review of Michael Ruby's "The Mouth of the Bay"

review of

Michael Ruby's "The Mouth of the Bay"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2385. "review of Michael Ruby's "The Mouth of the Bay""

- full version

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- written February 15-22, 2026; uploaded to my Critics website February 23, 2026

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticRuby1.html

review of

Michael Ruby's "The Mouth of the Bay"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15-22, 2026

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticRuby1.html

the truncated review is here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8382282785

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45300850-the-mouth-of-the-bay

Once again, I find myself somewhat stymied to write a review of poetry. I might read more poetry than most of my friends, I take it for granted that at least some of my poet friends read more than I do. Then again, I hearken back to something a local poet aquaintance named Peter (?) sd to me a few yrs ago: we had a conversation along the lines of: Peter: 'Do you read poetry?' Me: 'Yes, I review it too.' Peter: 'Even most poets don't read poetry.' His point being that poetry is very unpopular even among the people who write it. Is that true? It seems to me that it might very well be - &, yet, there're plenty of poets & plenty of poetry publications. Then I think of a publisher I know of who publishes small very cheap-to-produce poetry bks - it seems to me that their intention is to get a reduction in the cost of their own bks by meeting a quota for that reduction w/ the printer. Then they get the poets to buy copies of their own bks from the publisher so that, ultimately, the poet takes on the burden of expenses. But I digress (& start a sentence w/ "But").

I learned about Michael Handler Ruby by reading an article of his entitled "POEMS BASED ON SOUNDS" in the OPEN SPACE POST issue. Ruby's description of how he's written some of his poetry appealed deeply to me:

"I first became interested in composing poems based on the sounds around me in the late 1980s. I remember listening to a long bird soliloquy while visiting Owen Andrews in Alberene, Va., among the abandoned limestone quarries, in April 1988. I recorded part of that soliloguy. I immediately saw that birdcalls, with their strings of syllables and pauses, could easily be "translated" into the syllables, words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs of language. The lines and stanzas of poetry. On the spot, I conceived a birdcall-based drama, named after Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles, of course." - p 108, OPEN SPACE POST.

Almost everything in Ruby's article wd be potentially useful to quote here so I'll have to practice some self-restraint. The point is that Ruby listens & then 'translates' what he hears into the words that consitute his poems. To my mind, that enables his poetry to be both vaguely referential AND nonsense. I like that coexistence.

The 1st poem in "The Mouth of the Bay" is:

"ELEA

"There's no beginning

and there's no end

There's a beginning

and there's an end

There's a beginning

and there's no end

There's no beginning

and there's an end" - p 11

The back cover explains this thusly: "The Mouth of the Bay begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily-"There is no beginning and there is no end"-and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles amd others."

""PURIFICATIONS"

-Empedocles

Purifications mesmerize the likeness of good and bad

The twelth lecture on ergonomics

The first lecture on cryogenics

Transgenics

Purifications elevate the severance

From the need

To premiumize the sacred" - p 18

Now, I looked online to cf Empedocles (in English translation) to see if I cd find any parallels w/ Ruby's text, maybe just the word "Purifications". I didn't find any easy parallels so I chose the beginning to quote:

"Ye friends, who in the mighty city dwell Along the yellow Acragas hard by The Acropolis, ye stewards of good works, The stranger's refuge venerable and kind, All hail, O friends! But unto ye I walk As god immortal now, no more as man, On all sides honored fittingly and well, Crowned both with fillets and with flowering wreaths. When with my throngs of men and women I come To thriving cities, I am sought by prayers, And thousands follow me that they may ask The path to weal and vantage, craving some For oracles, whilst others seek to hear A healing word 'gainst many a foul disease That all too long hath pierced with grievous pains."

- https://ia801507.us.archive.org/4/items/thefragmentsofem00empeuoft/thefragmentsofem00empeuoft.pdf

It's not known to me whether Ruby was reading Empedocles in the original Greek or in English. I'm assuming the latter. If I were familiar w/ the Eleatic philosophers I might find these 'variations' more compelling in contrast. Later, still among the Eleatics:

"soda-ice cream-

privacy-myasthenia gravis-

prostate-regatta-

soda-dodo-

propane-sandwich shop-" - p 26

I don't want to find 'meaning' in these poems, I don't want them to resonate w/ me on a discursive level - that wd ruin the fun. Nonetheless, thoughts of drinking too much soda & eating too much ice cream make me think of Diabetes Type II, thoughts of myasthenia gravis make me think of a friend's mom who my friend & I think became so afflicted b/c of a covid-19 vaccine. Are we then dodos?

