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….