asheville School.

April 24, 2:04 PMLA Poetry ExaminerYvonne de la Vega

“…whenever possible, always have someone sacred, like Ellyn Maybe open your show.” -S.A. Griffin, “Rules of The Road”

LA Poet Ellyn Maybe is probably one of the most loved poets in Los Angeles. She is humble and witty, knows music and records and has the laugh that sounds like a school girl blushes. She’s also pretty darn funny and will charmingly laugh along with her listeners during a reading of one of her own poems. All humble charm and wit aside,

As a poet, Ellyn masterfully delivers a poets convictions with a blend of sweetness and sarcasm, poetry with stories of hopes shattered by the callousness of a rude world, Often, she is reciting forgiveness while standing alone in her charming solution of “Understanding is the key to happiness.”

Her current album of poetry and music, “Rodeo for The Sheepish“ is a perfect embodiment of Ellyn Maybe on vinyl, The music is a mirror of her very being – especially the music composed for “Two Girls…” (video, below), a beautifully written piece about the expectations of a girl and love and the realities of those expectations.

The music seems to be a direct interpretation of Ellyn’s unique voice and rare persona. A banjo over beats is of course, the natural backdrop beneath Ellyn’s poetry, the rhythm laid back and unpretentious.

“Ellyn Maybe is an irresistible force. To read or listen to her poetry is to be gently and completely crushed while simultaneously inspired and charmed. …Rodeo for the Sheepish has so many great moments. One of the stand out tracks on the album, “There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot The Same”, is a perfect example of why one becomes a fan of Ellyns immediately. Ellyn is a very gifted writer and a true gem.” -Henry Rollins

On the topic of poetry and music Ellyn Maybe states that “Thankfully the musicians are all very talented! for example, I wrote a poem today and brought it in to rehearsal and they wrote it right there, you know – they created the music for it with hooks and all! … it’s fun!

It’s a really interesting process, the collaboration… I’m learning, we’re learning a lot. On recording the album, with some of the poems, the music was written for the poem, and then I would go back into the studio afterward, knowing more of what it would sound like, it turned out pretty good, really neat!”

Ellyn’s poetry in residency: “Poetry Rodeo Thursdays Pier 212 in Venice Beach, is where she performs every Thursday night with her band and it’s an inspiring and fun-filled evening of music that is a blend of pop-electronica.

At Poetry Rodeo Thursdays Pier 212, Ellyn invites a guest poet to share their poetry as she shares her band with them, in a 10 minute improvisational performance. Audiences have commented enthusiastically about her shows, most all of them always promising to return.

“Harlan Steinberger, he plays the computer. Robbie Fitzsimmons plays the keyboard,… it varies on Thursday nights, sometimes it’s (the musician line-up) different.” It’s a really fun night!”

If there is any thing worth experiencing in Los Angeles in regard to the LA Poetry & Music scene, Ellyn Maybe as a first choice… would be a wise one. Check out the Poetry Rodeo line-up of guests for the rest of National Poetry Month and keep checking as she promises some heavy hitters as enthusiastic guests for May.

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

Of all the things I review for Pedestal, spoken word CDs are my favorite, both because of their rarity (few poets, after all, have the resources to put one together) and the ingenuity with which they blend visual art, music, and, of course, poetry read aloud. The best of these CDs blend all of these disparate elements to make something that is neither music nor poetry but which uses the common roots of each to create something bold, new, and frequently difficult to categorize, save for the term “performance.” Indeed, the successful spoken word poet is one who does not just read his or her work, but performs it as if it were a stand-up routine, a monologue, part of a “Happening,” or simply as something meant to live beyond the confines of the page.

Ellyn Maybe is a poet who knows how to do just that. Not only a strong poet on paper, she is also a consummate performer with a warm, full voice that is as friendly and inviting as it is delightfully quirky. Few poets—indeed, few performers of any stripe—have the personality, honesty and, yes, unabashed geekiness which Maybe displays in her readings of the ten poems on Rodeo for the Sheepish. Her voice is not only entrancing but unforgettable; indeed, I would very much like to hear her perform live someday.

Happily, Maybe’s poems are not only uniformly strong, but also lend themselves to being spoken so readily that they appear to have been written with performance in mind. Maybe begins the CD strongly with “All My Life I’ve Wanted a Great Love,” in which she enumerates ideal qualities for a lover that are just as unusual as her voice: “Someone who cries at least once a year,” and “Someone whose eyes are not remembered by color, but by every film he’s ever loved.” Maybe then caps this inventive lift with a line that is every bit as wistful as it is funny and ultimately heartbreaking: “Ever since junior high, I thought this person existed. Now I believe more in cows jumping over the moon.”

