In the razo to Context Collapse Ryan Ruby explains the reasons he wrote this verse essay and defines his terms. Like a lot of poets, Ruby has his own definition of a poem and he makes it clear from the beginning: "[A] poem is whatever a person recognized as a poet says is a poem." When you consider the rhyming quartets of Emily Dickinson and the Cantos of Ezra Pound, and of course see that they bear no resemblance to each other and yet are all considered "poems," Ruby's definition is not only palatable but pretty much spot on. (In the preface to my own latest collection of poetry I offered up my definition: poem: narrative written in verse form.) Ruby walks us through a history of poetry (the book's subtitle is "a poem containing a history of poetry" and that indefinite article is very deliberately placed there) from poets standing in Greek prosceniums millennia ago to Chat GPT today.
Ruby's intent was to make this a "mock-academic" poem and sometimes he succeeds at it. In the places where he doesn't it comes off as didactic snobbery and showing off. There's enough untranslated Greek, Russian, French, and German in Context Collapse to make non-mutilingual readers think he's telling them to take a hike. To say Ruby is provocative is putting it mildly. On Gertrude Stein:
If one were searching for a synthesis
Between these tendencies, one could be
found
In the writings of Gertrude Stein, who
ought -
More than Joyce, Proust, Kafka, or even
Pound -
To be regarded as the century's
Preeminent literary figure.
It's easy to imagine devotees of literary modernism going into fits of apoplexy after reading that, but Ruby offers up an explanation in subsequent verses (and footnotes) regarding a little-known paper Stein co-authored, "Normal Motor Automotism," an investigation into seeing if the hysteria that is shown in patients with a disorder then known as "double personality" could be artificially reproduced in normal people. He sums up the paper's conclusion with the last line of his verse being 'QED', which Latin speakers might recognize as "quod erat demonstrandum," often tacked onto the end of texts to signify that the author's point has been proven, end of discussion. (In addition to snobbery allow me to add self-congratulatory arrogance here.)
As Context Collapse moves from oration being the primary means of poetry dissemination, to stylus and papyrus, we eventually come to the printing press. Ruby seems to have an inexplicable loathing for Johannes Gutenberg, but then explains himself in footnote 33: "If the printing press takes off in Europe/ rather than in China, it has more to do/ with the relative modularity/ of the Latin alphabet and metal/ and sheer historical accident than with/ any special insight on Gutenberg's part." Ruby's a bit miffed that Chinese empress Deng Sui (and her eunuch Cai Lun) don't get the credit for inventing the printing press—theirs appeared centuries before Gutenberg's. (Ruby dismisses Gutenberg's press as a "contraption.") In the razo Ruby mentions that Context Collapse covers centuries in time and distance, "from San Francisco to Ganghwado,"—where in Korea another printing press appeared two centuries before it did in Mainz.
In Horace's Ars Poetica Horace says a poet's qualifications should include intellectual superiority, and Ruby's got it in spades. (Ed Simon, Editor-in-Chief for Belt Magazine, calls Context Collapse "ingenious.") I found very little to quibble with in Context Collapse, and I went through it as thoroughly as a bull-necked guard tossing an inmate's prison cell. "However it ultimately arrived," Ruby says of rhyming poetry, "the impact of Hispano-Arabic/ poetry cannot be overstated." María Rosa Menocal in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History writes that poetry was likely introduced into Christendom by slaves trafficked from Barbastro into Gascony by William VIII, and Ruby says this is the first instance of "the sustained use of rhyme in western literature." (William VIII reigned 1052-1086.) Poetry's main source of distribution around this time was the jongleur, taking the poems of the troubadours out on the road. Copyright law was still centuries away, but jongleurs were expected to attribute the troubadours, and the troubadours were expected to do the same if they "borrowed" a rhyme scheme from a fellow troubadour. It was on the honor system, and if the honor of poets then was anything like the honor of poets today, you can be sure some talentless hacks took credit for verse they never wrote (looking at you "John Kucera").
