Informative, All Too Informative
Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
Seven Stories Press, 96pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781911710141
reviewed by Joshua Abbey
Critic Ryan Ruby has written a poem for poet-scholars, which is fitting. About 150 pages into Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, he argues that most contemporary poetry is written by poets at universities for poets at universities. His story of poetry begins in the oral age of Homer and Hesiod when there was no distinction between poet and audience. As singer and sung-to are ‘cosensible’, there can be no questions of authorship, intention, or interpretation — the aoidos or singer is ‘nothing more than a messenger / with a godlike memory’ and the form poetry is determined by the context of the occasion. The story of poetry ends when poems are generated by AI only to be scraped by AI. Drawing on the work of media theorist Friedrich Kittler, Ruby has written a materialist history which treats poetry primarily as a ‘media technology’ — ‘technologies of disseminating and storing information’ — and ‘secondarily as a series of forms and genres’.
The dynamic of Ruby’s materialist history is best exemplified by the second canto, which jumps from the time of Homer to the invention of writing and the golden age of Greek drama. The advent of writing makes the poet aware of the line and all that it affords, allowing for ‘new complexities of genre and form / To emerge.’ Take the formerly improvised dithyrambs to Dionysus. Scripts enable better coordination of dialogue. More actors lead to bigger stages and audiences. In the golden age of Attic drama, the public attends as both audience and citizen. However, a gap is emerging between poet and audience, one wrought by increasing professionalisation and the competition for tax-funded prize money which incentivises stylistic experimentation. Public disagreement occasions the ‘formation of rival groupings’ around their preferred genres and writers, ‘balkanizing it into a primitive culture market.’ The introduction of masks means the actors don’t speak for themselves. Because ‘no one is saying what he means’, the audience must watch for irony. Outside the theatre, the proliferation of sophists has everyone asking: must they mean what they say. Hermeneutics is no longer the preserve of the gods; the audience must interpret. Formal innovation has been determined by economic, technological, and social changes.
The following cantos tell similar stories. Canto three considers those aspects of troubadour poetry typically associated with modern publishing: dissemination and authorial recognising. Canto four follows the ‘quantitative technological accelerations’ of paper and moveable type from around 1501, when books become ‘Europe’s first mass-produced commodities’, up to the cusp of modernism. In canto five, we learn that modernism’s motto (‘make it new’) re-emerged in the 20th century to serve the needs of ‘product differentiation / on a glutted literary market’ ever more subject to industrial pressures. Canto six considers the institutionalising of poetry in the ‘neo-feudal archipelago’ of the university; most poetry is now read by the ‘poet-scholars’ who write it. The final canto is sung under the spectre of AI and the story ends when the poet and audience are one and the same once more: large language models. There follows an apocalyptic Tornada, the Troubadour’s afterword.
Perhaps more so in his preface than the poem, Ruby emphasises the notion of poetry as a ‘media technology’, a means of ‘disseminating and storing information’. New media technologies lead to the development of ‘new social and economic forms’ to manage them. These changes alter the ‘relationship between the generators of information and their recipients.’ Hence Ruby’s claim that ‘the technologically and economically mediated relationship between poet and audience’ — what he calls ‘context’ — is the ‘major determinant of poetic form’. However, Ruby’s conception of poetry as means of ‘disseminating and storing information’ seems perverse if not straightforwardly wrong. Writing transforms the metaphysics of information; the page (and in our age, hard drives or flash memory) becomes the medium that stores and disseminates the information. Before writing, the poem encodes the information because it is the form of the poem that allows it to be stored, i.e. remembered. But once writing is invented the form of the poem becomes incidental to its storage; it is writing itself, the parchment and the written word on the parchment, that stores the information. The poem qua poem is only relevant to the encoding of the information insofar as it is ironic and the form is used to suggest that the encoded information is false. The notion of poetry as a media technology becomes irrelevant to its history as soon as poetry is no longer an aide memoire. Milton’s choice of ‘English Heroic Verse’ had nothing to do with storing information, it was for ‘ancient liberty recover'd’. Perverse because there is so much more to poetry than storing and disseminating information. Sure, Shakespeare’s sonnets encode information but then so does graffiti.
Context Collapse is also a poem. And though it may deprioritise ‘many of the features we tend to associate with poetry’ in favour of those generally associated with ‘nonfiction prose’, Ruby is adamant that Context Collapse is not simply a prose essay ‘chopped up’ into metred lines. Adamant, perhaps, because his claim to verse seems to rest on these loosely metred lines. That said, there is more to the poetry than lineation. Take these lines about the moot question of authorship and intention in the age of Homer and Hesiod:
Rhyme within unrhymed verse is either a clumsy accident or there for a reason. Ruby plays on this disjunction: even if the poet did intend these rhymes, the wink (‘arise/otherwise’) suggests he might not have had a choice — deft given the context. Sadly such play with rhyme become less frequent as the going goes on. Ruby also has fun with page breaks. In the late 12th and early 13th century, the schism between crown and tiara, equalled by that between orthodoxy and heresy, is followed by some ‘hardly less significant . . . dualisms’:
Tradition and novelty: not on the same page but part of the same unit of sense. Neat. Throughout the poem, Ruby becomes more and more fond of the page break, often giving one line a whole page of the verso. The verse is all on the verso (pun probably intended). As the poem goes on, it becomes more and more outnumbered by the lines of verse footnotes on the recto. Obviously, this is meant to challenge our preconceptions of text and paratext. Maybe too obviously. That the extended quotes are also broken up into ‘metred lines’ and are often prosodically indistinguishable from Ruby’s own raises a doubt. The qualm isn’t that he has ‘chopped up’ an existing prose essay into lines, but that it seems as though he has.
