"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.
Excerpt ˇExcerpt
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
Close ˆ
About the Author
Links
[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
Book Details
Trade PaperbackPerfect-bound. 144 pp, 6 x 9 in.
ISBN 978-1-937027-00-1
Publication Date: October 1, 2013
Distribution: SPD
Funding: The Fund for Poetry, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
- 04.26.16 | Michael Ruby featured as Brooklyn Poets' Poet of the Week
- 06.17.15 | A complete recording of American Songbook by Michael Ruby posted on PennSound
- 10.27.14 | Michael Ruby's American Songbook reviewed by Nomadic Press
- 10.01.14 | Michael Ruby interviewed about American Songbook in The Conversant
- 07.15.14 | Michael Ruby's American Songbook reviewed in Rain Taxi
- 04.13.14 | Michael Ruby's American Songbook is reviewed by Ana Schwartz of Cleaver Magazine
- 03.18.14 | Michael Ruby's American Songbook reviewed in The New York Review of Books
- 12.28.13| American Songbook makes Brooklyn Quarterly's list of Best Poetry 2013
- 11.24.13 | Video of Michael Ruby reading at Unnameable Books on Jacket 2
News and Reviews
Advance Praise
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