By: Michael D. Grover
Okay ten years ago I am at a poetry reading in Los Angeles. Ellyn Maybe walks in and signs up for the open mic. I am amazed because I thought she was one of the most brilliant poets in the world. I turned to my friends there and no one else knew who she was. Ten years later I still think she is one of the most brilliant poets in the world and it is an honor to have her as Outsider Of The Month. So I bring you the Outsider Of The Month of August Ellyn Maybe.
MDG: So you have been in Prague for two years and your new chapbook Praha And The Poet is what came out of that trip correct?
EM: I went to film school for two years in Prague-2003-2005 and, yes, Praha and the Poet came out of that experience.
MDG: How was that different from LA?
EM: The architecture was very different, the city is very compact, groceries cost much less there...
MDG: Did you miss LA?
EM: Yes, my poem Los Angeles delves into that.
MDG: Did you write a lot of poems in Prague?
EM: Yes (Smiling).
MDG: Tell us about the chapbook.
EM: The poems convey my impressions and emotional landscape.
MDG: How can people order it if they wanted to?
EM: www.ellynmaybe.com
MDG: Is this the first thing you have put out since Walking Barefoot In The Glassblowers Museum?
EM: Yes.
MDG: Reading your work I detect a Ginsberg influence. Would you say that is accurate?
EM: Yeah I like the Beat writers but poems just kind of come when they're ready, very naturally...
MDG: What else influences your poetry?
EM: I love music, film, theater, art...I guess all those things affect it in their own way...
MDG: What would you say defines an outsider writer?
EM: Perhaps eccentricities and non conformity play a part of it (Smiles).
MDG: As an experimental poet do you feel it is harder to make it as a woman?
EM: To be honest I never have thought of myself as an experimental poet.
Ellyn Maybe/Walking Barefoot In The Glass Blowers Museum/Manic D Press:
Honestly this book is five years old, but it is the newest thing I have to review by Ellyn. She does have a new chapbook available at www.ellynmaybe.com. In Ellyn’s last book “The Cowardice Of Amnesia” we saw intelligent word play in a good stream of conscience flow. Four years later in “Walking Barefoot In The Glassblowers Museum” we see her style evolve, and become more diverse. The first poem “Being An Artist” pulls you into it from the start. I’m sure a lot of artists out there can relate to it. Most of the rest of the book is a brilliant free flow ride of nostalgia by someone who was probably born a little late.
3 Poems From Ellyn’s new chapbook Praha And The Poet
ELLYN MAYBE’S DREAM
Girl…poet belongs in 1960’s...folksinger…very Nouvelle Wave
Guy…part Edward G. Robinson…loves noir…pulp novels…secretly musicals
Gargoyle…smart, funny, nice and extremely hip to music
The first two characters live in a tiny Midwestern town where they meet at Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues Café at the open mic hootenanny night.
The girl performs some Dylan poetry from Tarantula and the guy sings Desolation Row.
Bob Dylan is a huge life raft in their metaphoric desert, so they quickly decide to write a musical about the characters in Dylan’s songs.
They love being different. At the very same time, it’s something that’s caused emotional bruises and skinned knees since they were kids.
Loneliness, precociousness, chance.
They decide to play pin the tail with a map and whatever country, town or continent they land on, they’ll go. While
blindfolded listening to spinning, whirling, dervish songs, she suddenly reached with her thumbtack wand and decided their not so simple twist of fate.
He says, hey doll, where for art we headed?
She says, smiling and jumping up and down, we’re going to Prague.
He says, wow!
They are both ecstatic she picked some place further than Chattanooga or Dallas or Alabama or even Alaska.
She was grateful she was wearing heels that day so she propelled the thumbtack into Central Europe.
In flats, she would have picked Michigan or some M place. She had that knowledge.
She knew Allen Ginsberg had been the King of May in Prague. She knew he had been kicked out too. That’s what
she wanted. To be Queen and then to be returned to herself.
She related to Kafka, of course, like every Jewish outsider who grew up on Woody Allen films and gefilte fish. She
felt she’d know Prague on sight like Salvador Dali some night got in her eyes and the things she’d see…the melting
Astronomical Clock, the Vlatava with its lions and circuses underwater.
She saw illuminated manuscripts on her tongue when she brushed her teeth. On every tooth she saw a saga, a
hymn, something from some other time. She saw the library burning at Alexandria every night. She felt the books
march into her like a squadron of drowned soldiers asking to be saved.
She reads all the time. Never sleeping. She was the one who would remember. The books traipsed into her room
like she was some call girl. At all hours, she’d have Dostoyevsky showing up with a roulette wheel. She had
Madame Bovary wet with oceans knocking in the middle of the night. She saw a room full of bugs as evidence
that Kafka had slept there.
She saw the crazy ink, the melancholy topography of many scribes. Suddenly the girl woke up. She had a slightly sweaty forehead. She told the guy I had this vivid dream, but somehow
I forgot it. I was reading or was I being read to?
When they got to Prague, it was so beautiful. The theaters looked like cakes…gold icing, murals, horses, everything.
She never knew there could be so many kinds of cobblestones.