Another formal feature is Ruby’s persistent use of foreign words and phrases, always untranslated, untransliterated, and unglossed. Besides the homage to Pound’s The Cantos, which contains at least 21 foreign languages, the point of this polyglossia is connected to one of Ruby’s reasons for writing a verse essay: ‘to defamiliarize literary criticism by writing it in a nonstandard form.’ The thing about defamiliarisation or alienation or anything else designed to take the reader ‘out’ of the text is that it gets old quickly. And it doesn’t take much for the reader to get the point. Ruby might claim that the ‘sound’ of poetry continues when you encounter a line of French or German, less so when you must pause to decipher some unglossed Ancient Greek and Russian. The untranslated passages from Derrida and 𝕯𝖆𝖘 𝕶𝖆𝖕𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖑 in the footnotes; the use of unglossed Russian to make a joke about modernist obscurity; whatever the initial intention, the main effect of all this is the impression of someone being too clever by half. Too often desire to be clever seems to supplant any other poetic concern.
One of the reasons the essay became the dominant mode of criticism, besides essays being easier to write, is because it’s better at conveying information and argument. It’s one thing to dispense information, another to substantiate an argument. Academic monographs are slow and meticulous, but a good monograph gives the thesis the substantiation it needs and the reader a guide back into the sources. There is a reason the allusive verse essay and the prosody of poetic concision never caught on in academia. It’s the same reason they give references page numbers. The lay reader will comprehend the thesis of Context Collapse; only a reader who has read most if not all of Context Collapse’s bibliography will be able to judge the quality of its intervention. When the audience and the poet are one, the poem will not be idiosyncratic.
This is probably part of Ruby’s ‘lark’: ‘like any good joke, it is meant to be taken seriously.’ Those in on the joke will smile at the references. But unless the professors can read Ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic, German, Italian, French, Occitan, and Russian, even they will require the relevant dictionary. There is no shortage of interesting ideas in Context Collapse, and the poem will reward re-reading after a perusal of its 13-page bibliography. Whether you want this in the form of a poem or an essay or George Steiner’s unedited manuscripts will be personal preference. Ruby wished to ‘draw attention to poetry’s participation in the contemporary information economy’. Maybe the reason poetry languishes in the information economy is because storing and disseminating information is not the best part of poetry. Maybe Ruby knows that.
The dynamic of Ruby’s materialist history is best exemplified by the second canto, which jumps from the time of Homer to the invention of writing and the golden age of Greek drama. The advent of writing makes the poet aware of the line and all that it affords, allowing for ‘new complexities of genre and form / To emerge.’ Take the formerly improvised dithyrambs to Dionysus. Scripts enable better coordination of dialogue. More actors lead to bigger stages and audiences. In the golden age of Attic drama, the public attends as both audience and citizen. However, a gap is emerging between poet and audience, one wrought by increasing professionalisation and the competition for tax-funded prize money which incentivises stylistic experimentation. Public disagreement occasions the ‘formation of rival groupings’ around their preferred genres and writers, ‘balkanizing it into a primitive culture market.’ The introduction of masks means the actors don’t speak for themselves. Because ‘no one is saying what he means’, the audience must watch for irony. Outside the theatre, the proliferation of sophists has everyone asking: must they mean what they say. Hermeneutics is no longer the preserve of the gods; the audience must interpret. Formal innovation has been determined by economic, technological, and social changes.
The following cantos tell similar stories. Canto three considers those aspects of troubadour poetry typically associated with modern publishing: dissemination and authorial recognising. Canto four follows the ‘quantitative technological accelerations’ of paper and moveable type from around 1501, when books become ‘Europe’s first mass-produced commodities’, up to the cusp of modernism. In canto five, we learn that modernism’s motto (‘make it new’) re-emerged in the 20th century to serve the needs of ‘product differentiation / on a glutted literary market’ ever more subject to industrial pressures. Canto six considers the institutionalising of poetry in the ‘neo-feudal archipelago’ of the university; most poetry is now read by the ‘poet-scholars’ who write it. The final canto is sung under the spectre of AI and the story ends when the poet and audience are one and the same once more: large language models. There follows an apocalyptic Tornada, the Troubadour’s afterword.
