Michael Ruby : part five

Why is poetry important?

There are a lot of reasons, probably an infinite number of reasons, why poetry is important. I’m going to let a few spill out of me. Poetry is an ancient verbal art form, in continuous use for thousands of years. Much of the earliest surviving writing is poetry, including many scriptures. Other verbal art forms, such as narrative, drama and philosophizing, often begin as poetry. Another major verbal art form, song lyrics, is never far from poetry.

Poetry is all of the poetry ever spoken or written, most lost forever, but much not lost, including lengthy poetic traditions in a number of languages. All of those poems to enjoy, be moved by, learn from! In this language alone, English, the poetic tradition is vast, spanning roughly 700 years, peaking in the late 1500s and 1600s. Even with its much shorter history, the American poetic tradition is already vast.

Poetry is memorable language, probably a feature of all good writing. Poetry is often compressed language, without unnecessary syllables, without anything unnecessary. Language that calls attention to itself—to the sounds, the words—not just the meaning. Poetry entrances the listener. Poetry slows down the reader. Poetry is language that is savored instead of consumed.

Like painting and other art forms, poetry is always the same, and poetry is always changing. People can paint the way they always have. Poets can write the way they always have. But in our time, the past 175 years or so, poetry has also become the verbal art form where we are most free with language. Poetry is where language is most free.

Michael Ruby : part four

What are you working on now?

From 1999 to 2006, I wrote a book of poems called Compulsive Words, based on a collection of 150 words that appeared repeatedly during automatic writing, often taking over my poems. In 2015, I was able to collect an additional 800 compulsive words that had emerged in automatic writing since 1999, to free-associate on hundreds of those words, to undergo hypnosis on the most frequent words, and even to learn something about neurobiology from a daughter in college. I started a prose treatise, What Are Compulsive Words?, which I work on from time to time. Since I’m nowhere near finishing it, I’m going to take this chance to summarize my main conclusions and “get them out there.” This is what I think I’ve discovered:

1. When we make a surrealist poetic gesture, such as thinking “I’m going to look at the blue ocean water and write whatever words appear in my mind,” many of the verbal areas in the brain light up at once. A large number of the words we know are readily available to us, unlike during conversation, including words in foreign languages and words we don’t know the meaning of. The vast gulf between common and uncommon words is abolished, as in the dictionary, where they mingle on every page. I think this equivalence of common and uncommon words explains the seeming pretentiousness of much unconscious writing—and perhaps, by analogy, the baroque quality of much surrealist and psychedelic art.

2. When we make a surrealist poetic gesture—and perhaps a meditative gesture—of listening to whatever words appear in our minds, something else happens as well: We discover a particular group of words that appear repeatedly, often taking over the discourse. Surprisingly, these compulsive words don’t seem to appear in conversation, conventional poetry or prose. Their existence only emerges in unconscious-based poetry. Like inner voices heard in the last seconds before sleep, they inhabit a rarely experienced stratum of consciousness. If my theory is correct and doesn’t only apply to a few people, everyone has their own trove of supercharged words that can only become visible during surrealist composition. We each have our own very specific private language, but we’re highly unlikely to know it.

3. It’s somewhat troubling that when we make a gesture of Sixties freedom—“I’m just going to write whatever appears in my mind, man, you know?”—a specific group of words forces itself upon us, taking over our discourse, actually hemming us in, unless we consciously reject them or pick and choose among them.

Michael Ruby : part three

How important is music to your writing?

Very important now, though not initially. In the 1980s, modern art had the most influence on my poetry. But in the 1990s, I started listening a lot to postwar classical composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and Sofia Gubaidulina and Philip Glass while I was revising, and that probably contributed to the increasing abstraction in my poetry. I started listening to the blues then, too, and other 20th century American vocal music. By 1999, I was enjoying the vocal music so much that I wanted to work poetically with lyrics, taking a Free Jazz approach to them. That year, I began my book American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), based on recordings of 75 songs from the 1920s until 1999. For more than a decade, I was constantly listening to singers I liked in many genres, always on the lookout for a song I wanted to work with poetically. And when I was composing the poems, I might play a phrase over and over until I was happy with the words it displaced within me. I think I made at least one significant observation: Nonverbal sounds such as ooh and ah, woo and hoo, grunts and exclamations directly engage the listener’s “unconscious.” The most popular song ever, “Billie Jean,” has the most nonverbal sounds of any song I’ve ever heard.

