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.

///This video was a contribution to Ellyn’s online zine www.rodeowrite.com …please visit and contribute your own work to the Rodeo!

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.

Henry Rollins writes “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. The honesty with which she so exquisitely reveals her vulnerabilities, desires and pain is beautiful and rare.

Rodeo for the Sheepish has so many great moments. The first time I listened to it, I was reminded of when I first met her many years ago and how much I liked her and her poetry. 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. I cant understand how anyone could not find an aspect of themselves in that piece. This is what Ellyn does so well and so often in her work and on this album.

Reading Ellyns poems from the page is one thing but hearing her read them just the way she meant them to be heard is something else altogether. Ellyn has a great sense of humor and reads wonderfully. The musical accompaniment on the album is not mere background filler but a true collaborative effort between Ellyn and the musicians that really works.

Ellyn is a very gifted writer and a true gem.”

Song “There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot the Same” is from the CD “Rodeo For The Sheepish”.

Video by Veronika Bauer

Veronika was born in Krems, Austria and is a writer, actress, photographer, poet, and graphic designer. She came across Ellyn’s poetry on the internet, instantly loved it, and met Ellyn later in Los Angeles.

She has written and directed two short films, “The Window Across the Street”(2006) and “The Blue Door”(2008) and acts in short films and theater. She has also written two novels, several screenplays, several short stories and loves to take photos. Multi-talented and multi-lingual she literally lives Ellyn’s poem “Being An Artist.”

About.com Guide

(Hen House Studios, 2009) Ellyn Maybe got her moniker because she was too shy to commit when she signed up for the open mic list—“Ellyn,” she’d write, “maybe.” She’s an LA phenomenon, published by Henry Rollins, the lovechild of Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsberg, a lyrical poet in hippie couture, a one-of-a-kind. Now, with Rodeo for the Sheepish, she shows she’s ready for Las Vegas. Brilliant settings by producer Harlan Steinberger, superlative vocal backtracks by Tommy Jordan—all of a sudden, she’s gone Motown and you can hear the sheer force of Poetry vs. Pop music in an arena the size of Radio City Poetry Hall. Humor, poignancy, universality, individuality—like all great artists, how she does it is a mystery, but Ellyn Maybe is for real.

Poet Ellyn Maybe talks about her new album of spoken word fused with music.

I had never heard of Ellyn Maybe before a chance meeting in Los Angeles. Shame on me, considering her poetry pedigree is practically second to none. With her latest project, a spoken word/music album, Rodeo for the Sheepish, it is easy to see why she was named one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium by Writer’s Digest.

What’s particularly delightful about this album is that in addition to hearing her perform her poems, the album is also full of the vocal stylings of Tommy C. Jordan, of whose band Geggy Tah David Byrne once said:

“Geggy Tah are so post modern that they’ve come out the other side.”

We had a chat with both Ellyn and Tommy about making the album, inspiring social change through words, plus got a little insight into what both artists are working on next.

PG: What gave you the idea to do an album of spoken word set to music?

Ellyn Maybe: Since I reference music so often in my work it seems natural to do a spoken word/music album. This amazing opportunity came about when I reconnected with my cousin Harlan Steinberger who is wonderfully talented and he suggested we go in the studio and record a few poems with a click track and the album evolved very quickly.

We recorded everything at that first recording and then I went back after the music was finished and rerecorded some poems once I knew what the musical accompaniment was as that affected the reading.

We’re working on turning Rodeo for the Sheepish into a movie musical and hopefully a live stage show too. If anyone wants to create images for a track or a vignette for in between the songs they should please write me at ellynmaybe@aol.com.

We’re open to live action, animation, photography, painting, sketching, dance…

PG: How did working with Tommy C Jordan come about?

EM: Tommy has known Harlan a very long time and I loved what he brought with his vocals, hooks and how that shaped things. Tommy did the art direction for the CD and that turned out fabulous!

PG: Is there an underlying theme behind the album?

EM: Interestingly 5 of the 10 tracks are poems written while I was in Prague studying film at FAMU for two school years. There are definite things that go through my body of work. Love of music and the other arts, feeling a bit different that sort of thing, what’s going on in the emotional landscape.

PG: I had heard some mention that you went to Prague to study…

EM: I’d been getting more and more interested in learning about film and also heard such amazing things about Prague. I ended up getting the Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship from the U.S. Department of Education which made the experience possible. I only expected to be there one school year but ended up staying two!

PG: How do you see poetry as a force to help inspire people towards social or personal change?

I think because I reference different stuff in my work, as well as there being a social justice thread quite often in my poetry, people listening to it might get inspired to look into things. One can go to an open mic and hear very topical poems.

Consequently, the art that resonates most is timeless because though the names and faces change, unfortunately, the human condition is pretty consistent.

Since I began reading my work I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful feedback thanking me for my candor, people have resonated with the work big time. Art is a very natural part of my life, the fact that I was so shy and never expected to read in public but that I do has inspired others.

I have a poem called “A Day in the Life of a Working Poor Xylophone Maker,” which talks about a lot of stuff but like most of my poems that deal with social issues it is also surreal, imagistic, and has humor.

One thing I think that people enjoy is the mix of emotions and moods. I think the subtlety is appreciated and since my poetry is a natural gift, I just am very grateful.

PG: Picasso is one of my favorite pieces/poems in that it addresses a feeling that I think a lot of women probably struggle with. Basically the “standard of beauty” which stood for hundreds of years has basically eroded in one lifetime, making a lot of women uncomfortable in their own bodies. Can you talk a little about that?

EM: I think your intro to the question basically nailed it!

PG: Is there a favorite track on the album for you?

EM: Wow, tough question. There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot The Same is certainly one which I feel very strongly about but fortunately I feel the whole record came out really great. Deep gratitude to everyone who had a hand in making it. People were so incredibly dedicated at every level of the process. Now we’re beginning to rehearse for live concerts, very exciting!

PG: What drew you to this project?

Tommy C. Jordan: Harlan, the producer, is an old friend. He drew me into the picture.
After meeting Ellyn i realized it is a moving picture.

PG: You’ve written some of my favorite songs over the years and I wonder, what’s it like coming into something where the words/music are already there, and injecting your own self into that?

TCJ: It felt fun. Sometimes strange. Strange fun. Fast.
i love sopapillas.

PG: How did your own creative process work in this album?

TCJ: It was a Rorschach test to sound beds rather than inkblots.

What’s your favorite track on the album? Any of the poems really stand out and connect with you…affect you?

TCJ: Ellyn affects me in surprising ways. When words stop being words, its hard to say.
My favorite songs are the songs that stop being songs, and become vehicles of transportation.
City Streets makes me cry.

PG: What’s next for you? New Geggy Tah anytime soon?

TCJ: I am on a quest to ride in an actual “Poetry Rodeo.”

This Saturday I’m performing a wedding march I wrote for some friends. A good many friends have been sending Mendelhson’s “Here Comes the Bride..” to the showers; inviting fresh ceremonial tunes into play.

Geggy Tah?
Luaka Bop (David Byrne’s label) now and again inquires about releasing a “Best Of “. Sometimes I find my finger wet and in the air glistening. – By Alan Graham