All through the night in the house of tomorrow
There’s a little brown page waiting
bird of ice
singing Lou
Singing in the hush a memory
final marriage of the darkness and the dew
Singing in the hush the soiled elbows
foiled plot of the darkness and the dew
Would that his song scattered the leaves
the pressure point through the stillness
the wide river could go winging
the close sky could go a-winging
to you the loose bouquet
to you shoemaker
a blueprint for storming the castle
Lewis Warsh
American Songbook is a poetic response to the grand sweep of recorded vocal music in the 20th century. The poems are based on 75 recordings, with singers ranging from Bessie Smith to Tupac Shakur, and songs from a little-known Lomax prison recording to the last No.1 pop hit in the century. Many musical traditions inform the poems, including blues, jazz, gospel, country, folk, bluegrass, electric blues, R&B, rock, disco and hip hop.
Michael Ruby is the author of five full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010) and American Songbook (UDP, 2013). His trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill Press, 2012), includes Fleeting Memories, a UDP web-book. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Star-Spangled Banner (Dusie, 2011) and Close Your Eyes (Dusie, 2013). A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
You can sing along to Michael Ruby's delirious new poems, your voice echoing down (to mis-quote Fred Neil) "the canyons of your mind," until you can't sing any more and the poem goes off on its own. This book is like a blueprint for storming the castle---all the little guys in the tower shooting arrows as we cross the moat. Ruby's re-orchestrated and unfiltered versions of some of the greatest hits translates into a new way of reading---sure to drive you crazy in the best way.
Lewis Warsh
With the American Songbook what Ruby has managed to do is start us off in familiar territory with a tune that most of us can hum then completely derail us by fully reconstructing the structure and spirit of the original as to render it almost unrecognizable. Ruby knows his source materials thoroughly as he extracts, interjects, interposes and interpolates from and within the original texts. Even with his mangling of subject matter and romp through America’s heartland (be it pop, blues, jazz, folk or plain old patriotic much), his obvious love for these songs, their heritage, their life-breaths, is always present. You’ll never hear The Star-Spangled Banner the same way again.
Steve Dalachinsky
Other UDP titles from Michael Ruby here
Michael Ruby interviewed on Poetry Mini Interviews
[Audio]
Michael Ruby reads “I’m On The Battlefield For My Lord,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Look At Little Sister” from American Songbook
[Video]
Michael Ruby reads “Blue Skies” at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on October 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937027-00-1
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 144 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: October 01 2013
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)