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Michael Handler Ruby

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Michael Handler Ruby is an American poet and longtime editor at The Wall Street Journal. As a poet, he has primarily identified with surrealism,[1] Language poetry and the New York School, including Bernadette Mayer, whose early books he co-edited.[2]

Michael Ruby
Michael Ruby reading in Brooklyn in 2016
Michael Ruby reading in Brooklyn in 2016
OccupationPoet, journalist
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard College; Brown University
GenrePoetry

Life and career edit

Ruby is the son of Myron Ruby and Judith Handler,[3] and the half-brother of entrepreneur Sandy Ruby and Democratic Party official Alice Germond.[4] He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey.[5]

Ruby majored in English and American literature at Harvard College, worked on both campus poetry magazines, padan aram and The Harvard Advocate, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1979.[6] He studied early American literature with Alan Heimert and poetry with Jane Shore, Alan Williamson, Robert Fitzgerald and Seamus Heaney. He also was part of a group associated with novelist and conspiracy theorist Harold L. Humes.[7] After studying languages in Italy and France and working as a substitute teacher in the Boston public schools, he received an MA in poetry writing in 1983 from Brown University, where he studied with Keith Waldrop. He lived with the poet Cynthia Zarin during much of that time.[8]

He started working as a financial journalist and settled in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1984.[9] Since 1986, he has worked as an editor at The Wall Street Journal in Manhattan, initially covering technology and health, and later U.S. news and politics.[8] In 1989, he married art historian Louisa Wood Ruby,[3] who has written about the drawings of Paul Bril[10] and Jan Brueghel the Elder,[11] and who worked at The Frick Collection for many years.[12]

His first book, At an Intersection, a selection of poems from the 1980s and early 1990s, was published in 2002.[13] In his next published book, Window on the City, Ruby turned to a form of automatic writing that he called “surrealist at the level of each word or phrase, as opposed to surrealist at the level of the image or narrative, the predominant surrealist approaches,” in a 2014 interview in The Conversant. He continued that approach in The Mouth of the Bay, written over many years on the Maine coast. His 2010 book, Compulsive Words, is based on the experience of a group of words "taking over the poem,"[14] a subject he has continued to explore.[15] He is best known for the 2013 publication American Songbook, with poems based on 75 recordings of American singers from the 1920s to 1999.[1] A closely related book,[9] The Star-Spangled Banner, with poems based on the words of the U.S. national anthem, was excerpted in a chapbook in 2011 and published in 2020.

During the same years, Ruby wrote a series of books in prose and poetry that chronicled dreams, memories, inner voices and visions. The first three books— Fleeting Memories, Dreams of the 1990s and the hypnagogic Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep—were published as the trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices in 2012. A subsequent hypnagogic book,[16] Close Your Eyes, was excerpted in a chapbook in 2013 and published as an ebook in 2018.

Starting in 2010, Ruby has worked on editorial projects for Station Hill Press in Barrytown, New York, including co-editing with Sam Truitt Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer.[2]

Ruby has co-written memoirs about the Supreme Court with his great uncle Milton Handler,[17] and he edited the writings of his half-brother David Herfort, a poet who served in jail and then died in a car accident in Spain at the age of 22.[18]

Other notable relatives of Ruby include his stepfather, chemist Eli M. Pearce;[19] his aunt, foreign-policy expert Antonia Handler Chayes.[20]

Works edit

Books edit

  • The Star-Spangled Banner. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 2020
  • The Mouth of the Bay. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2019
  • American Songbook. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013
  • Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 2012 (a trilogy)
  • Compulsive Words. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2010
  • The Edge of the Underworld. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2010
  • Window on the City. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2006
  • At an Intersection. New York: Alef Books, 2002

Ebooks edit

Chapbooks edit

Editing projects edit

  • Piece of Cake by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. Co-edited with Sam Truitt. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 2019
  • Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Co-edited with Sam Truitt. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 2015
  • Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings by David Herfort. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2005

Reviews edit

Dan Chiasson wrote of American Songbook: “Ruby’s poems are ‘American songs’ in their transformation of tune into ‘sound,’ noise, traffic, as well as their loneliness (he calls to mind Edward Hopper and the early Eliot of ‘Preludes’)…. They are also, in their broken way, up-to-date, streetwise.”[1] Jerome Rothenberg wrote on the back cover of trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices: “His project here—to explore ‘the varieties of unconscious experience’ as they come to him—is an aspect of what Gary Snyder once described as ‘the real work of modern man: to uncover the inner structure and actual boundaries of the mind.’”

References edit

  1. ^ a b c Chiasson, Dan. "Go Poets". The New York Review of Books. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  2. ^ a b Mayer, Bernadette. "Thirteen Poems by Bernadette Mayer, Edited by Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt". Jacket2.
  3. ^ a b "Michael H. Ruby, An Editor, Is Wed To Louisa Wood". The New York Times.
  4. ^ Weber, Bruce. "Sandy Ruby, Co-Founder of Tech Hifi, Dies at 67". The New York Times.
  5. ^ City and State information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF). Retrieved on 2023-07-20.
  6. ^ "Michael H. Ruby, An Editor, Is Wed To Louisa Wood". The New York Times. 20 August 1989.
  7. ^ Ruby, Michael. "From Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep". Drunken Boat.
  8. ^ a b Ruby, Michael. "Fleeting Memories" (PDF). Ugly Duckling Presse.
  9. ^ a b "Poet of the Week/Michael Ruby". Brooklyn Poets. 23 April 2017.
  10. ^ Ruby, Louisa Wood. "Paul Bril: The Drawings". worldcat.org.
  11. ^ Gerszi, Terez; Ruby, Louisa Wood. "Jan Brueghel: A Magnificent Draughtsman". worldcat.org.
  12. ^ "Research Staff entry for Wood Ruby". The Frick Collection. Archived from the original on 2021-03-03.
  13. ^ "At an Intersection". Publishers Weekly.
  14. ^ mclennan, rob (6 March 2015). "12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Ruby". rob mclennan’s blog.
  15. ^ Whyte, Thomas. "poetry mini interviews with Michael Ruby". poetry mini interviews.
  16. ^ Mayer, Bernadette (October 2013). "Top Ten". Artforum. 52 (2).
  17. ^ Handler, Milton C.; Ruby, Michael. "Justice Holmes and the Yearbooks and Justice Cardozo, One-Ninth of the Supreme Court" (PDF). Yearbook 1988/Supreme Court Historical Society.
  18. ^ Herfort, David. Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings, Edited by Michael Ruby. OCLC 71294140 – via worldcat.org.
  19. ^ Ainsworth, Susan J. "Eli Pearce Dies At 86". Chemical & Engineering News.
  20. ^ "Judith Pearce". The New York Times.
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