Windows on the City

Poetry. "'Unreal City,' intones Mr. Eliot in his 'The Waste Land,' bracketed by 'One must be so careful these days' and 'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn'. Ruby writes 'velocity,' athwart 'toodle to tabasco' and 'orange sunshine.' What's cold and taut in Eliot strained is hot and loose in WINDOW ON THE CITY. While the poems in the section by that name are realized in direct contemplation of the Lower Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn 'The North Tower Blinks All Night' they are as...
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Poetry. "'Unreal City,' intones Mr. Eliot in his 'The Waste Land,' bracketed by 'One must be so careful these days' and 'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn'. Ruby writes 'velocity,' athwart 'toodle to tabasco' and 'orange sunshine.' What's cold and taut in Eliot strained is hot and loose in WINDOW ON THE CITY. While the poems in the section by that name are realized in direct contemplation of the Lower Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn 'The North Tower Blinks All Night' they are as much a matter of reflection off the surface of a vocabulary, as we each are, as on the windowpane: 'The gray thrust/tails the chariots/of melted heroines.' Further, there is nothing 'unreal' about Ruby's stance toward the 'city,' the Indo-European cognate of which is 'to lie' and 'homestead.' Rather, Ruby records the exact heart of how we can be 'on' and what happens there once located and turned how we experience the open as places and feelings and bits of knowledge flow and fire together to shine into a speckled block for a future 'of softening blue smells in the opening of loss/on snores/on truculent fraud/to indenture to fumes/once there.' Many write with words; Ruby with consciousness itself, which can only be approached by its absence. There is nothing abstract about this. It is here and here: 'The softness of the teeth encouraged us to eat' and 'We better tiptoe/to the hollow giants.'"--Sam Truitt.