Context Collapse : by Ryan Ruby
Context Collapse : a poem containing a history of poetry
by Ryan Ruby
NY : Seven Stories Press, 2024
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
– T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”
I
With Context Collapse, Ryan Ruby has produced a distinctive, undeniably brilliant, book-length verse essay, in the vein of the discursive, rationalist, edifying poetry of the Restoration era (Pope, Johnson), as well as that of much earlier and later (Horace, Lucretius, Andrea Brady, Charles Bernstein…). With a style steeped in both the tone and the erudition of a scintillating Phd. dissertation, Context Collapse is a bravura performance, a critical-historical dash across two millennia of literary development in the West (with frequent pointers to parallels and influences from other cultures near and far). Ruby’s interpretations of this history are incisive, sardonic, disenchanted, disillusioned… like some three-hour, caffeine-buzzed graduate seminar, conducted by a savvy adjunct prof. The centuries pass, the sparkling data flies out – from archaic oral poetry, to the medieval troubadours, the Renaissance… up to the immediate present, with apocalyptic twin shadows looming (both poetry’s perhaps imminent obsolescence, and the advent of cybernetics, AI).
Ruby contextualizes all this eminently-imminent entropy with the wider history of symbiotic, accelerating economic forces, technological revolution. He makes clear, in his preface, that while poetry is near-impossible to categorize, in this poem “poetry is treated as a media technology – as the quintessential and perhaps even original media technology… Media, in this understanding, are technologies of disseminating and storing information” [p. xiv]. And all was there, in Ruby’s view, at the beginning : Homer’s epics, for example, were didactic techno-storehouses of cultural knowledge.
Ruby frames this in a pattern which is as austere and uncomfortable as the Biblical Fall, the exile from Paradise. Poetry was, in the beginning, an oral, communal give-&-take within groups at very close quarters – like the cramped, warm, stovetop ur-kitchen of Russian literary intelligentsia. Then came the curse : writing. The advent of alphabets and written texts proved a kind of devil’s bargain : thenceforth, poets and the technology of writing and publication were joined at the hip. Technology became the tail wagging Hippocrene Pegasus. Here Ruby’s polished, aphoristic critical incisions are apt and precise. He has a fluent sense of taste, aligned with a deeply sociological perspective. And his narrative’s momentum is assisted by the format : facing pages of the verse (a loose, unrhymed pentameter line) and numbered footnotes, respectively. (One of the jokey aspects of the poem is that the style of the footnotes, and that of the verse, are almost indistinguishable.) Here are a few random samples :
from p. 58 (the verse) :
One hopes they enjoyed it while it lasted.
Around the time the earthquake levels Lisbon,
And the first of Blake’s dark Satanic mills
Crop up in Cromford, Cheshire, and Southwark,
Around the time the Marquis de Maecenas
Loses his head on the Place de la Concorde,
– Lovers, dear Reader, are still with us, thank God –
Vast impersonal forces will multiply
The faces of the audience beyond
All possibility of recognition,
Turning literate communication
Into an elaborate form of guesswork.
from p. 59 (the notes) :
Culler is skeptical of approaches
to lyric which treat it as the speech acts
of fictional personae – as though they
were secretly dramatic monologues
or “mini-novels.” Instead he proposes
a “ritualistic-fictional” entente
that, through what he calls “triangular address”,
captures the genre’s distinctive features
as well as its family resemblances
to others. (See Theory of the Lyric.)
from p. 116 (the verse) :
If one were searching for a synthesis
Between these tendencies, one could be found
In the writings of Gertrude Stein, who ought –
More than Joyce, Proust, Kafka, or even Pound –
To be regarded as the century’s
Preeminent literary figure.
from p. 117 (the notes) :
Like any edifice built on unsound
theoretical foundations, this one’s [ie., Dada’s,
Futurism’s] collapse was all but inevitable.
Communication, being a social
phenomenon, is made possible by
mutually-agreed-upon rules. Destroy
those and you destroy what they enable,
involving you, should you wish to persist,
in a performative contradiction.
As the poem’s historical narrative spins toward its modern-day denouement, the scene becomes more tense, fraught… absurd. Ruby is careful in delineating what he sees as poetry’s choreographed alignment with the political economy of neoliberal capitalism; with its tragicomic, self-defeating surrender to the academic-industrial complex, its hefty patronage and pedagogical style influences – molding avant-garde, experimental poetics even more thoroughly than “mainstream” lyric verse. All of which – ineluctably mirroring more widespread social shifts – encapsulates it within solipsistic bubbles of discourse, jargon, memes : an atomized marketplace.
I don’t want to give away the surprising turn of the plot (Tornada) on the closing pages. But Ruby manages to reverse course – suddenly, quietly – from the cosmic and literally apocalyptic pessimism of his narrative, to something more hopeful. From the note on p. 197 : “Writing poetry, reading poetry: these are ethical activities when all is said and done, concerned with our mode of being. And as long as we are being beings the only being we impoverish by not writing poetry is our own…”
II
Ruby’s long poem – within margins of the dry, prosaic, quasi-academic idiom he has crafted – is an impressive accomplishment, a dazzling display of critical acumen; a daring, iconoclastic tour-de-force. I have found it to be edifying on page after page, and simultaneously hard to put down. But I want to sketch out some inchoate objections or reservations I have about his thesis.
The entire historical panorama hinges on that fateful binary set out at the beginning : the metamorphosis of poetry, from its origins in primordial, communal, oral recitation (or song), to its alliance, or entanglement, with writing. This binary is the hinge on which Ruby’s definitive characterization of poetry – as a media technology – a human tool for information storage and dissemination – plays out in all its epic ironic splendor/squalor.
But I have questions about both of these thematic principles. First : is the distinction between oral and textual poetry really so absolute? In my view, poetry hovers in a kind of gray area, in the center of a Venn diagram, between music and speech. Words themselves are grounded in and filled with sound : they are inherently musical. And they don’t lose these qualities when transferred to text. In fact, the soft whispering, the murmur of the leaves, in the pages of a book, help to sharpen the ear that hears this undertone, this music. The sounds of communal singing rise from the dead leaves, the mute paper snowfields.
And this continuity, this symbiosis is linked, somehow, with my second objection. Ruby never addresses the aesthetic dimension of poetry. Yes, as he concludes, “these are ethical activities when all is said and done.” But Ruby’s disenchanted, post-Kantian, post-postmodern literary-theoretical rationalism never clarifies what beauty and aesthetics have to do – if they have anything to do – with poetry. Ruby doesn’t spell out his own political attitudes, his ideology – yet, in his poetic history, market forces, cold economic injustice, and class hypocrisies appear to evaporate the possible foundations of an aesthetic teleology or sanction for poetry. (To repeat, the conclusion of the book is both surprising, and somewhat veiled – so here I may very well be misreading Ruby’s point-of-view entirely.)
But let me just sketch out very briefly my own countering view. Just as the music of poetry synthesizes and transcends any technical differences between oral and text-based works, so this inherent verbal music is a kind of end in itself. The foibles, sufferings, scandals, travesties, and disasters of poetry through history, reckoned sociologically – within human socio-political economies – are merely one dimension of its spiritual-aesthetic-intellectual presence in human life : and not the most important dimension. The ethical activity of poetry is not carried out or fulfilled by the gears of “media technology”. It is not a craft; it is not a technique. It is a haunted calling : it is a spiritual vocation. It is a gift – maybe a divine gift. The ethical activity of poetry is to perceive and evoke the beauty of life : as Wallace Stevens termed it, simply : “life’s poetry”.