Coming Undone

Writing, it’s been said, remains unique because it is the only medium that can use its own form to investigate itself; that is, the art and the criticism that seeks to understand the art share the same ground. (Where is photography’s essay on the image? Where, for that matter, is a critique of Bach in the form of a symphony?) Lacking a discursive element, other forms must make do with implicit commentaries within themselves, something that the audience (which we will come to shortly) is left to tease out. But what of poetry? Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse (Seven Stories Press, 2024) attempts just that—a discursive, book-length essay composed in verse, announced by its subtitle as “a poem containing a history of poetry.” 

The “verse essay” has ancient antecedents in didactic poems such as Virgil’s Georgics and Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. More recent examples include Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009). But the closest analogue I can think of to Ruby’s project is Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (not a bad candidate for film’s great essay on itself), the subtitles of which are, alternately,Toutes les histoires (“All the (Hi)stories”) and Un histoire seule (“A Single (Hi)story”). Ruby, too, stresses the indefinite article in his subtitle—which is an appropriation of Pound’s description of the Cantos as “containing history”—conceding that the book “gestures at a comprehensiveness it does not in fact have” and is but one of many histories of poetry.

As with all ambitious texts, one can’t expect to swallow the whole bolus of Context Collapse the first time around, and it is almost impossible to produce a capsule version of the book’s argument in the space of a review. (A critic, alas, can only hope to graze.) The history that Ruby explores is that of poetry as media technology and the space where “technology, economics and language meet.” Specifically, he examines how these forces act upon the creation of a text and how that text is received and understood, for it is the “technologically and economically mediated relationship between poet and audience” that constitutes “context,” which is a “means of regulating meaning.”

A prolific critic and a student of modernism, Ruby has produced a polyphonic, polyglottal poem with footnotes aplenty. The loosely iambic verse is printed on the verso and the footnotes on the recto, creating a dialectical text as well as a play of the eye, which jumps back and forth across the pages. The footnotes, which provide framing and do most of the discursive heavy lifting, produce an interpolative effect; after finishing a note, one might read less than a line before having to start on another. These are not “prophylactic[s]” (as Eliot said of his own notes to The Waste Land) against dissection, but invitations for further reading. Ruby’s tone, by his own admission, is “mock-academic,” making pretenses to scholarship while also amusing itself at its own expense.

The book’s title and cover, which features a Gibbonian image (a row of crumbling columns), might lead one to think that Context Collapse is yet another declinist narrative, another “the death of.” But here, “collapse” refers to the deteriorating mediated relationship between poet and audience and the loss of clear coordinates for understanding the function of poetry within a social totality. Ruby chronicles the ways in which poetry has become increasingly conscious of itself under the necessities inherent in its own production. “[T]he relationship / between form and content and the poet’s / social function . . .” he writes, “are epiphenomena of quantitative, technoeconomic / changes to the nature of the audience.” This entails looking at how poetry has responded (stylistically or otherwise) to changes in the material conditions under which it has been produced—from the ancients to the medieval troubadours, from the Gutenberg epoch to Amazon, from N+7 to ChatGPT, and beyond.

***

In the age of the Homeric epic, occasion clearly defined the context in which poetry was performed and received: weddings, funerals, festivals, games, after-dinner entertainment. “Occasion determines the selection,” Ruby writes, just as context dictates the formulae (diction, meter). With all of this provided, “The question of intent does not arise” and “The poet cannot intend otherwise / Than what occasion and context demand.” Therefore, “Audiences are not there to interpret.” The aoidos (bard/poet), like any other craftsman, was judged solely on the performance of their work.

The spaces where these performances took place were likely private lodgings or gardens, often in the courts of túrannos (kings)—not amphitheaters, which clearly separate and thus differentiate poet from audience. The medium through which poetry was experienced was the aoidos themselves, who were regarded more as conduits than the “authors” of their work:

   When the bodies of singer and sung-to 
Are cosensible, there is no need to ask 
After an author. The request would be 
A category error, a mystery 
To be referred to those with addresses 
Atop Helicon and Mt. Parnassus . . .