We leave the Eleatic philosophers:

"FOGHORN

(two notes,

then a pause)

Mortification

Premiums

Insieme

Tutto" - p 34

Now, this is where it starts to get more interesting for me. To quote Ruby's OPEN SPACE article again:

"In the early 2000s, in Maine, I wrote a second long poem called "Wave Talk," this time listening to the small waves on the rocks near the mouth of Frenchman Bay. I also began a series of poems called "Foghorn" or "Distant Foghorn," where the sounds of a two-tone foghorn displace words within me." - p 111, OPEN SPACE POST

Coincidentally, around the time I'd learned about Ruby's process, my collaborator AG Davis remade the soundtrack for my movie "Blue Knob, Time Raveller" ( https://archive.org/details/771.-blue-knob-time-raveller ) by using what he told me is called "AI Diffusion". If I understand it correctly, one imputs a sound file, the AI Diffusion 'dissolves' it in white noise & then outputs a new sound file of a nature similar to the original but w/ a new spin on it. The person doing the inputting apparently has some options about what they want the spin to be. I found the results to be highly entertaining & hilarious. Ruby's process of listening to environmental sounds & turning them into language evoked by them in his mind struck me as a similar process to the AI Diffusion.

In fact, the process being so similar was coupled w/ my reaction to the bk's cover to create a state of suspicious ambiguity for me. The cover image is of a lighthouse w/ what appears to be some columns superimposed over it. The colors are subdued. The cover design is credited to Geoffrey Gatza. I don't particularly like it but the problem here, for me, is that it doesn't seem like an artwork generated by a human, it seems more like AI art. This might be a classic 'Turing Test': If I can't tell whether the art is human or AI generated then maybe the hypothetical AI shd be accepted as of human value. The thing is, I'm admittedly biased against AI as in no way equal (& certainly not superior) to human thinking (& action) - SO, liking this bk, wd I be a complete fool if it turned out to be primarily AI generated w/ all explanations being bullshit?

There are quite a few Foghorn poems here. I like imagining Ruby listening to the horns & 'translating' their sounds into words, approximately 2 syllables or words (but not always) per foghorn note.

"DISTANT FOGHORN

(from memory)

Ryan

illustrates

world

position

open

horseback

timely

crossout" - p 92

"DISTANT FOGHORN

solitude

handwork

icicles

syllogism" - p 108

"FOGHORN

The wrong load

of horses

Singes my tooth

prays with disregard" - p 116

"DISTANT FOGHORN

without random

lightening

the see

will purple

all Randy

Tolliver bond

and all

sorry allowance" - p 126

"FOGHORN

There's no reason

For this spray

Hold the tooth

To face the sauce" - p 131

"FOGHORNS AND WAVES

Without our certainty

Without this dawn

Oftentimes

Refer to the port

Refer to the time" - p 134

Wch brings us to the waves, another fertile source for reading into.

"More important, that same summer at the Woods' house in Manchester by the Sea, Mass., I was listening to waves at Singing Beachand noticed that the sounds could displace apparently unrelated words within me, usually conversational fragments, as opposed to poetic phrases. During the next few years at my mother's house near Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton, N.Y., I wrote the long poem "Wave Talk," following the roughly 12-hour cycle from one high tide to the next." - p 108, OPEN SPACE POST

Can't you just imagine it? Reading into the sound of the waves? That appeals to me more than describing the waves. The long poem "Wave Talk" appears in "The Mouth of the Bay" & begins thusly:

"1.

Don't do it

You're gonna find out about it

Like I said

Go ahead and do it

Go a-HEAD

Maybe

I wanted to tell you

I wanted to tell you for a long time and now I'm going to" - p 36

Imagining the waves talking to the poet in this way amuses me.

Despite the unusual nature of how the words originate the layout is mostly in fairly straight-forward stanzas. BUT, then there's "RAINDROPS ON A PAGE". This has each word on a separate non-justified line, what I'd call "Field Writing". Taking each word to be placed there by a raindrop, this is the closest thing to a Concrete Poem in the bk.

