Here’s a book-length poem about poetic innovation, about the ways, over millenniums, that poets and audiences have conceived of each other, and about how poems get delivered from producer to consumer — but wait! Ryan Ruby’s “Context Collapse” is all of that, yes, but it’s also fun. And irritating, fascinating, poignant, a folly, a lark.
It’s wise, too. I read this book in the aftermath of the election, when it seemed possible that democracy itself was experiencing a kind of collapse. Is this extratextual context gratuitous? Maybe, but Ruby — a novelist, poet and critic — is vigorously aware of poetry’s social context and of how what we think we know feels as if it’s slipping away.
To Ruby, poetry is a “media technology” — a method for circulating content — currently undergoing “context collapse.” This recently coined term refers to the way that, on social media, you find yourself speaking to everyone everywhere — and thus to no one in particular, nowhere, in a context defined by a lack of common understanding.
Ruby explains this in one of hundreds of footnotes that course in unrhymed 10-syllable lines down the book’s right-hand pages, opposite the main poem (also in 10-syllable lines). In tandem, the text and the commentary narrate and explain poetry’s origins and its waves of innovation and transmission all the way to the present, whereupon Ruby takes up artificial intelligence’s relationship to the varied forms we call poetry.
Ruby is most engaging when he ventilates his exposition with striking imagery, as in passages imagining Bronze Age oral poetry delivered in “nomadic fellowship” at “the blood-spattered altar/Or the controlled burn of the domestic hearth” in “little rooms” of “maritime trade routes/ … Or else those of the high-roofed [ ]” — here Ruby inserts the ancient Greek for “palace rooms.” Later passages, like this one on computer programming languages, are harder going:
If language is a subjectless process
Rather than an intersubjective one,
A countercommunicative flow of parts
Through decontextualized language zones
Not being, well, dead, I don’t much enjoy that pileup of Latinate abstractions, despite their supple cadences and dense sound effects. I’m pretty sure Ruby designed that bit to mimic the denatured feel of programming language. It doesn’t matter if I follow every word. Not all poetry wants to achieve the same things; this too is something language — poetic language — can do.
If “Context Collapse” is tiring — Ruby seems never to have met theoretical poetry jargon he didn’t want to press into service — it is also moving. Ruby’s perceptions are often delightful, as are his skilled modulations among literary, spoken and academic idioms. It’s true that no one ever needs to use the phrase “metadiegetic/framework,” even to fill out a syllable count. And if at times I snarled “Jerk!” (for example, at the footnote where Ruby quotes, in untranslated German, a philosopher-critic to illuminate the title and innovative procedures of a French poem), I meant it lovingly.
It’s my own fault I stumble through elementary French and Latin. I can sound out anything written in the Roman alphabet, but I mostly won’t get its gist. My teenage daughter, in her fourth year of Classics study, with all manner of translation apps and keyboards installed on her phone, gave me the sound and sense of any Ancient Greek that Ruby didn’t translate, but couldn’t help with Arabic or Chinese characters. They remained opaque. But this is also one of Ruby’s points: that there’s meaning in our gaps in understanding, that in miscommunicating we communicate. As his audience, I experience “Context Collapse” in a partly physical way: what my eye sees, what my ear hears, not just what the words mean.
Reading, I scribbled in the margins, associations as well as assessments — Ruby’s procedures are catching — and soon I felt I was operating in a cloud of zigzagging linkage. Then I scribbled this: “‘Context Collapse’ may get as close as an ink-and-paper object can to the multidirectional, multidimensional rabbit-hole experience of the digital world.” That’s a long way from the lyric and narrative formats of poetry’s beginnings. But Ruby’s last words are entirely lyric.
Delivering these concluding lines under the title “Tornada” (a “turn” at the end of an medieval Occitan lyric that gives “a rationale/for its being written in the first place”), Ruby, practicing winking hybridity, meditates in terza rima (a separate medieval invention — Dante’s in the “Divine Comedy”) on poetry’s survival, or demise, in the face of climate change or nuclear annihilation:
The present from which I am addressing you
Can only be seen if light from its own
Future shines on it, light that was not new
When the first throat cried the first hymn to the sun
If this book is a labor of love, that last bit might, finally, be an article of faith. Or — to quote one of Ruby’s favorite modernists — “fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
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