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Michael Handler Ruby

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Michael Ruby
Michael Ruby reading in Brooklyn in 2016
Michael Ruby reading in Brooklyn in 2016
BornSeptember 19, 1957
Orange, New Jersey
OccupationPoet, Journalist
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard College; Brown University
GenrePoetry

Michael Handler Ruby (born in 1957 in New Jersey) is an American poet and longtime editor at The Wall Street Journal. As a poet, he has primarily identified with French surrealism, Language poetry and the New York School, including Bernadette Mayer, whose early books he co-edited.[1]

Life and Career

Ruby grew up in South Orange, N.J., in a Jewish family, the son of Myron Ruby and Judith Handler.[2] He had six older half-siblings and a younger full sister, including the mathematician entrepreneur Sandy Ruby and the Democratic Party activist Alice Germond.[3] He graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., in 1975.

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. 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 the group associated with novelist and conspiracy theorist Harold L. Humes.[4] After studying 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.[5]

He started working as a financial journalist and settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1984.[6] 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,[7] often editing articles for the front page of the newspaper and home page of wsj.com. He married the art historian Louisa Wood Ruby in 1989, and they have three daughters.

Ruby didn’t start publishing poetry until his forties. His first book, At an Intersection, a selection of poems from the 1980s and early 1990s, was published in 2002.[8] In his next book, Window on the City, Ruby turned to a form of automatic writing that he has 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,” according to a 2014 interview in The Conversant. His 2010 book, Compulsive Word, is based on the experience of a group of words “taking over the poem".[9] He is best known for the 2013 publication American Songbook, poems based on 75 recordings of American singers from the 1920s to 1999.[10]

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,[11] 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, N.Y., including co-editing with Sam Truitt Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. [12]

A family historian, Ruby has co-written memoirs about the Supreme Court with his great uncle Milton Handler,[13] 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. [14]

Other notable relatives of Ruby include his stepfather, chemist Eli M. Pearce[15]; his aunt, foreign-policy expert Antonia Handler Chayes[16]; his brother-in-law, political journalist Jack Germond[17]; his niece, rock bassist Abby Travis; and his first cousin, wartime journalist Sarah Chayes. Ruby is more distantly related to writer Ellen Handler Spitz, poet Daniel Hoffman, poet Wayne Koestenbaum Broadway singing star Ben Platt, pianist Fred Hersch and organist Larry Goldings, among others.

Works

Books

  • 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

Chapbooks

  • Coastal Elements. Kingston, R.I.: Dusie, 2015
  • Foghorns. Kingston, R.I.: Dusie, 2014
  • Close Your Eyes. Zurich, Switzerland: Dusie, 2013
  • The Star-Spangled Banner. Zurich, Switzerland: Dusie, 2011

Editing projects

  • 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

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.”[10] 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

  1. ^ Mayer, Bernadette. "Thirteen Poems". jacket2.org.
  2. ^ Ruby, Michael. "Michael H. Ruby, An Editor, Is Wed To Louisa Wood". www.nytimes.com.
  3. ^ "Sandy Ruby, Co-Founder of Tech Hifi,".
  4. ^ Ruby, Michael. "From Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep". drunkenboat.com.
  5. ^ Ruby, Michael. FLEETING MEMORIES (PDF). E-book by Ugly Duckling Presse.
  6. ^ RUBY, MICHAEL. "POET OF THE WEEK MICHAEL RUBY". brooklynpoets.org.
  7. ^ Ruby, Michel. FLEETING MEMORIES (PDF).
  8. ^ Ruby, Michael. "At an Intersection". www.publishersweekly.com.
  9. ^ rob, mclennan. "12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Ruby". robmclennan.blogspot.com.
  10. ^ a b Chiasson, Dan. "Go Poets". www.nybooks.com.
  11. ^ MAYER, BERNADETTE. "TOP TEN BERNADETTE MAYER". artforum.com.
  12. ^ Ruby, Michael. "Thirteen poems by Bernadette Mayer". jacket2.org.
  13. ^ 1988, YEARBOOK. YEARBOOK 1988 SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY (PDF). {{cite book}}: |last1= has numeric name (help)
  14. ^ Ruby, Michel. "Washtenaw County Jail and other writings". worldcat.org.
  15. ^ Ainsworth, Susan J. "Eli Pearce Dies At 86". cen.acs.org.
  16. ^ Campbell, Frank E. "JUDITH PEARCE". No. May 11, 2012. The New York Times.
  17. ^ Germond, Jack. "Jack Germond, Political Reporter of the Old School, Dies at 85". Douglas Martin. nytimes.


Category:1957 births Category:Surrealist poets Category:New York School poets Category:Language poets Category:Poets from New Jersey Category:Harvard College alumni Category:Brown University alumni Category:Living people Category:People from South Orange, New Jersey Category:People from Brooklyn

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