[Seven Stories Press; 2024]
To quote 30 Rock, “Grad students are the worst.” They have taken the old maxim to “stay in school, kids” a little too literally, have made being a nerd into a source of health insurance. Given America’s deep-seated anti-intellectualism, made especially pronounced in recent years with more and more vicious attacks on the university voiced in the public sphere, it is sometimes difficult to remember that academics are, in fact, very passionate people who are consumed by some problem or question to the point of obsession. As someone at the tail end of his graduate school career (blissfully all-but-dissertation, but not so blissfully on the academic job market for the first time), I could not help but respond to Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse on a personal level, no matter how seemingly “impersonal” the text might seem.
The entire book is a poem written as an essay in blank verse with lines of loose iambic pentameter. It has been described as a “mock academic” essay because it plays with the conventions of academic writing (formal diction, footnotes, citations etc.), while the chatty and digressive tone as well as the verse form harken back to genres pre-dating peer review. The book consists of seven chapters along with a foreword and epilogue, tracking the development of poetry from pre-Homeric incantations to contemporary instapoetry, with pit stops in the medieval troubadour culture (the birthplace of our idea of the “lyric”) and the modernist “make it new” aesthetic laboratory. Indeed, avid poetry readers might be surprised to see Rupi Kaur mentioned in the concluding chapter alongside contemporary avant-garde poets such as Cathy Park Hong and Christian Bök: All of them, in their own way, respond to the contemporary moment of poetic market oversaturation. Market and technological forces are at the heart of Ruby’s analysis: How does poetry change in different social roles and contexts? How do different technologies and audience expectations shape poetry, and what happens when we think of poetry itself as a technology? How does the audience shape the poem? These questions arise immediately, beginning with the emergence of oral poetry. Ruby focuses on the Ancient Greek context, including quotes from the original language of the poetry he discusses, as he will throughout:
At first, the question of the audience
Is quite simple: where should it be seated?
The science of acoustics was still in
Utero and the phase velocity
Of the voice of the ἀοιδός
By architecture that was not designed
For amplification. As a τόπος,
The campfire retains a durable grip
On our imaginations, suggesting
Enviable nomadic fellowship—
More likely it was the blood-spattered altar
Or the controlled burn of the domestic hearth,
Whether those of the mudbrick “little rooms”
That punctuated maritime trade routes
In the eastern Mediterranean,
Or else those of the high-roofed μεγάροις
In the palaces of late Bronze Age kings,
That served as the empyreal backdrops
For early poetic performances.
This playful, yet at times purposefully mocking pretentious and obtuse tone persists throughout the book. Normally when I write a review for a more public-facing outlet, I bring to the table my training as a literature graduate student, adding citations and analytical tangents (dutifully combed into a more presentable form by patient editors). So let’s first situate Context Collapse within a larger set of generic expectations.
The book’s resurrection of the poetic essay form (the “largely forgotten and putatively archaic genre,” as Ruby calls it) is reflective of a longer trend in American letters, that of poets existing in proximity to universities as instructors and scholars. Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s recent Academic Avant-Gardes (2023) analyzes poets such as Jorie Graham and Susan Howe whose relationship with academia, such as teaching and research, became central sources of inspiration in their work. The mock academic essay lives in the same neighborhood as campus novels such as Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, providing a non-specialist audience an insight into the workings of the “ivory tower” and giving a face to the neurotic individuals that comprise “higher education.” Another generic fellow-traveler is Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous novel-but-not-quite Pale Fire, a long poem by the fictional John Shade and a digressive and misleading commentary by his old friend Charles Kinbote. All of these observations notwithstanding, however, Ruby has beat me to the punch: He already cites Andrews’s monograph in one of the poem’s many footnotes! Because my typical strategies don’t quite work, I will artificially divide myself into Venya-the-academic and Venya-the-poet to capture in full the peculiarities of engaging with Context Collapse.
