"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"--

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 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.""--

WINDOWS ON THE CITY by Michael Ruby