Harlan Steinberger

Video by: Jacob Mendel

Excerpt from article:

MJ: What about something totally outside your genre?

GM: I like to think there’s no outside; that I can hear whatever has a claim to make, but if you’d asked me if I were interested in poetry set to music, I’d probably say no. When I heard Ellyn Maybe’s “City Streets” on KALX in Berkeley I had no idea what it was, just that I was transfixed. I called up the DJ, went to Amoeba Records, couldn’t find it, wrote away—and after listening to Maybe’s album Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House) half a dozen times, I had no idea who the people behind it were—a poet, and a musician/singer who sounds like many of himself, or for that matter her-himself. But there’s a pathos cut with self-lacerating humor that makes this the most surprising and painful music I’ve come across.

Video by: Nisey Jay and Riccardo Spinotti

Viggo Mortensen’s imprint Perceval Press is a small, independent publisher specializing in art, critical writing, and poetry. They were gracious enough to feature Ellyn Maybe’s Hen House release Rodeo for the Sheepish as one of their recommendations! Check out the spotlight and all the great content on their site.

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ROUND 9: SAN FRANCISCO
Thursday, OCT. 14TH – 7 P.M.
SPARRING W/ BEATNIK GHOSTS
RETURNS TO THE BEAT MUSEUM
540 Broadway – North Beach
Guest Host…Ginger Murray
David Meltzer
Ellyn Maybe & Her Band
Steve Arntson
Jerry Ferraz
Martin Hickle
Richard Loranger
Whitman McGowan
Julie Rogers
Margery Snyder
Chris Vannoy

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ROUND 10: BERKELEY
Friday, OCT. 15th – 7 p.m.
SPARRING WITH BEATNIK GHOSTS
@ ART HOUSE GALLERY
& CULTURAL CENTER
2905 Shattuck – at Ashby
Guest Host…Mark States
Ellyn Maybe & Her Band
J.R. Brady
Tim Donnely
Q. R. Hand
Mike The Poet
H.D. Moe
A. M. Stanley
Plus: Mystery Poets (To Be Announced)

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ROUND 11: SANTA CRUZ
Saturday, OCT. 16th – 7 p.m.
SPARRING WITH BEATNIK GHOSTS
REVISITS FELIX KULPA GALLERY
107 Elm Street – Downtown Santa Cruz
Guest Host…Marc Kockinos
Gary Young, Santa Cruz Poet Laureate
Ellyn Maybe & Her Band
Dennis Holt
Debbie Kirk
Ron Lampi
Erik Lawson
B.C. Petrakos
William Taylor, Jr.
Mel C. Thompson
Plus Mystery Guest

Watch videos, listen to tunes, comment, add photos! Check her out!

Last.FM Bio: Of Ellyn Maybe’s new poetry/music CD, Rodeo for the Sheepish, the legendary rock critic Greil Marcus wrote, “I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it’s music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe’s inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana’s Oh well whatever never mind as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.”

Author of eight books of poetry but even better known for her engagaging personality and performances, Ellyn was convinced by fans from the music world to adapt her spoken-word prowress to a musical format. Their delight at the results can be seen from a few typical reactions:

• Jackson Browne – “I have started to write something about you…several times, and each time I am struck by my inability to describe what you do in terms beautiful enough, original enough to do you justice. … Who has ever been able to say in other words what a song says? Maybe it’s why I like your poems so much; they say what can only be said in exactly the way you say it. The best way of turning someone on to you is to play you for them.”
• Henry Rollins – “Ellyn Maybe is an irresistible force. To…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. … Reading Ellyn’s poems from the page is one thing but hearing…them just the way she meant them to be heard is something else altogether. … The musical accompaniment on the album is not mere background filler but a true collaborative effort between Ellyn and the musicians that really works.

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I have started to write something about you for your site several times, and each time I am struck by my inability to describe what you do in terms beautiful enough, original enough to do you justice. But it’s always been this way. Who has ever been able to say in other words what a song says? Maybe it’s why I like your poems so much, they say what can only be said in exactly the way you say it. The best way of turning someone on to you is to play you for them. – Jackson Browne

A CAREER OF EVOCATIVE YEARS

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. (more…)