You are welcome to bring your own work and sign up to read with the Ellyn’s band! Show starts at 7:30!

Read more about the event from:

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.

December 14 at 7:45pm Danny Moynahan host a night of music and revelry at the Talking Stick on Lincoln Blvd. in Venice. Many talented musicians will be in attendance, Hen House’s own Baba Alade among them. So head out for a night of FUN, FESTIVE and FREE live music!

By Rose Albano-Risso

City Editor

Nov. 29, 2010

The name Michael C. Ford will probably ring a bell to not just a few Manteca Unified School District students who were in elementary and high school during the mid-to-late 1980s. Those were the years when the award-winning spoken-word artist did stints as a poet-in-residence at Brock Elliott School, Manteca High and other campuses in the district.

Chances are, some of the students he taught probably still have in their possession today copies of an anthology of the youthful verses they penned in the classroom which was “published” at the end of their poetry lessons with the Grammy/Pulitzer Prize poet.

Ford was actually the resident poet for San Joaquin County area schools as well as language arts consultant for the California Poets-in-the-Schools program at the time, so he touched the lives of hundreds more would-be young poets than just those he mentored in the Manteca Unified School District.

Fast-forward to November 2010. Some 20 years after his poetic perambulations in The Family City, the poet, teacher, recording artist, critic and playwright who passed up a golden opportunity to become The Doors’ bass player to pursue his poetic muse, is back to his old haunts in the San Joaquin Valley – at least, poetically speaking. His latest book containing his musings on the bread basket of California is about to come out of the press around the end of the year. Photographic illustrations showing some scenes in the local area are expected to accompany this anthology.

Through the years, Ford has made appearances at various venues in San Joaquin County including a recognition dinner for the late Hollywood actress, Janet Leigh, under the auspices of the Stockton Arts Commission, and a more recent guest appearance last year in Stockton which, he was excited to say, was attended by retired Manteca High drama and English teacher Dorothy Mulvihill and her former student Erica, with whom he worked while being a poet-in-residence here. In honor of the late actress Janet Leigh, a former Stockton resident and an alumnus of the University of the Pacific, Ford wrote the poem, “A Landscape Entitled Janet Leigh.”

“If she could have lowered the San Joaquin Delta/Like a canvas on a slant towards downtown/Hollywood, she would have. In our own slanted/memory, we remember somebody’s Westwood/Village grandmother pointing at an apartment/building on the corner of Wilshire and Westholm,” reads part of his ode to the late actress.

Most recently, Ford has been involved in such poetic presentations as “Waiting for Jack” in Los Angeles, described by the L.A. Weekly as “a 90-minute, partly scripted, partly improvised re-creation of the historic 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading” featuring Doors drummer John Densmore. Ford is one of the producers of this “poetry theater event.”

He is also among the noted poets included in the L.A./Land of Poets group featuring online videos of 250+ poets performing at various Southern California venues. You can watch them in action at www.Poetry.LA.

Ford also continues to appear and lecture at various school campuses. Just last week, he was at Napa Community College.

He earned a Grammy nomination in 1986 with his debut spoken word vinyl titled, “Language Commando.” In 1998, his book of Selected Poems: Emergency Exits was honored by a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

As a playwright, Ford’s plays have been staged internationally. Currently in production is his screenplay version of a West Coast production of Blondes Don’t Bother to Knock.

He may have turned down a golden opportunity to play with The Doors, but Ford has continued his collaboration with Doors member John Densmore. The two recently wrote a piece together entitled “Drumming.” Ford described it as a depiction of drumming in the history of the United States. In the video, Ford recites the prose while Densmore “exemplies the reflected styles on his drum set.” You can watch the video by logging on to the web site of Hen House Studios which produced the videos, at www.henhousestudios.com.

In the meantime, while you’re watching his latest poetry-in-action project, you can wait for the publication of his latest poetry book about the San Joaquin Valley.

*Remember you are welcome to bring your own work and sign up to read with the Ellyn’s band!

See our Event Featured on RentFoodBroke!

]]> http://www.harlansteinberger.com/archives/134/feed 0 http://www.harlansteinberger.com/archives/129 http://www.harlansteinberger.com/archives/129#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:37:07 +0000 admin http://www.harlansteinberger.com/?p=129 Thanks all who came out and many thanks to Beyond Baroque for hosting such a wonderful night!

Baba Alade performed songs off his album Unified and One

Ellyn Maybe introduced us to a Poetry Rodeo. Many thanks to the incredible band and the rest of the poets!

by Michael C Ford

My initial thought was to decline an invitation to comment on these 49 spoken word tracks. As an associate producer at Hen House Studios, during the gestation period of this recorded document, there might have been some danger that the subjective nature of my prose would take on the PR complexion of a pinch of low grade salt. That being said, however, as someone who studied the important facets of the creative process with Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and, later, with the poet and translator Jack Hirschman at UCLA, I have better chance of identifying with what’s concerned the Robert Peters compendium of five decades of literary contributions than, perhaps, most anyone. And I/m really talking about gifts which comprise his prolific catalogue, and how his many works have been assimilated into realms of the World Culture.

One has only to listen to Peters, on tracks like Father, Son, Cousin, Country-Western Band or Home-Made Saw-Rig. With a combination of rhapsody and lament he invites us to experience the rural landscapes, as well as the interior terrain of the years of his Wisconsin youth. Then, as with cuts like Memory Loss In A Parkinglot, we’re hearing him go onward, into an undeniable poetic maturity. It should be noted that executive producer Harlan Steinberger is responsible for the competently composed, engaging and thoroughly complimentary musical backdrop.

As a hyphenated American poet-playwright- essayist-critical analyst, Peters has been continuously, acknowledged as an author of evocative, imperious perceptions, generally, involved with the whole of international literature.

Now, this 2009 set of aural genetic poetics, in their entirety, are every bit the perfect recorded companion to a Peters volume of print entitled Familial Love and other Misfortunes: certainly an indicative collection produced by Red Hen Press, in 1999, and still available via their website.

Since, 1974, I/ve been aware that Robert Peters, as an artist who, through his differentiable talent, possessing both an illustrative image mind and the sense of dynamics to interpret character lives in one-man performances of his staged monologues, has proven time and time again all deserved accolades for the wide and “evocative” nature, on so many levels, down the long years of his transcendent career.

The voice on this CD/MP3 reminds one of how grateful so many of us should be that Peters has never allowed his dark, poetic vision to lose sight of his writer/s integrity. The scalpel he’s used to probe into the, occasionally, vile body of University-sanctioned poetry never got dull, Nor did he ever drop the sutures covering the wounds of warrior poets he, more than once, went out of his way to encourage and defend.

He accomplished his literary goals without chasing after tainted poetry prizes, so often achieved by too many of the mainstream clones beating drums for the Yuppie poets of distinction. It now, seems to be a perfect time, indeed, to put Robert Peters between your ears, harvesting your very own hay and evoking any necessary personal transportation container to oblivion.

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.