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