Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

by Ryan Ruby

Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.

Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the “gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”

Genres: Poetry, History, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Essays

147 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 14, 2025

Reviews

[Grant Bollmer · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you’re going to write a media theoretical essay about poetry in verse, it better be both a good theoretical argument and a good poem. This is the equivalent of a first year media studies PhD’s reductive, overly determinist reading of Kittler that hides its mediocrity by breaking up a bunch of otherwise prose-based footnotes with enjambment

[michal k-c · Rating 1 out of 5]

was thinking, maybe obviously, of Alexander Pope and the tradition of verse-criticism / verse-essayism, and (again, obviously) the key to writing the good stuff is caring as much or more about the verse than the crit. This is simply horrible poetry, and sometimes I would submit that it is actually just not poetry at all (in that there are stretches that seem to abandon any adherence to an idea of "poetics"). Just look at this self-contained tercet:

"And if, among them, our exclusive
Concern has been with one in particular,
It's because, ultimately, the context of"

The whole work turns on these absolutely vacuous remarks delivered with the authority of a genius (did you guys know that "the alphabet changes everything"?) An almost offensive work.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven't discovered Ryan Ruby by now, what are you waiting for? Follow him on Twitter @_ryanruby_ , and be sure to read this witty, intelligent, well-researched history of poetry. You can't go wrong! Ryan Ruby is a public intellectual extraordinaire!

Part 1: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFgCq5...

Part 2: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFgD4i...

[Dan Cassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever, cheeky, smarter than it has to be and often very funny. Sure, the history is written in pentameter, but the footnotes as well? Come on.

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

My brain is so little

[Zachary Swann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to claim I understood even 50% of what Ryan Ruby was saying in this book length poem about poetry and its evolution. There is liberal use of Latin, German, French, Italian, and Greek. The entire poem is accompanied by annotations that nearly equal its length. The tone is erudite and emphatic; I felt myself in the hands of a very, very smart guy who loves his subject. The book made me love poetry more as well, and I especially liked the parts about Renaissance Italy. Ruby also succeeds at writing about AI and the impact of our digital age upon writing in a manner that is satisfying and helpful and not annoying!

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart on multiple levels. Didn't really work as poetry for me, but as a quick survey of the evolution of the relationship between poet, text and audience, it's a great intro/refresher.

I did get a bit irritated by the refusal to provide translations. Felt like an affectation with theoretical justification that's mostly theoretical.

[Rebecca Libersat · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not for me, and I REALLY wasn't the reader for it. I've been out of academia too long to comprehend either the joke or the argument.

[Helen Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like (things like) this. didn’t understand everything (was v erudite) but appreciated:
- the form. an epic poem written in pentameter (how fun!) about the history of poetry (how informative!). non fiction content without the dryness. best thing about it was i learned stuff—the internet thinks the poem is bad and no better than wikipedia in crude verse but i’d rather read this than wikipedia.
- the layout. left hand page was for verse only, right hand for accompanying footnotes. everything had space to breathe, nice to look at.
- the up-to-dateness. ofc i enjoyed his bits on ancient greece (“the use of masks makes it clear that no one / on stage speaks in propria persona, / and thus no one is saying what he means”) but even better were the bits on chatgpt and “the fundamental irrelevance of / the writing subject in the manufacture / of the written product”.
- the objectivity. i feel like we (i?) see poetry as this untouchable/pure/human art form but this book situates it objectively as a product of technology (from the invention of the alphabet to the invention of the internet) and a part of the economy.
- the rupi kaur criticism, lol. (or criticism of what modern society reduces her to.) “what she ultimately provides is not certain words in a certain order … but rather the attention and behavioural data of her millions of followers/readers to instagram itself (and its owner, meta) and their b2b clientele.”
- the self-awareness. duh, in writing a poem about poetry, but also how brazen it was to say “poetry has no function in a market society”. the tongue-in-cheek pessimism reminded me of ovid.

[Elizabeth Branstetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“….ultimately, the context of poetry is death. Not that in such a war it could ever be victorious. The death of death? A trope. Mere metaphor. A play on words. Yet in futile resistance one discovers a justification for the cosmic error called consciousness, without which neither significance, matter nor mattering, meaning nor meaningfulness would even exist. Immortality may be nothing but a metaphor, but remember: so too is Time.”

A beautiful meditation on the history of poetry and her future. A joyfully researched and truly inspiring piece of critical media that is engaging and enlightening. The journey is gratifying and the boldness of paratext is thrilling for those who love a good footnote. This piece gives equal attention to past, present, and future, capitalizing on their elasticity and creating a timeline that is not strictly linear but a series of mutable impressions that invite thought that reinvigorates common conceptions of language, art, and criticism.

This text is going to be a wonderful reference for me in the future, I’m so glad I have it on my shelf!