Fog & waves are like the AI Diffusion's white noise.

"AN ISLAND ALMOST INVISIBLE IN THE FOG

A magazine

A hamburger

Help

Orion

Bring me cereal

Muskrat

Breath

A breath

Bring me there

The Torah

The whole fog" - p 52

Ok, maybe it 'doesn't matter' but it still effects my affect: "Orion" instead of "Onion", "Breath" followed by "A breath", "The whole fog" instead of "The whole hog".

"II ELEMENTS" begins w/ ELEMENTS & I'm reminded of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

"Rocks

Water

Islands

Mountain

Sky

Sun" - p 57

"Elements" goes thru different forms. By p 60 it's reached this:

"The ape

castigates

our record

The ape hazards

a trifle for petunias

toffee for sorrows

harps for eyebrows" - p 60

Earlier I wrote: "I don't want to find 'meaning' in these poems". Perhaps, I sometimes feel like meaning is a type of prison (so why am I writing this way now?). I've had an interior dialog debating the relative comparative merits of exactitude 'vs' ambiguity. I like them both. I have no intention of rejecting either in favor of the other. Nonsense can help erase over-determinism. Not wanting "to find 'meaning' in these poems" indicates that I get more out of their performing a function other than descriptive. Open-ended evolution, not a dead end. &, then, whaadya know? From pp 72-78, w/in the same longish "Elements", we're back to field writing again. The last word on p 73 is "Ime" wch I interpret as 'I me'. So what? "Ime" might throw the reader for a moment, does reading 'have to be' a continually flowing experience w/ no obstacles to divert one's attn? Boooooorrrrrrrr-rrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnnggg. Is this a peb-

ble under yr mental foot?

"Elements" goes on, changing en route:

"Lives first in my spine drinks the spiral placemat informs the debate tolerates shrinkage you've fried now egg living dodger polished Roger rescue you know the Sioux talk reciprocate each more so criminal eye for an eye the building several screws bruises stiffens thickens.

"Solves our motion pause for pitch regulation infomercial Tabasco the plinth the Bilbao in this mushroom the Baumeister of this dream sleek whithout protection for hollow tock almond regular tennins broth and silver mushroom of rust pell-mell and dislocated to start" - p 80

For me, there's a joy to be gotten from stringing together words windfall rot indignation Indian Nation not exactly free association for the sake of generating combinations not likely to be encountered in discursive writing. I don't know if that was part of Ruby's process above but that's what I find in it. I'm not talkin' Stream of Consciousness, y'know? I'm talking about something more composed.

"BLUE FIELDS" stretches from pp 87 to 91. We're back to field writing, somehow this surprises me every time. The number of words per page varies substantially per page: 3 words on p 88, 13 on facing 89. I ask myself: 'Is it random?' by wch I don't really mean "random" I mean non-systematically determined. I tell myself that it wdn't be if it were my writing - but that's not necessarily true. The point is: I'm inclined to think that Ruby just put down the number of words he was feeling - but I don't want to take that for granted, there may be a system I'm being insensitive to.

Has there ever been a poet who'd resist puns? "TRANS POSITION": This one consists of phrases/sentences ending in blanks of varying lengths, presumably to be filled-in by the reader, most in parentheses. The 1st:

"They're not going to ___________________________" - p 95

They're not going to inhale seal blubber to prove their..

""IF WE COULD DO WHAT THE WHITE BIRDS DO"

-Marsden Hartley

If we could place the song where it belongs on the tree, apply a little red paint, a little banana

If we could run the heart factory, the heart and lung factory" - p 104

Who? An American Modernist painter, poet, & essayist. I don't know his work. Now, if I see a bk of his work that's affordable to me I might just pick it up thanks to Ruby.

"THE BLUE WATER

for Clark Coolidge

The blue water rises for lines

bests seven hodges

records a houseboat in its sign language, you know how the orison pools through sign language headwaters" - p 114

Who? I've read quite a few of Coolidge's poetry bks & I've liked them very much in much the same way that I like this Ruby bk - they're elusive to me. Perhaps In fact, I keep imagining shooting an interview w/ Coolidge while he's still alive - although shooting one post-mortem might be even more interesting.

There're poems that use what one might call "list poem" structure - but not w/ a dogmatic rigor.

"PURIFY ME

Purify me of little borther hilltown raspberry soup & annelids & sizing ramps to polish the laminated toystore hallways candlemaker fragment figment"

[..]

