An Extended Argument in Verse: On Ryan Ruby’s “Context Collapse”
Ryan Ruby | Context Collapse | Seven Stories Press | November 2024 | 96 Pages
I am not qualified to review Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry. It’s not clear to me that anyone is, given Ruby’s stated goals: his book-length poem attempts to explain the history of poetry and poetics, “retracing the steps we’ve taken to get here” from “the palaces of late Bronze Age kings” to our current all-too-online moment, focusing first on classical antiquity, then on the European Middle Ages, then on French and English. The last book I read to succeed at a project this big was probably Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). It’s a high bar.
Along with its ambitious, so-old-it-feels-new project, Context Collapse adopts a so-old-it’s-new form: loose pentameters (sometimes dissolving into free decasyllabics), main text on the verso, footnotes (also decasyllabic) on the recto. Sometimes a verso page holds just one or two lines: footnotes crowd thick and fast, as in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728-1743). Pope also wrote a poem about how to write, and how to judge, poetry, his advice-filled Essay on Criticism (1711). Closer to our day, Auden (Letter to Lord Byron, 1935), Karl Shapiro (Essay on Rime, 1945) and Charles Bernstein (Artifice of Absorption, 1987) all produced verse essays about the history of verse (seems to be a guy thing).
Does Ruby come anywhere close to pulling it off? He does, and I loved it—but not because his argument holds up. That argument says (I think) that the history of poetry is the history of the media, from orature to the internet, that contain it, along with the audiences and institutions those media offer or snatch away. That account follows media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, proceeding through the Latin Middle Ages to “Paper. Moveable tyle. Quantitative/ Technological acceleration.” His book ought to bring more attention to the stunning (well, I was stunned) accounts, by Marisa Galvez and others, of the way written-down, meant-for-silent-reading lyric poetry reemerged in the modern West from troubadours’ work to preserve the words they sang.
Ruby takes, as the central story of modern poetry, modern-ism and its parade of would-be avant-gardes, heeding scholars who do the same (Marjorie Perloff; Barrett Watten), with an assist from critics focused on institutions (Jed Rasula; Mark McGurl). He cares (as Ron Silliman once put it) about poetry rather than poems. According to his story, the most important poets move the art of poetry forward, reinventing how and what “poetry” means in light of new audiences and technology, “from Homer to… Christian Bök.” Gertrude Stein thus “ought . . . To be regarded as the [twentieth] century’s / Preeminent literary figure.” Stein’s reactions to automatic writing, mechanical reproduction, and anything-goes interpretive practices anticipate not only language writers like Bernstein, but generative AI.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ruby’s story runs this way: as the art of poetry developed, oral-formulaic bards and their imitators gave way to monks, courtiers, and aristocrats exchanging manuscripts. Later came print culture, poets who lived by subscriptions, and then “skeletons garreted on Grub Street, / Thumbing numbers of The Spectator over/ Coffee at the penny universities.” Late eighteenth-century copyright gave poets an “incentive . . . to develop a trademark ‘voice’ or style.” With the decline of mass readership, “the verbal art // Surrenders at last to the visual”: you could read all of In Memoriam aloud—people did—but you’re probably better off silently reading Pound’s Cantos.
Modernist readers, primed by writers like Pound, found ambiguity everywhere (Ruby cites—but, I think, misreads—William Empson). They also made what they wanted to find: intensive interpretation became the name of the poetic game. Then, thanks to the plunging cost of reproduction—from monks with quills to mimeographs to Wattpad—poetry, which “has the lowest barrier to entry / Of any art form,” acquired more writers than readers. Unless we are professionalized, academic literary critics (like me), we have too much else on our plates these days to provide stable contexts for reading new poems. Everything seems permissible; nothing seems novel, and nothing confined to verse practice seems significant, unless other people (for example, teachers) already think it so.
That’s life “within the context of no context,” as George W. S. Trow put it in his 1981 essay, one source for Ruby’s title. Ruby cites others: “coined independently by digital / ethnographer Michael Wesch and social / media theorist danah boyd, context / collapse occurs when communications” can reach “billions of anonymous / users beyond their intended audience,” so that contexts, frames, and lifeways no longer guarantee predictable meaning: “apparently well-formed / statements… exhibit the same semantic/ instability as any open text.” If you have no idea what to do with them, George Herbert’s “Jordan” poems, Hera Lindsay Bird’s “Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind,” and Tracy Smith’s Life on Mars become as baffling, or as pointless, or as likely to spark unresolvable argument, as Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, Silliman’s Tjanting or Aram Saroyan’s “eyeye” and “lighght”. And that’s how we read—or don’t read—poetry now.
So Ruby implies. I am not sure that’s true. Nor am I sure that institutions and changes in media guide the writing of what we call poems—or the writing of what, say, Herbert called poems—as strongly as Ruby’s history seems to assert. Ruby’s scholarly authorities treat academia as the destination for modern poetry, the movement of poets into universities as a central fact about the twentieth century. But poetics aren’t like surgery, or metallurgy, or structural engineering. If nobody wanted to read poems, in their free time, universities would eventually stop teaching them. That’s what happened to Restoration comedy: who, now, reads Wycherley?