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're looking for a comprehensive history of poetry, this is not the one. But Ruby instead offers a playful, clever reframing of poetry as the medium that most synchronously interacts with contemporanous technology and its extenuating developments/problems. With this in mind, we get a poem that unpacks the form's social role (or lack thereof) and the ways in which poetry theoretically precedes and presupposes our alienating era defined by presumed apocalypse and the ever-encroaching attention economy. All in free pentameter. A vibe. Moving tornada conclusion.

[Ludovica Ciasullo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non so se ho capito tutto e sarei interessata a leggere una versione in prosa del suo argomento, che riguarda la relazione fra tecnologia, incentivi economici e poesia, in un formato più semplice da seguire. non so se la sua teoria è originale, né ho gli strumenti per valutarne l'accuratezza, ma mi è sembrata molto interessante e la lettura è piacevole. ho letto qualche tratto ad alta voce e anche così mi sembrava di arrancare un po'. anche se da erudito sembra ogni tanto diventare pretenzioso, ne ho apprezzato l'(auto?)ironia

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. Three because the “poem” can’t be read as poetry. It lacks not only rhyme, but any consistent meter. Reading it aloud is like reading a computer manual or academic essay. The uptick of 1/2 because it is a very thoughtful, witty essay which deserves four stars.

The gist of Rubey‘s argument is that poems are written in the context of a culture. In the past poems were a meaningful presence in our culture. Today poetry is atomized into small groups of poets clustered around their individual journals. There are many more poets than readers. And poetry has no resonance with, no impact on, the broader social group we live in.

Historically, there is an argument that poetry has most often been restricted to a small group. Chaucer wrote his poetry for a small circle of the English court. Shakespeare’s plays had a large audience, but his poetry had a smaller distribution. Yet there have been many poets whose poems became part of the culture. For example, Yeats, Auden, and Frost. Ruby fears poetry has now permanently lost its place in our wider culture.

[Max · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't read this book, I just think it's funny to give Ryan Ruby one star

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wrote a spicy review of this and sent it off for publication, we'll see if anyone bites.

[remarkably · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is rly purely subjective and rather inchoate — I am not a scholar of poetry (astaghfirullah!) and I don't have a worked-out analysis and I don't intend to develop one, but I hated the experience of reading this and I wish to record this impression here. from these sentences you can probably infer the kind of reader that I am, and you are thus welcome to disregard the rest of my thoughts.

first off this is obviously no kind of 'history of poetry'. if it is anything it is an extremely theory-brained argument about how technological mediation drives poetic expression in certain contexts, using largely cherry-picked and predictable examples, but I realise that 'A Selective Account of A Few Western Poetic Movements Through The Lens of Writing But Also Climate Change and AI Et Cetera' does not sound cool on a book cover.

thus this raises several knee-jerk responses in me. for one thing, this is obviously no kind of 'poem' either. the 'poetry' herein is dire and leaden and not particularly worthy of the name; the ten-syllable lines with no attention to metrics read horribly, just intensely unpleasantly; the over-referencing of flash-in-the-pan contemporary scholars is unspeakably tedious; the line breaks are so distractingly arch,

The science of acoustics was still in
Utero and the phase velocity

like yeah yeah sure irony blah blah artificial constraints et cetera subverting something or other interpretative labour something but what is this doing at root? there is no consistent acoustic or semantic function to the line-breaking; all it is doing is saying, 'this is poetry', while the prose rolls on underneath.

for another thing, there is something unbelievably tiresome about enumerating, smugly, in the preface, all the non-western traditions that you intend not to cover due to yr lack of expertise therein, which in any case is ridiculous! as an acknowledgement of scope — 'I know I'm excluding most of the historic poetic traditions of the world, but somehow that doesn't undermine my project at all' — and then proceeding to make luridly sweeping claims e.g.

The alphabet changes everything,
But not immediately. On continents
Unknown to the Phoenician mariner,
In languages that did not yet exist,
Reading aloud would be an important
Mode of transmission until well into
The nineteenth century.

and then footnoting this with like, of course I am aware that 'traces of oral tradition survive into the present', here is a citation of Kamau Braithwaite on Caribbean 'nation languages', does that please you now, woke critic. but like, this does not assuage the objections of the woke critic! this retains all of the assumptions of a center-periphery model of literary history, just with a land acknowledgement thrown in to make you feel better about it! the dominant thrust of the narrative remains the 'Eurocentric' one! you do have to decide whether you are having your cake or eating it! (at least in the ebook edition I read, Caribbean was also mis-spelled in this footnote, which was just infuriating. anyway I am not convinced about the nineteenth century thing even for Europe but.) please try.

in any case very funny to do an entire book of soporific technological-economic determinism and then end, in the tornada (blackening the good works of my beloved Occitan troubadours ... smh ...), with However Poetry Despite Being A Media Technology Whatever That Means Is Really Humanistically About Death and Finitude, poetry is death, poetry is resistance to meaninglessness. have cake eat cake. EAT CRITICS INSTEAD

[BooksRgood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll try to avoid pleonasm here:
so much of this was over my head or under my toes - outside of my body in one way or another. while that was frustrating and led to some skimming, I enjoyed my confusion and wonder and the occasional times I felt I had the proper frame of reference to appreciate what Ruby's laying down here. Plus it's about poetry and also I laughed sometimes!