Furthermore, the lyrists who were part of the performance were not simply an accompaniment, but co-equals: poet and music were homogenous. All of this furnished an acoustic space that enveloped subject and object, speaker and listener, in a single field of experience—an “ecstatic trance,” in Walter Benjamin’s words. It was the phonetic alphabet, Marshall McLuhan argued, that broke the spell, giving its user “an eye for an ear” and established division of experience, releasing the individual from the “tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship”—the world in which the aoidos operated.

The arrival of the alphabet in the ninth century BCE allowed for far greater dissemination of poetry, but it also necessitated a separation between the poet and the audience, as all technological mediums simultaneously connect and amputate. Technology does, however, have a way of compensating for what it takes away. One recalls Freud’s remark that “If there were no railway to overcome distance, my child would never have left his home town and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice.” In this case, the compensation that the alphabet gave to poetry was the formation of the poetic persona—the “I” which Ruby claims is there “to stand in / For the body that used to go without / Saying.”

The oral tradition and the use of writing for composition had a brief modus vivendi in the fifth and fourth centuries at agonistic festivals like the Panathenaea, where the citizens of the polis, emergingly defined as spectators, were the judges. Ruby writes that this dynamic incentivized playwrights and poets alike to attempt “Differentiations of style that will / Provide the occasion for said public / To disagree over matters of taste” and “. . . the formation of rival groupings / Around the individual genres / And writers they prefer.” Moreover, since the theater was the place where key concepts of political life (honor, family, loyalty, virtue, justice, citizenship) were hashed out in public, the audience came to play an interpretive role in addition to being the evaluators of craft.

Not long after, texts assessing the structure, theme, and form of poetry began to emerge. Aristotle’s Poetics is the first great example, and by the Hellenistic period, the Library of Alexandria was full of scholars doing just the same. Though Ruby doesn’t mention it, I was reminded of the argument that the scholar Harold Innis makes in Empire and Communications (1950), that in Alexandria: “Aesthetic opinions were crystallized and the dilettante appeared. Literature was divorced from life, thought from action, poetry from philosophy.” Criticism was born, signaling yet another shift in the nascent power imbalance between the poet and the reader, who was now the self-appointed keeper of the work.

This history is necessary for establishing the route to “context collapse.” The next stage is Occitan poetry in the Middle Ages, in which composition (handled by troubadours) was divorced from performance (done by minstrels, or jongleurs). From there, the printed book initiated a turn inward, and the experience of poetry became a silent affair. In the medium of print, Ruby argues, readers “Find themselves increasingly isolated / From the poet’s voice” and “The proscenium . . . shrinks to the size / Of a skull . . .” Writing now being an essential part of composition also meant that, when poets read their work aloud, they merely recited what they had previously composed. Likewise, the reader—i.e., the erstwhile passive recipient—could now play the role of reciter as well.

In print, lyricism appears to the eye before lodging in the ear, and rhyme becomes a visual feature of poetry as much as an auditory one (“As the privatized public learns to sing / With its eyes alone . . .”). And “When acoustic patterns / Need no longer function as aides memoires, / They become compositional conventions / Deployed”—Ruby stresses—“for tradition’s sake . . .” More still, “Surveillance exerts gravitational / Pull on style,” as the reader’s freedom to revisit a text ad infinitum allows the poet to “attempt far greater / Complexities of linguistic technique” well beyond what is possible in an oral tradition.

But, Ruby argues, the abstract spacetime of the printed page “taken to its logical / Conclusion” is vers libre. It was Charles Baudelaire who broke the mold with Le Spleen de Paris in 1869, after which, Ruby writes, his “musical prose would still, by his oft- / Dreamt-of-miracle, survive to sidewind off / Into a future sans rhythme et sans rhyme.” The epochal figure in free verse, though, is Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work represented “the insurrection / Of the eye against the ear’s empire.” Mallarmé was influenced by the topographical space of newspapers and magazines (an influence he extended to the Surrealists and poets like Pound). Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard (1897) exploits the abstract space of the printed page to the point where the reader is free to make connections between isolated and seemingly random pieces of information. When text can be arranged in any configuration, the “conceptual / Boundaries” of the poem, Ruby argues, are cast into uncertainty (Tristan Tzara cutting up Shakespeare sonnets and the OuLiPo group would not be far behind). This also set the stage for the fragmentary nature of modernist poetry, as well as its dictates of novelty and difficulty, which, Ruby claims, “Comes to operate under conditions / Of informational saturation.”