Perhaps more so in his preface than the poem, Ruby emphasises the notion of poetry as a ‘media technology’, a means of ‘disseminating and storing information’. New media technologies lead to the development of ‘new social and economic forms’ to manage them. These changes alter the ‘relationship between the generators of information and their recipients.’ Hence Ruby’s claim that ‘the technologically and economically mediated relationship between poet and audience’ — what he calls ‘context’ — is the ‘major determinant of poetic form’. However, Ruby’s conception of poetry as means of ‘disseminating and storing information’ seems perverse if not straightforwardly wrong. Writing transforms the metaphysics of information; the page (and in our age, hard drives or flash memory) becomes the medium that stores and disseminates the information. Before writing, the poem encodes the information because it is the form of the poem that allows it to be stored, i.e. remembered. But once writing is invented the form of the poem becomes incidental to its storage; it is writing itself, the parchment and the written word on the parchment, that stores the information. The poem qua poem is only relevant to the encoding of the information insofar as it is ironic and the form is used to suggest that the encoded information is false. The notion of poetry as a media technology becomes irrelevant to its history as soon as poetry is no longer an aide memoire. Milton’s choice of ‘English Heroic Verse’ had nothing to do with storing information, it was for ‘ancient liberty recover'd’. Perverse because there is so much more to poetry than storing and disseminating information. Sure, Shakespeare’s sonnets encode information but then so does graffiti.
Context Collapse is also a poem. And though it may deprioritise ‘many of the features we tend to associate with poetry’ in favour of those generally associated with ‘nonfiction prose’, Ruby is adamant that Context Collapse is not simply a prose essay ‘chopped up’ into metred lines. Adamant, perhaps, because his claim to verse seems to rest on these loosely metred lines. That said, there is more to the poetry than lineation. Take these lines about the moot question of authorship and intention in the age of Homer and Hesiod:
The question of intent does not arise;
The poet cannot intend otherwise
Than what occasion and context demand
Of him.
Rhyme within unrhymed verse is either a clumsy accident or there for a reason. Ruby plays on this disjunction: even if the poet did intend these rhymes, the wink (‘arise/otherwise’) suggests he might not have had a choice — deft given the context. Sadly such play with rhyme become less frequent as the going goes on. Ruby also has fun with page breaks. In the late 12th and early 13th century, the schism between crown and tiara, equalled by that between orthodoxy and heresy, is followed by some ‘hardly less significant . . . dualisms’:
Sedentary and nomadic, tradition // And novelty, sacred and profane love, // Difficulty and accessibility, Troubadour and jongelur. . .
Tradition and novelty: not on the same page but part of the same unit of sense. Neat. Throughout the poem, Ruby becomes more and more fond of the page break, often giving one line a whole page of the verso. The verse is all on the verso (pun probably intended). As the poem goes on, it becomes more and more outnumbered by the lines of verse footnotes on the recto. Obviously, this is meant to challenge our preconceptions of text and paratext. Maybe too obviously. That the extended quotes are also broken up into ‘metred lines’ and are often prosodically indistinguishable from Ruby’s own raises a doubt. The qualm isn’t that he has ‘chopped up’ an existing prose essay into lines, but that it seems as though he has.
Another formal feature is Ruby’s persistent use of foreign words and phrases, always untranslated, untransliterated, and unglossed. Besides the homage to Pound’s The Cantos, which contains at least 21 foreign languages, the point of this polyglossia is connected to one of Ruby’s reasons for writing a verse essay: ‘to defamiliarize literary criticism by writing it in a nonstandard form.’ The thing about defamiliarisation or alienation or anything else designed to take the reader ‘out’ of the text is that it gets old quickly. And it doesn’t take much for the reader to get the point. Ruby might claim that the ‘sound’ of poetry continues when you encounter a line of French or German, less so when you must pause to decipher some unglossed Ancient Greek and Russian. The untranslated passages from Derrida and 𝕯𝖆𝖘 𝕶𝖆𝖕𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖑 in the footnotes; the use of unglossed Russian to make a joke about modernist obscurity; whatever the initial intention, the main effect of all this is the impression of someone being too clever by half. Too often desire to be clever seems to supplant any other poetic concern.
One of the reasons the essay became the dominant mode of criticism, besides essays being easier to write, is because it’s better at conveying information and argument. It’s one thing to dispense information, another to substantiate an argument. Academic monographs are slow and meticulous, but a good monograph gives the thesis the substantiation it needs and the reader a guide back into the sources. There is a reason the allusive verse essay and the prosody of poetic concision never caught on in academia. It’s the same reason they give references page numbers. The lay reader will comprehend the thesis of Context Collapse; only a reader who has read most if not all of Context Collapse’s bibliography will be able to judge the quality of its intervention. When the audience and the poet are one, the poem will not be idiosyncratic.
This is probably part of Ruby’s ‘lark’: ‘like any good joke, it is meant to be taken seriously.’ Those in on the joke will smile at the references. But unless the professors can read Ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic, German, Italian, French, Occitan, and Russian, even they will require the relevant dictionary. There is no shortage of interesting ideas in Context Collapse, and the poem will reward re-reading after a perusal of its 13-page bibliography. Whether you want this in the form of a poem or an essay or George Steiner’s unedited manuscripts will be personal preference. Ruby wished to ‘draw attention to poetry’s participation in the contemporary information economy’. Maybe the reason poetry languishes in the information economy is because storing and disseminating information is not the best part of poetry. Maybe Ruby knows that.