Some new words and some passages:

paratext - material that surrounds the published main tax supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers.

pleonasm - the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning. (e. g. see with one’s eyes.)

incunabula - an early printed book pamphlet or broadside, printed prior to the year 1500.

Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence, poses an audience, whereas the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poets utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.
John Stuart Mill

To the precise extent that a poem calls for exegesis to be understood, it’s attempts at communication are genuine.

Film would come to exert the same downward pressure on the novel that the novel wants exerted on narrative, poetry, extemalizing its proprietary "hallucination" function. Faced with this threat, the novel makes a tactical retreat into the form's unfilmable features, interiority and abstraction.
When obsolescence becomes medium specific, the novel becomes poetic, and poetry, pushed further to the margins of culture, crosses the margin of language itself, into terra incognita.
In the words of critic Viktor Shklovsky.
Eliot states the case in similar terms:
We can ... say that it appears... that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity and this variety and complexity... must produce various and complex results.
[Accordingly] the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language
into his meaning. [Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc'd. / Tereu]


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

[Differengenera · Rating 2 out of 5]

[420th review]

a basically fine impressionistic essay offering a run-down of the macroeconomic headlines of what the Anglo-American poetic canon lays claim to, from Homer to the present. the line breaks, associative flourishes, uses of Italian, French, Russian, Latin, blurbs and introductory materials are trying to convince you that it's poetry, but it is not, it is line-broken cultural criticism:

'Yet again these innovative writers
found themselves marching in step with,
rather
than bucking global trends, in this instance,
the shift from a manufacturing-based
to an information-based economy'.

It concludes with a short inventory of what climate change - and / or an hypothesised hostile Artificial Intelligence - will entail for the future of human life on earth and it comes across as an attempt to invest alt-ac lit crit with intense social stakes:

'The machine intelligences we've built

And programmed to pursue exclusively
Instrumental goals, one day determine
That the concerns of humans, especially

With their own survival, are, in the end,
Suboptimal. Since it is probable
That at least one of these events will happen,

Let us ask ourselves a rhetorical
Question. To whom would it even matter?
Not in fact, to the acidised molecules

Of water that once composed a glacier

[...]

The death of death? A trope. Mere metaphor.

A play on words. Yet in futile resistance
One discovers a justification
For the cosmic error called consciousness,

Without which neither signification
Nor significance, matter nor mattering,
Meaning nor meaningfulness would even

Exist. Immortality may be nothing
But a metaphor, but remember: 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'.

It would have been a perfectly decent essay

[John Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was like a granola bar: enjoyed the full bites of it and lots of interesting stuff in it, but hard to say what all the pieces were separately. At times the academic material outweighed the poetry and in other parts it was vice versa. There were several snippets of untranslated language that took me out of the reading experience but otherwise very enjoyable/interesting poetry even at its densest. On the whole it worked for me.

[K. Spicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book through twice and am tempted to go in for a third round.

It is a lyrical and memorable examination of poetry's history and future that urges the reader to consider some of the grandest and most difficult questions of philosophy and the universe:
-what is art?
-what is language?
-what is humanity?
-why does any of it matter?

[Coty Dangleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was really exciting. I'm glad I made the effort to read before a prose history of poetry type of book because this stimulates the imagination in a way somehow only poetic form is able to do distinct from prose (surprisingly not mentioned in here but maybe beyond its scope or I just missed it). But yeah lots of fun, but also makes me not take prose non-fiction for granted as much.

[Julien L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nonsensical to write a review after a first read. Gotta read it again to fully grasp it. Needless to say Ruby is one of the most intelligent thinkers in today's world.

[Karen Carlson]

Every time I try a poetry book, I regret it - but I still keep trying. This sounds really interesting. h/t a random retweet by jaycel on https://x.com/MAOrthofer/status/18668...

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry and fire
(forged our forebears’
(early media—
(the alphabet
(would come
(and change it all)))))

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun and scholarly work that does what it says on the tin. I liked reading it and it sent me in a lot of different directions looking stuff up. Is poetry the canary in the coal mine for changing communication technologies impacting our society? I don't know if it's a leading indicator, but it indicates. I hear that information overload is shifting us back towards an oral culture ("wine-dark sea", "crooked Hillary"), so it's worth reviewing how things went the last time.