The difficulty of a text demands interpretation and thus grants tremendous power to the reader, and, as Ruby rightly identifies, “Turn[s] literate communication / Into an elaborate form of guesswork.” (The Old English rǣdan, from which we get ‘read,’ means ‘to guess,’ with even older connotations of ‘to interpret a riddle or dream.’) The reader is no longer simply a passive recipient of the text but an active participant in generating its meaning, something that Joyce intuited in Finnegans Wake (“His consumers are they not his producers?”), a novel that pushes hermeneutics to the nth degree and is, in the words of the scholar Finn Fordham, an “exegete’s dream.”

The supposed cult of difficulty attributed to modernism was—like the Romantic conception of the poet as a heroic genius—partly a reaction to the blunt force of that spurious collective known as “the Reader.” Ruby writes that the Reader, as an anonymous entity, was conceived “by fusing / the lowest common denominator / of a series of dubious assumptions / about the moral and intellectual qualities of Man . . .” who then “become the poet’s de facto audience.” Faced with the diminishing taste that comes with abundance, the difficulty of a text, Ruby argues, is a way of ensuring quality over quantity, which he elaborates on in a characteristically longish footnote:

    . . . a poem whose meaning is not clear invites 
explication and explication in turn 
ensures the longevity of the poem. 
What the difficult poet sacrifices 
in the spatial distribution of her 
readership—which shrinks in number—she gains 
in the temporal extension of her work.

The calls for newness and difficulty that characterized modernism to the point of aesthetic terminus turned out to be a death sentence, as language attempted to engineer its own escape velocity and eventually flew out of orbit altogether. Relentless defamiliarization (“Occulting . . . meanings, which are at once / Overdetermined and indeterminate”) necessitated higher levels of abstraction and self-consciousness, thus producing more and more cloistered work, which in turn demanded more cloistered analysis, effectively institutionalizing such literature in the academy—which Ruby claims, now provides the context for the reception of poetry, as it does for most literature.

This shift meant banishing the poet from their own home to clear the field for interpretative work. From the mid-twentieth-century New Critics, who cautioned against “author intent” and treated texts as formal systems, it was just a jump to poststructuralism’s banishment of the author tout court in the 1960s and ’70s, after which, in Roland Barthes’s words, writing was “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” and a text “only a tissue of signs.” Poetry thus became (theoretically) subjectless, without even an “I” to stand on. But “[T]he reader’s apotheosis” Ruby writes, “is but a prelude to disappearance, / As the activity once known as reading / Is supplanted by the act of looking / at a text . . .” And that a “contextual frame” like a museum, an academy, a cultural moment, can “transform any instance of language into art.” This, Ruby argues, ushered in “the context of no context” where the page “Had become a place where there was no there there.”

To the question: What is poetry? Ruby answers—“whatever / anyone says it is.” And if poetry is whatever anyone says it is, the corollary is that anyone is a poet. When context disappears, “the loss of definition goes hand in hand / with the loss of function—and vice versa.” To this, I can only cite my own experience: I remember being given a writing prompt in an undergraduate workshop, where we were told to take the top Google searches of that day and arrange them as we wished, in any configuration or typography. I didn’t then—and don’t now—regard myself as a poet. But had I produced a poem? The arbitrary nature of the context (the setting and theoretical scheme) made it so, as after Mallarmé’s coup, any occasion for the re-presentation of language becomes poetry. Whether the writer consciously regards it as such is essentially moot.

Poetry’s loss of cultural centrality, centuries in the making, has happened in correlation with a crisis of overproduction. Ruby cites the fact that MFA programs ensure the steady output of writers by the thousands every year; submissions to literary journals and prizes consistently outnumber readership; and options for self-publishing (largely via Amazon) has led to a proliferation of texts (Mark McGurl notes in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon that over a million titles are now self-published a year). This means that there are more books produced in twelve months than anyone can conceivably read in a lifetime, and it also means that there are more new books every year than can be stored in any physical location. And, crucially, it means that more people are writing poetry than reading it. The definition of reader and writer, such as they are now in the era of bi-directional media and “laborized leisure,” has completely collapsed, as consumers and producers become indistinguishable from one another (Joyce rears his head).