It might happen to Herbert and Horace, too, but I doubt it. “The destiny of the anthology / is the course syllabus,” Ruby declares: an anthology “is a symptom of a movement’s/ imminent institutionalization.” That’s quite the half-truth: The Norton Anthology of Poetry aims for the classroom, but The Golden Treasury did not. Nor did hand-copied collections traded among sixteenth-century literati; nor do the de facto anthologies of favorite poems you can find today on Tumblr, from Bird and Ocean Vuong to, yes, George Herbert. If universities abolished the teaching of poetry tomorrow, I’d be sad, and I might need a new job, but poems would get written and read. Maybe some of the same poems, by the same people. For fun, or for intellectual stimulation, or just to know someone else, long ago, felt that way.
Poems—instances of verbal arrangement, challenges to ordinary usage, “emotional machines made of words” (William Carlos Williams)—must circulate somehow, in some medium, thanks to some institution (the internet, or the periodical press, or the schools, or kids trading zines), if anyone is to read them. Few of them, though, require a particular institution in the way (say) that The Magic Flute requires an opera company. And what’s true for poems, here, seems equally true for people, as danah boyd—a youth sociologist—would likely know. “Context collapse,” in boyd’s wonderful study It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, does not—at all—mean we live in a postmodern void where any interpretive frame will do, or none.
Instead it means that people (in boyd’s study, teenagers) want to be seen in one way by one social group, in one context, and in another way by another. Life online makes it hard or impossible to keep contexts apart. It’s harder “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” as one modernist put it, when you don’t know who else might see that face. Your cool jock boyfriend might find out about your four-year-long Dungeons and Dragons campaign; your dad might discover your nickname, or your gender.
Teens (boyd argued) reacted to context collapse not by forming another post-avant-garde or diving into postmodern aporias but by “choosing how to present themselves before disconnected and invisible audiences.” Like poets. You might say, with William Wordsworth, that they create the taste by which they are to be relished. You might also say, as boyd did, that it’s easier to focus, generation after generation, on “what is new and disruptive” than to place what’s changed in the context of what hasn’t. Herbert might not recognize Silliman’s Tjanting as a poem, but I like to think he would recognize Smith, or Hughes. Of course I can’t prove it: he’s been dead for a while. Historically minded critics who think otherwise ought to explain why some people—outside of classrooms—still read him.
Like any other human use of language, poetry requires a medium, and a context, but—like Soylent Green—it’s made of people. Definitions of poetry that live long and prosper—Williams’s, for example—imply expression, arrangement, communication, as well as mediation: anti-expressive poems, or interventions, like Kenneth Goldsmith’s, imply a limited emotional force. They also have a limited shelf-life. You can try to write like Hardy over and over (Hardy did), but you can only retype a whole newspaper and call it poetry once (Ruby cites, rightly, Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick).
AI, of course, can retype, or re-combine, its words any number of times, and it can certainly generate reams of nonsense. But it can’t pass consistently for people, and it can’t—yet—counterfeit my favorite poets, or not in a way that sounds right to me. Even if it does, though, Ruby thinks “that would not . . . be a good reason for humans to stop / writing poetry, any more than a chess- / playing computer’s consistent victories” give present-day humans reasons to scrap chess. Poetry represents an end in itself, a “refusal to remain content / With what there is.” I agree.
Ruby’s style of argument—choppy, playful, sometimes sonically enticing—invites us to look, not just at “poetry” as a concept, but at the poem we happen to read, whose sounds we likely imagine in our heads as we move to the end of each line, along with the person who might have composed it. That’s what it means to make an extended argument in (why else would you do so?) verse. As Ruby asks in another connection, “is this really such a clear-cut case / of creeping determinism?” “Once domesticated in the topologically flexible bed of poetry, ‘ideas’ are bent into peculiar shapes,” among them “parody by simulacra of received discourses,” flip condensations, unpredictable expansions, and “lexical vivifying of sober expository sources.” “Ideas”—say, the endless death of the avant-garde, or the dependence of poetics on publishing—“are framed, posed, choreographed, heightened, and refined or coarsened,” treated as “wonderful artifacts of human mentality,” rather than truths to be proved and believed.
In response to Ruby’s question, I have just been quoting Helen Vendler’s lecture on Pope’s Essay on Man, published in 2006 as one chapter in her Poets Thinking. That lecture—and Pope’s verse essay, and Ruby’s essay in turn—make cases for poetry generally too: there is an art in using words, and lines, and groups of lines, to represent people, for other people, in ways that at their best seem familiar yet new. That art appears to have survived—not without changes—over millennia, even as (to quote Wallace Stevens) “the plum survives its poems.” Ruby’s coda, in unrhymed tercets, even offers a Stevensian (and Vendlerian) argument for continuing to read, and to write: “ultimately, the context of // Poetry is death”—the mother of beauty, one might say, since “in futile resistance / One discovers a justification / For the cosmic error called consciousness.” I couldn’t have put it better, in any context.