By the time the English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney was felled by a bullet among the low, frigid marshes of Zutphen in October of 1586, where he was fighting on behalf of Dutch independence, he had already spent quite a lot of time thinking about greatness, both personal and poetic. Dead at only 31, a partisan for the Protestant cause, in an anonymous portrait from a decade before Sidney is russet-haired with aquiline nose, handsome in his starched Elizabethan collar, white doublet, and black-and-gold threaded breeches (with obligatory cod-piece)—a man whose regal countenance makes him appear destined to enthuse about verse’s ability to “lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” That quote is from his A Defense of Poesy, the most important work of literary criticism written during the English Renaissance, and a potent example of that strange genre of the “Ars Poetica,” whereby the vocation of versification is justified, in this circumstance partially by an appeal to ethics.
Lean, athletic, and martial, Sidney was the ideal candidate to defend poetry, whose detractors slandered it as flabby and effete, a man whose martyrdom in battle earned him a reputation which the nineteenth-century Scottish writer Thomas Campbell described as a life that was “poetry in action.” From Horace to Percy Shelley to Archibald MacLeish, the “Ars Poetica” has been a genre in both verse and prose dedicated to the defense of poetry, to contradicting Plato’s ancient claim that verse lies and that poets should be exiled from the ideal republic. If in Sidney’s estimation poets were mediators between our humdrum, shadowy world and the transcendent realm of pure ideas, by MacLeish some four centuries later the conclusion would rather be that “A poem should not mean/But be,” an expression of both futility and totality in all such attempts at justifying verse.
Which is what makes the critic, novelist, and translator Ryan Ruby’s ingenious Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry all the more remarkable in its mock antiquity, for he offers nothing less than an “Ars Poetica” for the age of metadata and social media, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, a work ranging from poetry’s Orphic origins through the Attic versifiers, the Occitan troubadours, Sicilian sonneteers, French symbolists, the twentieth-century avant-garde of Dadaists and Surrealists, the New York School, the University of Iowa MFA program, and the online denizens producing Flarf poetry (Shakespeare, however, does not appear). Yet this is a poem which, for all of its erudition and verbosity, contains an adamant thrill toward its subjects, where Ruby’s fragmentary stanzas are able to dip into the slipstream of poetry’s history, evoking eccentric and hermetic worlds, such as this ekphrasis imagining Cathar heretics and their role in the invention of the sonnet in the court of the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, whereby the:
influence of the Occitan exiles
Was first felt at Palermo, in the court/of Stupor Mundi…
Where, among the Emperor’s concubines,
Magicians, slaves, ropedancers, acrobats,
Mathematicians and beloved falcons,
One of the fourteen notaries…
supplemented the eight-line
Sicilian strambotto with a sestet
And created the “little song” – to this day,
The quintessential verse form.
I tremble at the (blessedly successful) task of Ruby’s agent, and thank whatever visionary acquisitions editor at Seven Stories Press took on a seven-book blank verse epic that follows the history of poetry from its paleolithic origins to the Canadian poet Christian Bok inscribing verse into the genetic code of a single-celled organism, all of it concluded with a beautiful, if depressing, apocalyptic terza rima addendum about the Anthropocene. Grim though that may sound, Ruby’s work is actually estimably playful, for as he writes in his introduction, “like any good joke… [Context Collapse] is meant to be taken seriously.” The sort of audacious title that harkens back to the greats of high modernism rather than the fads of contemporary Big 5 publishing, a work evoking Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Wasteland (especially with all of Ruby’s untranslated Latin, French, Italian, German, and Chinese) more than Rupi Kaur.
As a verse essay—that now nearly extinct form once practiced by everyone from Lucretius to Anne Carson— Ruby advances an argument about poetry that can only really be made by poetry itself, so as “to defamiliarize literary criticism by writing it in a nonstandard form.” Throughout Ruby’s epic, his copious use of footnotes is crucially important, not just in that the prose conveys arguments differently from the main work, but because the experience of reading itself becomes interrupted, where you are forced into a bifurcated attention which necessitates the flipping back and forth between the poem’s pages, an experience that in many ways replicates that of internet hypertext. Often several footnotes will be amended to a solitary line otherwise pinned into the whiteness of the page, which reminds more of the Talmud than it does Nabokov or Danielewski. As a result, the physicality of the book becomes obvious, the eye repeatedly moving between lines enjambed not merely by end-stop, but by being spread over several pages. A crucial effect, for Ruby considers poetry as technology in terms of the actual material circumstances which define it, being less concerned less with Parnassus than the print shop, and in Context Collapse form itself becomes argument.