Ruby shows that this crisis is no accident, nor even a paradox, but an inevitable consequence of the fact that poetry has taken on the form of a cheap, reproducible commodity in a capitalist economy, as the commodity form subjugates all other notions of value. “In market societies,” Ruby writes in a footnote, “the social function of all producers / is pegged to the market valuation / of their product,” and therefore if poetry lacks a social function, it is because it “has no function in a market / society.” If this has produced any solipsism within poetry itself, it is because “solipsism becomes inevitable / when your primary audience is, well, you.” Indeed, who is the audience for Context Collapse, if not critics like me?

***

In some ways the argument of Context Collapse is reminiscent of the one Georg Lukács makes in The Theory of the Novel (1916)—that is, the loss of meaning goes hand in hand with the loss of social totality, as it existed in the ancient world pre-Socrates, when “context” was not necessary because meaning was immanent in all things. The move into literacy and mediation was thus a move into a state of alienation, for in Modernity, Lukács writes, literary forms “have to produce out of themselves all that was once simply accepted as given . . .” (i.e. meaning), and that henceforth, “the ultimate basis of artistic creation . . . become[s] homeless.” Lukács’s epochal thesis is speculative, borderline-mystical, but Ruby—a good materialist—tracks the loss of meaning by filling in what Lukács leaves out: the ways in which literature exists in an intrinsic and dialectical relationship with the forces of its own production, which in turn change literature’s understanding of itself.

Context Collapse is framed by two paratexts taken from Occitan poetry: a Razo (detailing the terms and circumstances of the composition) and a Tornada (an additional reflection on the poem’s themes and its raison d’être). Both assist with understanding by helping to enforce the poet’s vision and avoid misinterpretation. That is, they are both ways of asserting context. Ruby knows that it is now almost impossible to encounter a text in innocence, one which presents itself simply “as is”—a fact that his poem playfully attempts to compensate for by justifying its own existence.

But context, once lost, cannot be restored or even reimposed by explanatory power. On the contrary, consciousness of deterioration plays a role in that deterioration (“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts,” as Italo Calvino says in “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” his lecture on post-humanist literature). Ruby is aware of this fact in Context Collapse and seems to recognize implicitly that his poem exists in some terminal state of affairs, an attempt at a great explanation, post-something-or-other. In light of its own elucidations on the current status of the poet-audience relationship, Context Collapse is itself a product of “Pure negentropic equilibrium, / Afflux and reflux without end or end” as Ruby phrases it, an asymptotic state that is “indistinguishable from death.”

As an early adopter of new media, the poet is always the “canary in the coal mine,” Ruby declares, who points the way to the future we can’t yet see. Therefore, if poetry has been death-bound for centuries, it is because it’s pointing the way to our own oblivion, beset as we are by threats of rising sea levels, environmental collapse, nuclear war, viral plague, artificial intelligence, et al. “[U]ltimately,” Ruby writes in his Tornada, “the context of // Poetry is death.” It is Being’s confrontation with non-existence, a futile effort to outlast what we all know is inevitable.

Ruby argues that the poet’s fate was sealed long ago, when poetry became a written form and thus “a potential commodity.” Ditto the bound, typeset book, which was one of the first machined commodities in an era of emerging capitalist markets—at which point the poet was already being pressed into “an increasingly / desperate series of protestations / to relevance,” from Philip Sidney’s to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s defenses. Echoing Shelley’s description of poets as “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” Ruby writes: “The present from which I am addressing you / Can only be seen if light from its own / Future shines on it.” This may be the light of the approaching train. In any case, a note of hope is enclosed in the poem’s dedication, which is addressed to “the poets of the future.”

Perhaps the poet’s fate was sealed from the very beginning, before it even properly began, when Orpheus, the Ur-poet of the Western tradition, was undone by his audience because they failed to understand his grief and the nature of his song. In tearing him to pieces and scattering his severed limbs all over the world, the seeds of poetry were planted, which would then be taken up by generations of bards. But the rub (because there always is one) is that only in death does Orpheus achieve immortality, and long after his remains have been sent down the river, his dead head still sings.