Maybe skillfully and wittily dissects the struggles and joys of her profession in “Being an Artist” and pays a touching, illuminating, and off-beat tribute to Sylvia Plath in a long poem named for her, and in which Maybe tackles not only the horror of Plath’s treatment at the hands of a sexist culture, but also the importance of her work to young artists, whom she still touches “through tin can lines we walk through.” But my favorite pieces on Rodeo for the Sheepish were the three in which Maybe speaks of women whom U.S. society frequently casts aside or overlooks because they are overweight (“Picasso”), quirky and intelligent (“There Were Two Girls Who Looked a Lot the Same”), or, as with the subject of “City Street,” just lonely, socially awkward, and perhaps depressive. While the poem is best read and listened to in its entirety, these stanzas are some good highlights (rendered in prose-poem format):

She dreams in psychedelic colors, fuschia and periwinkle. When she sleeps, the voices stop. Her voices are loud today. It’s the you’re not normal alto blended with the you’ll never find love baritone. This is her morning coffee. This is what wakes her up.

Today might be different. She whispers words of encouragement but because her ear is bruised from this lifetime, instead of hearing love she hears of and instead of hope it’s nope.

The girl looks at her finger. There was a diamond. She got it when she was 6. Her grandma said no matter what the world thought of her, she deserved beautiful things.

Someone shouted hey baby. It momentarily distracted her from the symphony of lonely conductors playing in her brain.

…

When asked where she’s going she says the library. Her friend smirks and says you need to get out more…books can’t give you an orgasm.

She responds you aren’t pressing right then. Books have a double life. Just like readers.

While I don’t want to spoil the experience for listeners, the poem does end with a sort of transformation for the subject which is at once moving and exhilarating. Suffice it to say, then, that this poem spoke directly to me as someone who has often felt alone and several steps behind the pacing and concerns of the world around me. I dare say the poem will resonate with several women who have felt the same—whom I assume to be the silent majority of women.

Maybe’s choice of subject matter is not the only thing that makes her poetry sing. She is also profoundly skilled with language. Note above the succinctness and muscle of her lines and her tight control over them (“Her grandma said no matter what the world thought of her, she deserved beautiful things.”). Note also that the poetry in this excerpt uses such tools as metaphor and simile sparingly. Instead, Maybe gives her poetry force through pithy dialogue (“Books have a double life. Just like readers.”) and through powerful, unexpected imagery (“the symphony of lonely conductors playing in her brain.”) This succinct quality makes her poetry ideal for speaking aloud and also beautifully conversational and down-to-earth, two qualities which also make it enormously accessible and relatable—not in the sense that Maybe “dumbs down” any of her subjects, but that she manages to tap into such truly universal feelings as social awkwardness and isolation.

For the most part, a spoken word CD is made or broken by its musical accompaniment. Here, Maybe is extremely fortunate to have found ideal partners in Harlan Steinberger (who also produced Rodeo for the Sheepish) and Tommy Jordan (who doubled as art director for the CD booklet’s striking black and white photographs). Steinberger and Jordan’s instrumentals—of saxophone, drums, guitar and amplifier, to name but a few— complement Maybe’s voice, underscoring rather than overwhelming her words in such a way as to bolster the poems’ themes and ambiances. The trombone, drum licks, and harp of “City Streets,” for example, give the poem an even more awkward and unusual feel, which helps evoke its strange, sad protagonist. The steel guitars in “Sylvia Plath” likewise evoke the sorrow of the poem, just as the electric guitar wails and drum beats in “Picasso” evoke a mood of sexiness, appropriate for a poem about the beauty of large women’s bodies. Interestingly, sometimes Jordan (who provides the tracks’ vocals) will sing a line from the poem during intervals between words or a refrain that, while extraneous to the text, nevertheless complements it well, as the refrain “City streets criss-cross inside me” does in “City Streets.” Together, poetry and music create a unique experience that neither could achieve by itself. While the most obvious name for this experience would be theater, for some reason I find it much closer to visual art, if only because the mental images evoked for me by the words and music of Rodeo for the Sheepish were so bright and vibrant.

Fans of spoken word CDs and lovers of slam poetry with a nerd-girl edge should seek this CD out as soon as they finish reading this review, as should anyone curious to see the highs to which this blended art form can aspire. I cannot recommend Rodeo for the Sheepish enough.