Context Collapse, it must be emphasized, is a very weird book, though this evaluation is meant in the best of all possible ways. True to the great Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky’s contention that verse is defined by being its own subject, Ruby focuses not on poets but poetry. “What is the history of poetry,” notes Ruby, “if not a series of more or less closed texts responding to other more or less closed texts?” Easy to assume that a history of poetry would merely provide a litany of great names, but Ruby’s intent thankfully isn’t to provide a straightforward exercise in hagiographical canonicity, for though certain poets are mentioned—Dante and Petrarch, Baudelaire and Whitman—they appear not as figures in the liturgy of greatness, but rather as simply whorls and gnarls in the wood of poetry’s evolutionary tree. What emerges is a discussion of poetry not just about personage, but also in terms of patronage and courtiers, copyright and royalties, not to mention page size and print arrangements. In Context Collapse “poetry is treated as a media technology—as the quintessential and perhaps even original media technology – and only secondarily as a series of forms and genres,” or for that matter of canonical authors. Fundamentally, Ruby considers poetry in terms of both production and consumption, the latter intimately tied to the relationship between the poet and her audience. “At first, the question of the audience/Is quite simple: where should it be seated?” asks Ruby in the first line of the poem, where epics would normally conjure the muse, and the answer to that question is imperative to define poetry, whether it’s an attendant at the Theater of Dionysius or somebody scrolling on their phone.
This requires consideration of how the movement from the oral to the textual effects verse, as well the shift from the manuscript to print, and today the transition from analog to digital. Such material developments inevitably alter the relationship between the poet and her audience, such as when the sort of recitation whereby “seventeen/Thousand people gathered annually/At the wine god’s festival to watch what/We now call Attic drama” would be irrevocably altered with first the introduction of alphabetic writing and then millennia later with the innovation of print, both of which allowed for solitary reading, a victory which he calls the “insurrection of the eye against the ear’s empire.” According to Ruby, shifts such as these are important not just because written poetry allows for the introduction of certain features associated with verse (such as lineation), but because the social experience of reading and thinking are forever changed. “The proscenium where, in Rome, dramatic/Monologues were performed, shrinks to the size/Of a skull and, at the same time, inflates/To the volume of an imagination,” he writes.
How then do we understand our transition to this second orality, this emergence of the undifferentiated digital morass, where the contemporary over-production of poetry makes it impossible to either gain the attention of an audience or to credibly read all that which may merit an audience? In his footnotes, Ruby offers some sobering numbers about the sheer preponderance of poetry being written, a Malthusian condition where the number of writers outstrips that of readers. Then there is the warning Ruby gives in one of his most memorable lines—“Exit: the well-wrought urn. Enter: AI.” Quoting a study which estimated that in the era of Reddit and X, Facebook and BlueSky we each read on average 100,000 words a day—though consider the quality of those words— Ruby hypothesizes that “‘poets’ are no longer generators of language but curators of the vast quantities of already-existing text.”
More words are produced and consumed today than at any point in human history. In the era of the content-creator versifier and of the found-text poem there might be something despairing about all of this dross, yet Ruby makes clear that the definition of poetry itself has always had contingencies, identifying what is verse and what isn’t eternally an issue of framing more than anything. Besides, that says nothing about whether or not we should write poetry, an activity that Ruby understands as a profound human act. He writes that “ultimately, the context of/Poetry is death,” because though “Immortality may be nothing/But a metaphor… so too/Is time. The future grimly shadowing/The present from which I am addressing you/Can only be seen if light from its own/Future shines on it.” Not just a human act, but an ethical one as well then. Maybe not so different from what Sidney was saying after all.