When I finished the book in 2013, I was well aware there were countless great singers and songs I hadn’t used, didn’t even know. This knowledge has bothered me through the years. It’s probably a foolish thing to do, and I might never get around to it, but here are some singers and songs I would likely use if I wrote more of these poems: Lonnie Johnson’s “Blues Is Only a Ghost,” Big Bill Broonzy’s “C.C. Rider” and “Black, Brown and White,” T-Bone Walker’s “T-Bone Shuffle,” Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” Tampa Red’s “Let Me Play With Your Poodle,” Blind Willie McTell’s “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” Memphis Slim’s “Life Is Like That,” The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Fenton Robinson’s “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” Patsy Cline’s “South of the Border,” Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World,” Buck Owens’s “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” Gene Chandler’s “You Don’t Love Me No More,” The Staple Singers’ “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray,” Bessie Griffin’s “Too Close to Heaven,” Martha Reeves’s “Love Makes Me Do These Things,” Ronnie Spector’s “Be My Baby,” Brenda Holloway’s “I’ll Always Love You,” Teddy Pendergast’s “You Can’t Hide From Yourself,” Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” And I have to do something by Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner, Albert Collins, Willie Nelson….
 

Michael Ruby : part two

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, my friends and I worshipped the poetry of Wallace Stevens, especially his later poetry. I would subsequently “tergiversate” and prefer his first book, Harmonium. More lines of late Stevens are imprinted in my brain than of any other poet. I reflexively quote Stevens lines to myself in situations that sometimes require far more than renewal, sometimes far less. Here are some of those lines.

When I left work in the early morning hours on election night in 2010, 2014 and 2016, I thought this line from “The Auroras of Autumn”:

                                  The cancellings,
The negations are never final.

I think this on the occasion of the big defeats in life, the big losses, even the ones I can’t recover from. I want to think it.

On a summer afternoon when big clouds fill a vast blue sky and what year it is in my life briefly doesn’t matter, I think these lines, also from “The Auroras of Autumn”:

It is a theater floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave...

By the way, how about the title “The Auroras of Autumn”! And yet, when I recently re-read the poem, I blanched at a likely racist line, which I will not quote.

When someone disses me, I try to walk away thinking Stevens’ late title, “A Clear Day and No Memories”.

When my mother was dying in 2012, as an experiment, I pulled out my favorite poetry books to see which would have the most beneficial effect on me. Normally, I just listen to Mahler’s 9th and 10th symphonies at such a time. Nothing spoke to me more than the opening lines of “To an Old Philosoper in Rome”:

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
become the figures of heaven,…
 
Sometimes when I think back to my teens or early twenties, I think of the penultimate stanza of “Long and Sluggish Lines”:

…Wanderer, this is the prehistory of February.
The life of the poem of the mind has not yet begun.

Another phrase from that same poem I find myself thinking more and more:

…one has been there before.

In the subway, trying to describe what my relation is to an unknown person I’m observing, I often settle on the famous final phrase of “The Snow Man”:

the nothing that is

I wrote a paper as a college sophomore about one of Stevens’ last poems, “Of Mere Being,” that includes these lines:

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.

I use these lines to explain anything I can’t explain.
 

Michael Ruby : part one

Michael Ruby is a poet and journalist who lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, including At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), ebook Close Your Eyes (Argotist Online, 2018) and The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist, 2011). He is also the author of the echapbooks First Names (Mudlark, 2004) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018), and five chapbooks with the Dusie Kollektiv (2011-2019), including The Star-Spangled Banner. He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and worked with Mayer and Lewis Warsh on other Station Hill books. Recordings of three of Ruby’s books, two performances and a 2004 interview are available at PennSound. A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.

Photo credit: Susan Brennan.

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was little, I had a much older half-sister through my father’s first marriage, Kathryn Ruby, who wrote poetry. She was the editor of the high-school literary magazine and the girlfriend of New York School poet prodigy David Shapiro from the nearby Weequahic section of Newark, the setting of many Philip Roth novels. Due to family conflicts, I had no contact with Kathy for many years starting when I was in 7th grade. But I heard all about the anthology she co-edited, We Become New: Poems by Contemporary American Women, published by Bantam five years later. It was one of the first books of contemporary poetry I ever read. Although I had no contact with her when I started writing poetry as a high-school senior, my big sister certainly sanctioned it as an activity for me.

When I was young, I also had an older half-brother through my mother’s first marriage, David Herfort, who wrote poetry. During February vacation in 9th grade, I visited David at college in Ann Arbor and read some of his poems and a prose poem called “The Virgin Land.” That was the first time I ever read any contemporary poetry, any poetry at all, except Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline” in class the year before. We didn’t study much poetry in South Orange and Maplewood, N.J., which otherwise had a great education system and produced such poets as C.K. Williams, Michael Lally, Paul Auster and my two siblings in the decades before me. Just nine months after I visited David in Ann Arbor, he was killed in a car accident in Spain. I didn’t read many of his poems until I was in my 30s and 40s, when I edited his Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings for publication, and thus they had little effect on my first decades as a poet. But my dead brother has certainly played an immense role in my psychic and poetic life. Strangely, the piece of writing I remembered, “The Virgin Land,” was lost for 40 years, but finally reappeared in 2012. Writings of his have kept turning up all through the years—and there are more to come, if I’m not mistaken.

In a family with three out of eight children writing poetry, you might think our parents would be interested in poetry. But history and politics were everything to my parents, dominating all family discussions.