To discuss Context Collapse as an academic, I welcome the (in many ways) provocative thesis it advances: that poetry is not some ahistorical constant that exists throughout times and cultures. While there is nothing wrong in ahistorical personalized readings (indeed, to write poetry one must at times muster up some ahistorical hubris), I am suspicious of anyone who would claim that there is only one poetry throughout human history, that what Sappho and Li Bai write performs the same social and aesthetic function as a text written by Claudia Rankine or John Ashbery. While such historicizing is one of the marks of good scholarship, it is also useful for readers outside of the academy to recognize the historical and cultural gap between themselves and the texts they read (not that this should limit our enjoyment!). As someone currently writing a dissertation about modernist poetry, I want to thank Ryan Ruby (hello!) for his good citation practices. In the book’s extensive bibliography, I found two sources relevant to my personal research (e.g., Hannah Sullivan’s The Work of Revision and Daniel Tiffany’s My Silver Planet). In this respect, Context Collapse acts like other quasi-academic works such as Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: While perhaps too broad and “literary” to be cited as secondary literature in an article, it becomes useful for its wide bibliography. Further, while Ruby does avoid total Eurocentricism in his account, mentioning, for instance, the Arabic influence on medieval European troubadour culture (including the word “troubadour” itself), he does tell a story of primarily Western poetic traditions. As the foreword helpfully reminds us, in the book’s subtitle (“a poem containing a history of poetry”) “the second indefinite article is deliberate”:
Context Collapse gestures at a comprehensiveness it does not in fact have. It covers nearly three thousand years and stretches from San Francisco to Ganghwado, but leaves out a number of traditions, including but not limited to the poetry of the ancient Near East, Indian classical poetry, the Chinese poets of the Tang and Song dynasties, the Japanese poets of the Edo period, non-European-Arabic and Persian poetry, and the poetries of Africa, South America, and Australia. Even within the historical and geographical space of Europe and North America that is its focus, major figures and movements are either touched on only cursorily, or not at all.
Of course, the non- or mock-academic orientation of the text absolves it from objections that would be raised in the peer review process. Indeed, Ruby plays with subjectivity, both claiming it and absolving himself from it, spending the conclusion of the chapter “proving” that Gertrude Stein is the premier poet of her generation, concluding his “argument” with the following:
Stein drowns the syntax that Marinetti
Had failed to destroy through decimation,
Giving literature—as opposed to
Psychiatry—its first glimpse at what occurs,
In Barthes’s notorious paraphrase, when
C’est le langage qui parle [[et]] pas l’auteur.
Now do you agree? Anyhow. QED.
As a literary, non-academic work, Context Collapse—although at times dense and perhaps a little too self-referential, containing seemingly performative long footnotes (at times longer than the primary text itself)—still remains guided by a fundamentally human obsession to find one’s footing in a new context, a renewed sense of community. In the foreword to the one poem, one of the first self-conscious paratexts that the reader encounters (Ruby winkingly acknowledges that “some will read this paratext before proceeding to the text; some will return to it to read after they have finished; some will read it instead of the text; some will ignore it altogether”), the author describes his text thus:
It is, in a way, a record of an eighteen-month-long program of independent study and reeducation undertaken in my thirty-fifth year when, like many before me, I found that I had lost my youthful taste for poetry, and wanted it back. Unable at first to orient myself in the vast labyrinth of contemporary Anglophone poetry, I decided to find my way to the present again by retracing the steps we’ve taken to get here, following a single thread around the blind corners and dead ends of history.
This admission reminds the reader that beyond the poem’s seeming abstraction and analytic distance stands a curious and anxious human who is merely trying to learn about his favorite topic. The “nerdiness” of Ruby’s approach grounds this wide-sweeping book within a personal, particular context: that of one limited person’s attempt to understand his contemporary poetry scene, not a work aspiring to any “objectivity” (which, to be honest, not even “real” scholarship can hope to reach). In this respect, most impactful was the concluding section on the contemporary moment of “context collapse” and the tornada-epilogue. Ruby’s story ends on a less-than-cheery note by talking about the looming threat of generative AI and the question of what it means for poetry to have a non- or post-human audience. The epilogue departs from the form of the larger poem, turning to the old Occitan form of the tornada, characteristically used for conclusions. After depicting a world swept up in climate change-related catastrophes that threaten the very conditions necessary to human life, Ryan reemerges to reassert the value of poetry as reminding us of our engagement with others:
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,
But was conceived in a still more distant past,
Opening the circuit through which the question
Of the audience is disclosed at last.
For a book of admirable scope and erudition, Context Collapse ends with a moment of human connection, reaching out to some unknown reader. Though we must, as the late Fredric Jameson reminds us, always historicize, this very embeddedness in a historical moment is the one universal. In other words, though always different and dependent on its context, poetry, in Ruby’s view, is always a deeply human activity.
Venya Gushchin is a poet, literary translator, and PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus; Action, Spectacle; Midway Journal; No, Dear; and elsewhere.
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