She had tried to learn Czech before coming to Prague. The first word she learned was slunce meaning sun. The
language came intricate and quick out of the speakers’ mouths. Everywhere she went, she felt people were talking of
philosophers, musicians, and alchemy. Many were only making a bit of small talk, but she imagined she was missing
out not knowing.
On the other hand, she had spent so many years in America knowing exactly what people were saying. This was not
necessarily an advantage. All the words with rough edges, all the endless talk about reality TV, all the eternal chatter
like contemplation was nefarious or something.
The Charles Bridge was beautiful, but she didn’t feel compelled to linger there like others. It was the side street
architecture she felt deep in her marrow. It wasn’t just the various styles of architecture alone, but the sculpture,
painting, sgraffito, ornamentation and most of all the people in their stone state. They were their own Prague…a
nation of gargoyles. At night you could hear their speeches, their music, their litany of witness.
Others looked like angels. Some held up balconies, their Verona’s, the lovely soliloquies of this magical and haunted
city. Sometimes they held their bodies a certain way, practically leaning into eternity.
One day she was singing all kinds of songs as she walked in the night. She felt safe enough to enjoy the way past
twilight hours on certain streets. There she would sing and sing. Tangled Up In Blue, Love Is A 4 Letter Word, and
Adelaide’s Lament.
Suddenly someone said Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Frank Loesser. She looked around and nobody seemed to be
talking to her or even looking her way. But she looked up and smiling at her was a gargoyle wearing a
t-shirt with a picture of Starry Starry Night.
He winked, that’s Van Gogh and a little bit Don McLean.
This was seriously unusual for anyone to get her references, let alone a gargoyle.
She sang more songs, he knew all the lyrics too.
It was as though he was waiting for her to come to Prague and walk down this street.
He looked more human than gargoyle like he had just jumped into the building for her benefit, but he looked like
he had been restored.
He told her how he had once been a composer, a painter, a poet, a baker, but a few credits short to be a candlestick
maker. He was one of the Renaissance people alive during the Renaissance who nobody remembers anymore. He
was in Shakespeare’s shadow. If not him, then somebody else. Shadows drove him crazy…now he cast his own.
She listened to his psychology unfold and told him that the guy she came with walked into a hospoda and walked out
with a girlfriend and now he was history, so to speak,
and here they had come all this way to write a musical about the characters in Bob Dylan’s songs.
She started to ask him if he had any time.
She caught herself. He said, look, I don’t want a pity gig just cause I’ve been on this building since 1348. I was here
before this building was. The building is here because of me. I used to live in a tree, it can always be done, but
sometimes this takes a toll after 100 years or so. Suddenly he started to talk about directors and playwrights
and penguins and where the peanut butter and jelly sandwich was invented and he pulled a dictionary from his rib.
She was awed by his mystery. His head, which was not bigger or smaller than other heads, was full of this…while
others it seemed were full of that.
LOS ANGELES
Some things I miss about my hometown, which I’m considering LA since I’ve lived the last very
many years there.
Family and friends
Wonderful events at the Screen Actors Guild, Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences,
Skirball Center, American Cinematheque, New Beverly, LACMA, Laemmle, Landmark…
Libraries, bookstores, and no language barriers
The Museum of Television and Radio, Vidiots Video Store, the Pacific Ocean
The mild climate, let me repeat, the mild climate
The ABC ratings system of restaurants by the health inspector
No MSG on restaurant menus and especially no smoking inside
Miss cranberry juice and corned beef
Miss the books, tapes, CDs and records piled around my room.
I miss reading a newspaper every day with breakfast.
I miss public radio, public television and theater.
I miss the ducks crossing Ocean Avenue in Venice.
I miss all the quirky films that only open on the Coasts.
I miss listening to my friends play music and read poetry.
I miss them listening to me.
All of us familiar enough to request that poem or that song by just an image or lyric.
I miss the Iguana Café, but that was years ago before we scattered to other cities,
tour buses, movie sets, death and other places medieval and modern.
CINEMA DANCE
Cinema plus dance
Invocation, fezzes, hot chocolate
UNESCO barrier reefs
Unseen Griffin
Deer crossed with horse
a hybrid…just like us
we come from all over the Globe
shaken like a snow crusted city in a
Medieval handstand.
We gleefully take towns by storm with our
Merry Prankster bus selves
3 and a half days of cameras, ping pong and pivo.
We compose a shot list from confetti.
We are part speed of light
Jules and Jim at midnight
We resist the temptation to crawl into the world
and pull our psyches over our heads.
In a universe where dance ruled,
we’d see fewer body bags.
We are Cinemascope.
Chromakey with chromosomes.
We are taking back the ozone layer that tries to stomp
artists out and put them in tiny flowery picket places.
We go where others have gone and others will go.
Van Gogh and Truffaut danced once.
It’s an everlasting dance.
We are one tin can line away from the sky.
We need our exuberance more than our math.
We need to let our lights shine.
Cinema Dance is the longest magic hour.
Let us leave a bread trail.
Our bread crumbs are evident.
Feeding the soul is society’s true hunger.
Dobre Chut!!!
Lovingly written by Ellyn Maybe
Last update : 01-08-2007 14:06
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