When I said I found very little to quibble with in Context Collapse, it doesn't mean I found nothing. Ruby refers to Baudelaire as the founder of modernism, and certainly there are a few people that might nod along with that claim. However, literary modernism wasn't really birthed until a few years after Baudelaire's death; it was born precisely when Eliot laid down the third line of Prufrock's Love Song. But with Ruby being Ruby, it's possible he meant this as more of a provocation than an homage. Ruby, like all of us, resents the prosecution of Baudelaire but looks at the monetary fine levied upon him as a down payment on future acknowledgment and fame (I do believe that Ginsberg's fair-to-middling poem Howl would have been better off at the time if Ginsberg had been convicted as well).
Pound said of his The Cantos it's "a poem containing history." Ruby explains the added indefinite article in Context Collapse's subtitle "a poem containing a history of poetry" as gesturing toward a comprehensiveness that it does not have. Ruby's actually selling himself a little short here (if that's possible), the dense poetics and prodigious use of footnotes in his two-hundred page poem packs as much poetic wallop as Pound's 800+ page unfinished opus. Both Pound and Ruby hit upon the Albigensian crusade (1209-1229), Ruby delving into how the troubadours fled east into Italy looking for new patrons, Pound calling it "a sordid robbery cloaking itself in religious pretense." Both works are highly ambitious; one has earned its place in the canon, the other most certainly will too.
Ruby appears as if he's trying to shoulder David Foster Wallace off the King-of-the-Footnote throne—in less than two-hundred pages he's got one-hundred and fifty two. The poem is on the verso page, the footnotes on the recto, bifurcating the readers attention and oddly forcing a more intense close reading (although it sometimes gets irritating in ways the author didn't intend). The footnotes do most of the heavy lifting in Context Collapse and provide much of the "mock-academic" tone. Footnote 57 on eighteenth century ballad revival, which saw:
juxtapositions
of vernacular
and archaic diction, iterable
refrains, the conscious use of
commonplaces,
and the feminine/homosocial
ethos of authorial imposture
typical of the epistemology
of their domestic/closeted sites
In the razo Ruby gives three reasons why he wrote Context Collapse, the third being "personal amusement." I have no doubt he amused himself greatly composing footnote 57.
"[H]e will go on to say, that, where language/ is concerned, perhaps no single factor/ is more responsible for its breakdown/ than the invention of the typewriter." That's Heidegger in his Parmenides lectures. Ruby, a classics scholar, often seems as if he's pining for a past that he never had—the days when poets and their audiences communed together without the interference of publishing houses, literary agents, Ingram, or, ack!, Amazon. (Introverted poets would have had a hard go of it in those classical good ol' days.) "Its fate was no doubt/ sealed centuries ago," Ruby says of poetry, "when it became/ a written form, and thus a potential/ commodity." There's mention made in Context Collapse of later poets who "had virtue/ of restoring verse to its autochthonous/ context as a kind of oral performance." including Edith Sitwell who set some of her poems to music. Poetry and songwriting are two separate endeavors, but Ruby almost seems as if he wants to meld the two. To look at it from the other side, who would enjoy sitting by the fire with a snifter of bourbon and opening up a leather bound hardback to read do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do?
Context Collapse closes up with a tornada, and the tornada opens up:
One day,
perhaps soon, an ice sheet the size
Of Greenland will melt into the ocean,
Contributing to a tide level rise
That will swallow Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh
City, Buenos Aires, and Miami.
Not long thereafter, desertification
May render whole swaths of Spain and Italy
Uninhabitable, having done so
Already to Morocco and Mali
After taking us through history, Ruby breaks out his crystal ball for a glimpse into the future to find high-flown drama, though to his credit he plays it in a minor key. It would be expected that someone as intelligent as Ruby would have more foresight than to try to predict the future, certainly the critics of the future will give him raspberries for the twenty-fifth anniversary reprinting of Context Collapse when Miami will not have been submerged by glacier water. (The UN climate scientist who told an Associated Press reporter that we only have ten years until climate disaster—in 1986—did so anonymously.) Ruby's ambitious and exhaustive gallop through poetic history (exhaustive even if it omits Shakespeare and Berryman's Dream Songs) shows us poetry's major turning point at moving from oral dissemination to printed—"the insurrection of the eye against the ear's empire" as he puts it. The digital dissemination of poetry today probably won't be looked back on as an insurrection in the future; Rupi Kaur's digital depictions of her poems are collected into paperback books that land on the same bestseller lists as John Grisham and Danielle Steel. In February of 2025 Barnes & Noble announced they will be opening sixty new bookstores. Print is still very much alive.
THE END
Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
