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.