Supermachine Launch Party Takes Over the Schoolhouse

The literary crew known as Supermachine came back down, once again, from their hot air balloon to provide Brooklyn with another all-star cast of literarily inclined readers. There was beer too, and danceable music. An enthusiastic crowd, maxing out at fifty to sixty people, congregated in the enigmatically dazzling Schoolhouse building in southern Bushwick to hear poems from the newest issue of Supermachine, their second volume, an eighty-one page Netflix-sleeve-sized poetry booster.     Everyone who read (with one minor exception) on Friday evening did so directly from the second issue of Supermachine while a banner flared that particular reader’s name behind him or her on a projection screen a la an all-star game or awards show.

The building itself was a welcome addition to the poems and the Brooklyn lager—a renovated space with an indoor terrace walkway, hefty rafters and gothic acoustics. It’s the kind of architecture slowly disappearing from the overall Brooklyn landscape.

Issue 2 is out now for purchase on the Supermachine website. Ben Fama said he was “glad to survive the weekend,” which was filled to capacity with bookish events for the young publisher-poet. Look out for an upcoming Supermachine reading on September 16. Below are the details of this Friday’s performances, in order of each performer’s appearance:

Macgregor Card

Chris Cheney

Lonely Christopher

Joanna Penn Cooper

Corina Copp

Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch (reading together)

Anne Cecilia Holmes

Lauren Ireland

Simone Kearney

Dorothea Lasky

Paul Legault

Emily Pettit

Christie Ann Reynolds (replacing the absent Brandon Downing)

Matvei Yankelevich

Matthew Yeager

Music was rendered by:

FORMA

Haussmann

–Ken L. Walker