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Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices
Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. In MEMORIES, DREAMS, AND INNER VOICES, the poet Michael Ruby records three strands of our elusive experiences: the involuntary memories of bygone times and places that day and night flash across our minds; the mysterious inner voices heard in the last seconds before sleep; and the imaginary experiences called dreams, most of which we forget upon waking. The first and third books of this trilogy, FLEETING MEMORIES and the hypnagogic INNER VOICES HEARD BEFORE SLEEP, are among the first literary forays into two un-sounded terrains of consciousness; while the hyperrealist DREAMS OF THE 1990s, joins the dream books of such French writers as Leiris and Perec, and the Americans Kerouac and Burroughs. Taken together, Ruby's trilogy is a unique fusion of history, fiction and poetry that not only rescues unplumbed psychic experience but also exults in the laughter, terror and baffling innuendos of unbidden utterance. With an uncanny ability to elicit our own most elusive moments of consciousness, this book is an instigation and guidebook for readers in their own explorations of the psyche.
The Mouth of the Bay
Poetry. In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost's famous dictum about poetry. THE MOUTH OF THE BAY begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily--"There is no beginning and there is no end"--and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others. In "Elements," he breaks the coastal landscape into six elements--rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun--and writes a stanza for each, creating a series of 23 poems akin to abstract expressionist landscapes. In the long poem, "Wave Talk," he listens to small waves lapping against the rocks and writes the conversational phrases that appear in his mind. In the last section, "Foghorns," he responds to the blue sky and water of Frenchman Bay on clear days and the two-note foghorn at Egg Rock Light on foggy days. The poems end with delight in the sights and sounds around us, the words that appear within us.
Close Your Eyes, Visions
"CLOSE YOUR EYES, VISIONS is the material results of two experiments conducted by the poet Michael Ruby in the realm of poetic transcription, working with vision and what one sees when we close our eyes, coupled with both past and future life experience. It arose from an experience Ruby had twenty years ago, or as he writes, "I chose to remember I lay on the carpet with my eyes closed and saw a blue square, three green squares and a red circle." He goes on to describe the ramifications of that event: "This brief vision could be a Suprematist painting by Malevich from Moscow in the 1910s. It's like paintings by some of my favorite artists: Kupka, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Reinhardt, Newman, Rothko. It's part of a world of ever-changing colors and shapes, an abstract movie playing continuously in our brains just below the surface of consciousness, almost never perceived. Surely, these visions are a source of abstract visual art, just as dreams are a source of fiction and inner voices are a source of poetic lines.""--
At an Intersection
Poetry. Michael Ruby's poems are an intersection of the various possibilities of poetry and language. Many artistic movements echo through these pages-surrealism, constructivism, expressionism, confessional poetry, language poetry, even I Crepuscolari and the Prairie School. There are elegies for the early dead, texts to accompany artworks, investigations of meaning and parts of speech. There are transcriptions of inner voices and of the ordinary flow of thoughts and road signs on a night drive. These vivid poems take place on "5th Ave. and Carroll St. in Brooklyn" and "in one of Lithuania's doomed shetls," but also where a dog might play "Schoenberg in the silver and black plazas, balancing the Santa Maria, the Mayflower and the first slave ship on this head."
The Edge of the Underworld
Poetry. "'Call it immersion': take Michael Ruby's sibilant heterographic tour of the underworld's underwords and rediscover in these homophonic burrows that sonic intersection is ear + imagination. At once 'tenebrous children' and a 'jangling ring of skeleton keys,' these poems ghost- grasp their father (or was it patrimony's patter?), then intrafiliate to interlock in lines that haunt: we watch these 'seals kiss' as 'bus urn,' to 'out vain era// air a care//none inferior' and 'still soak to a purpose somewhere.' Ruby, take a golden bow—this work's '[to elicit] a response from littoral folk' and figural ones, too."—Judith Goldman "'Ghostly cooing fills the moist dark places,' and the rea...
American Songbook
"Poetry. The poems in AMERICAN SONGBOOK are based on phrases from more than fifty 20th century songs. The singers range from Memphis Minnie to Tupac Shakur, and songs from Louis Armstrong's hit "What a Wonderful World" to Hattie Ellis's "Desert Blues," a little-known Lomax prison recording. Many musical traditions inform the poems, including blues, jazz, gospel, country, folk, bluegrass, electric blues, R & B, rock, disco and hip hop."In their careful reading of real and imaginary signs these poems bring peripheral and liminal perception into focus. At the intersection of form and voice--of how something can be said and what meaning might intend--Michael Ruby folds everyday utterance into astonishing fact. These plaintive and destabilized voicings offer the necessary means to discover what is immediately before us."--Peter Gizzi"--
Compulsive Words
Poetry. "Reading the poems in COMPULSIVE WORDS is like taking a hard drug."—Aaron Kiely "Michael Ruby's new book is experienced as a kind of sotto voce diction, an unrelenting mumbling in the back of the mind, which takes two very different forms: as a graphic representation of voices (words presented in diagrammatic patterns), and as what might be 'transcriptions' of those diagrams and patterns: 'O paper placement machines/Blue ladder to family problems' or 'Somnabulist prows to leaven/Healthy escarole.' Or perhaps the diagrams are transcriptions of the other texts: the tense dialectic between these two poles is one of the things that makes this book well worth contemplating."—John M. B...
Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings
WASHTENAW COUNTY JAIL and Other Writings is first and foremost a gritty prison journal by the young poet David Herfort, who served time for drugs as a college student at the University of Michigan in the turbulent early 1970s. It is also a delicate poetry collection, The Poems of Horatio Pepper, and the poignant European journal and letters of an American hitchhiker who was killed in a car accident in Spain in November 1972. The book was edited 30 years after Herfort's death by his half-brother, the poet Michael Ruby.
Close Your Eyes
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