"Purify me of football binding arbitration hello at onion balls"

[..]

"Purify me of smoke forever & ever amen inside the hard practical sandwich shop & all-night prostitutions" - p 111

This system continues for all 3pp of the poem (pp 111-113). What is one to make of this? I usually enjoy this form whether it's discursive or non-discursive. It gives a cumulative drive to the language, as if there's a physical force to it.

THE BLUE WATER uses a similar strategy that uses variations. "The blue water" is replaced by "The blue hearts" (p 115). This 'works for me' somehow w/o having to have 'meaning': it creates a continuity. The full line is "The blue hearts place maker", that cd be "heart's pacemaker", the ambiguity enables multiple meanings to co-exist &/OR for 'no meaning' to exist.

"SOUNDS OF A FOGGY COAST

The Ralph runs the song sock

Yes for dressing

Yes for the sandwich of dreams

And fur" - p 119

More words that appear in the place of white-noise-like nature sounds. I like imagining the weather conditions as something that the words are 'pulled from' (or sounds that're displaced in the poet's mind by words). It's as if one sharpens one's focue & finds the words popping out, The Mouth of the Bay speaking to the attentive listener.

"THE BLUE COMPELS

for Tom Raworth

The blue compels

sign language

right

holidays

Parsifal" - p 122

I have yet to read Raworth, as far as I can recall, but his name has always had a presence in my mind b/c my friend Anselm Hollo referred to him in my company on multiple occasions as one of his favorite poets.

"WAVES

Without a doubt the song proceeds infinitesimal in its advances roguish parallax

I think you'll find a certain savoir faire right or wrong in this inning to pearly the pellets prepped and consolidated

Is this, is this the honest-to-goodness four-way harp and promised follicle of invention inveterate attention retention intention

And they're, they're presumed illegitimate and holdover process the polished hostler to persuade the pillbox the parallel onions and toy with olive sundown sandwiches" - p 128

Are the italicized parts the waves coming in & the non-italized the waves going out? Not if their cycle is regular.. but I'm tempted to read it that way anyway.

"CLOUDS OVER FRENCHMAN BAY

Treg me

them beasts

Epp those

base quadrangles" - p 133

I tend to like writing for its vocabulary. I've written several (many?) works that explore this area - such as my "Puzzle Writing". Some readers seem to get bothered by seeing a word they don't know. Sometimes I look the words up:

"Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are a specialized subset of T cells [..] that maintain immune system homeostasis, prevent autoimmune diseases, and enforce peripheral tolerance by suppressing excessive immune responses." - AI Overview

"EPP most commonly refers to Environmentally Preferable Purchasing, a U.S. EPA program that helps federal agencies procure sustainable products to reduce climate impacts and pollution." - AI Overview

Well, I'll be dagnabbited all to Heck if there isn't another poem w/ the same name (not that I object, mind you)!

"CLOUDS OVER FRENCHMAN BAY

Fluttering friar

taskmaster

and accountant

Blame skeleton" - p 137

When I think of reading things into clouds I think of August Neter

"One Monday at noon, in a provincial capital, next to a barracks, an "apparition" appeared in the sky:

At first I saw a white spot in the cloud, very near by the clouds all stood srtill then the white spot withdrew and remained in the sky the whole time, like a board. On this board or screen or stage pictures followed one another like lightning, maybe 10,000 in half an hour, so that I could absorb only the most important only with the greatest attention. The Lord himself appeared, the witch who created the world in between these were worldly scenes: war pictures, parts of the earth, monuments, battle scenes from the Wars of Liberation, palaces, marvelous palaces, in short the beauties of the whole world but all of these in supraearthly pictures." - pp 159-160, "Artistry of the Mentally Ill", Hans Prinzhorn

After the poems are over, the reader is informed that:

"Written on the rocky coast

of Frenchman Bay

in Winter Harbor, Maine,

from 1995 to 2016" - p 141

& in the bio following that we're informed that: "He is the co-editor of Bernadette Mayer's collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015)" - p 144

Yet-another thing that arouses my enthusiasm since I love Bernadette Mayer's poetry (& have yet to read her early poetry reputed to be Language Writing). It's lookin' like Ruby is just going to have to be added to me "Top 100 Poets" website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100Poets.html .

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