Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Ellyn Maybe on BlogTalkRadio

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Writing  On Demand Hosted By Mende Smith

5/27/10 Show Description: Join Mende as talks to Ellyn Maybe Ellyn Maybe has performed her poetry all over the country, including Bumbershoot,the Poetry Project, the New School, Taos Poetry Circus, South by Southwest, Lollapalooza, Albuquerque Poetry Festival and Seattle Poetry Festival. She has also read in Europe at the Bristol Poetry Festival, on the BBC, and in poetry slams and readings in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart. She opened the MTV Spoken Wurd Tour in Los Angeles. In addition, she has also read at USC, UCLA, CSUN and Cal State Fullerton, among other colleges. Writer’s Digest named her one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium. Her work has been included in many anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, Poetry Slam, Another City: Writing From Los Angeles, Poetry Nation, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and American Poetry: The Next Generation. She was on the 1998 and 1999 Venice Beach Slam teams. She was seen reading her work in Michael Radford’s (Il Postino) film Dancing at the Blue Iguana

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Ellyn Maybe and Greil Marcus at Skylight Books!

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

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“Rodeo For the Sheepish” Tops Greil Marcus’s Believer Column!

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Real Life Rock Top Ten

by Greil Marcus

201005(1) Ellyn Maybe: Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House Studios). 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.


Buy the new issue of The Believer here!

Photos of Poetry Rodeo Thursday’s Fun – Join us this week, same time same place!

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Ellyn April Pics and Ad2

Examiner LA Article on Ellyn Maybe’s Residency

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The LA Poetry and Music Scene at Pier 212 with the sacred Ellyn Maybe

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

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“…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. (more…)

Ellyn Maybe and her Band at the LA Times Book Festival!

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

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Friday, April 9th, 2010

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Ellyn Maybe and the Band April Residency at Pier 212

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

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Pier 212 Website

Pier 212 Map

For this poet, bombing at a reading won’t be bad

Monday, March 1st, 2010

JOHN ROGERS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Poetry readings have always been a blast for S.A. Griffin, but the tour that the venerable Los Angeles poet plans this spring may be his most explosive.

This time the author of such collections as “Unborn Again” and “One Long Naked Dance” will be packing his poems inside of a Cold War-era bomb and taking them on the road. The idea is to create the constructive from the destructive.

“I’m taking one of the most iconic images of destruction of the 20th century and turning it into something positive,” says the strapping Griffin, who at 6-foot-3 is nonetheless dwarfed by the gun-metal gray performance-art companion that rises more than 7 feet tall when tilted on end. He found the dummy bomb, which contains no explosives, on the Internet and bought it for $100.

His plan: bring the bomb to a city near you, dropping rhymes and free verse by the hundreds on audiences everywhere from Atlanta to Montana, Oregon to North Carolina and points in between. His aim is to get people to wake up to poetry.

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Ellyn Maybe – City Streets

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010


“City Streets” from Ellyn Maybe’s Rodeo for the Sheepish
Video Randi Malkin
http://henhousestudios.com/

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