On summer nights in the hills of Gallatin, Michael Ruby sits outside with a recorder in hand. He listens — to the staccato chirp of crickets, the long notes of tree frogs, the silence between. What he captures in those moments does not become poetry in the traditional sense. It becomes what he calls a kind of “audio translation”: patterns and pulses rendered into surreal, evocative language.
Ruby, who splits his time between Gallatin and Park Slope, Brooklyn, is an experimental and surrealist poet whose career straddles art and journalism. A retired politics editor at The Wall Street Journal, Ruby has authored more than ten books of poetry, often pushing the boundaries of form and perception.
“I started writing poetry when I was a teenager,” Ruby said. “I wanted to be a fiction writer, but when I sat down to write, poetry is what came out.”
His early influences trace back to modernist masters such as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Hart Crane. Over time, Ruby found resonance in the work of mid-century experimentalists like Charles Olson, Jackson Mac Low, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, as well as later poets such as Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, with whom he collaborated before her death.
Born in South Orange, New Jersey, Ruby studied English and American Literature at Harvard, graduating in 1979. He spent much of his career balancing poetry with journalism. Ruby worked for more than three decades at the Journal, spending the first 22 years part-time — dedicating his mornings and early afternoons to poetry — before moving into a full-time editorial role focused on U.S. politics.
“Whatever I was doing, I was never very far from poetry,” he said.
Ruby and his wife, Louisa, purchased their Gallatin home in 2001, spending weekends and vacations there until the pandemic allowed them to live in the Hudson Valley full-time. After his retirement, they resumed splitting their time between Gallatin and Brooklyn.
For Ruby, Gallatin has become a wellspring of inspiration. His latest collection, “Sounds of Summer in the Country” (published in early 2025 by BlazeVOX [books] in Buffalo), was inspired by the sonic textures of the landscape. “I wrote all the poems here,” he said of the collection. “I would sit on the porch and record things and listen back to sketch them out … mark how the syllables and pauses were, and see what words they displaced within my mind.”
This approach — attuning to the nonhuman, the ambient, the uncanny — has defined much of Ruby’s recent work. While his styles vary, Ruby is comfortable being labeled a surrealist and experimental poet. “I write dream poems, vision poems, voice poems… some are conventional, but most aren’t,” he said.
Asked to define what poetry is, Ruby invoked the Russian theorist Roman Jakobson: “Prose leads you to meaning. Poetry draws your attention to the materiality of the words — their sound, their shape, their strangeness.”
It’s this materiality that guides his recent work. Ruby’s collection “Sounds of Summer in the Country” intentionally resists narrative or metaphor. “I’m not trying to say what the birds are really saying,” he said.
Ruby values the vitality of the Hudson Valley literary community. From John Ashbery’s legacy in Hudson to active readings in Kingston and Barrytown, he finds the region uniquely alive with poetic energy. “There are so many significant poets in this area,” he said. “It’s an inspiring place to live.”
As April marks National Poetry Month, Ruby offers this previously unpublished prose poem, a quiet gift to readers listening closely.
“The Clouds Over Stissing Lake on Sunday Afternoon, August 13, 2017”
The clouds take the shapes of animals above Stissing Lake today. I have seen lions, elephants, dogs, several different kinds of birds, whales, a stegosaurus. Is that a snake there?
I like to think the clouds I don’t recognize represent extinct animals. Remember, those extinct animals lived on earth for a very long time, much longer than we have. How many years did dinosaurs live on this earth? The clouds had millions of years to take the shape of dinosaurs.
How many years did buffalo roam over this land? The clouds have imitated buffalo for millions of years. Even when there are few buffalo, the clouds continue to take the shape of buffalo, and perhaps will continue to do so for millions more years. The clouds preserve the shapes of all the animals that ever lived.