Context Collapse is a very bad poem.

Ryan Ruby's failed experiment is mere discourse poetry.

If Context Collapse is a “mock-academic” poem, akin to the mock-heroic of Pope’s Dunciad, as Ryan Ruby says it is, in what he insists on calling a dozen times the “paratext” at the start, then I’m a grapefruit. Context Collapse is littered with German and Greek, and full of references to Pound and Auerbach, but none of its heavy learning or preening submission to literary theory can make the word mock in this context mean anything other than humorous imitation. Alas, Context Collapse lacks wit, as this representative quotation from the poem’s third section makes clear,

Thus considered—i.e., as a human
Technology in a world where manuscripts
Remained time consuming and expensive
To copy—the jongleur at least satisfied
One of the criteria typically
Associated with publication,
Viz., dissemination. Authorial
Recognition, by contrast, would prove more
Elusive.

In the paratext, Ruby says that those who suspect that he chopped up a prose essay into metered lines should “perform the experiment of “restoring” its lines to prose and read the results.” Let’s try it, shall we?

Thus considered—i.e., as a human technology in a world where manuscripts remained time consuming and expensive to copy—the jongleur at least satisfied one of the criteria typically associated with publication, viz., dissemination. Authorial
recognition, by contrast, would prove more elusive.

We do not seem to be dealing here with Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa, but rather its opposite: not prose than falls naturally into the forms of poetry, but poetry that it neither authentic nor mock, and falls naturally into the very familiar forms of a narrow sect of modern literary criticism. Read aloud, the problems of Ruby’s poetry are clarified: he has no verse. It is not possible to recite this as anything other than prose, flat prose, the prose of leaden journals. He has no line, no flow, no feel for the words that ought break the ends of lines like waves. This is not, in any sense, good poetry. Lines like “One of the criteria typically/ Associated with publication” cannot be defended as anything other than prose. It lacks all rhythm.

If this is all a joke, a sort of Kingsley Amis writes pseudo-academic footnotes exercise, then it falls rather flat. There’s nothing very funny about saying “viz. dissemination”. (Ruby uses “viz.” some nine times. He seems so fond of this archaic academicism that I half expected him to write, as Cowper once did in a letter, “viz myself”.)

Other typical aspects of this endeavour are apparent in that extract, viz. cliche. “Thus considered—i.e.”; “time consuming and expensive”; “at least satisfied one”; “typically associated”; “by contrast, would prove more elusive”. In the mock heroics of Pope and Dryden we labour in the delights of constant invention; in the “mock academic” of Ruby we can take our ease in the familiar. Perhaps the low-point of combining cliches of both expression and thought with witless academicism comes in these lines.

On the other hand, as any Genius
[Sic] could tell you, it was a Golden Age.

Putting sic after the word genius is the sort of thing Pope would have cruelly mocked, not the art out of which he made his poetry. Putting it after the line break is the sort of thing that would have made Johnson dyspeptic. Lest you think I am picking too carefully at the small bones of this carcass, here’s footnote 18.

Toward the end of the twelfth century,
the main debate in troubadour poetics
was between the “styles” of the trobar clus
(closed form) and the trobar leu (light form).
As the tenso (see Fn. 25)
between Raimbaut and Giraut de Bornelh shows,
the two styles track neatly, if imperfectly,
the class compositions of their producers
and their audiences. Although composed
in the vernacular, the trobar clus
was intended, according to Erich
Auerbach, for a circumscribed social
class. An esoterische Liebesspiel
with firmly defined terminology,
the übermaßig geformten trobar clus
reveled in obscurity, paradox,
and games of a dialectical nature.
Later, when this aristocracy went
into terminal decline, troubadours
began to write for other audiences,
simplifying their forms accordingly.
Those who remained loyal to trobar clus
adopted a more defensive posture:
snobbery: the ideological
Zuflucht of every shrinking circle
of formerly bevorzugter Menschen.

This is not so much mock academic as an act of sycophantic criticism. The essence of the mock epic is the use of a high form to satirise a low subject: Ruby takes his subject, and himself, far too seriously. This is not a parody but a witless pastiche. The nervous repetition of “paratext” in the Preface satirises nothing: it is all quite serious. Context Collapse isn’t mock academic, it is sub-academic. It’s a long essay of the sort Ruby usually writes, written in the prose style we might expect, but with a fruit-salad approach taken to certain “poetic” features: italicised foreign words, impressive names, footnotes that refer to other footnotes, all laden with a imitation-nineteenth-century adoration of viz, inter alia, pace, and so on.

This is about as funny as it gets.

Dante
Wrote twenty-five sonnets to the dead wife
Of a prominent banker. A wise move
On his part, it turns out, in more ways than
One.

This might have made a half-decent tweet or a dinner-party line, but the mock form relies on wit, not familiar witticisms. (At one point, in what is surely an admission of defeat, Ruby says, in brackets, pun intended.) Notice, too, the ragged line breaks, that hang like branches after a storm. This flippancy is evident in the lines of argumentation as well, viz.

Paper. Moveable type. Quantitative
Technological accelerations
Which break a qualitative barrier—
When, exactly? Impossible to say.
By millecinquecento at the latest,
With the twilight of the incunabula,
Europe’s first mass-produced commodities.

The rather tired “quantitative/qualitative” parallel aside, and overlooking the needless use of millecinquecento, which acts less as mock-academic than an academic disguise, the description of early printed books as “mass-produced commodities” is no great revelation. Like everything else in this passage it casually overstates the historical position in modern language, using supposedly poetic trappings to distract from the fact that these lines are rather pointless. Mock heroic was made with the art of concision; Pope’s language is powerfully compressed. Context Collapse feels like an unravelling jumper sleeve in comparison.

One day in 1336, Petrarch Climbs
Mont Ventoux with a tiny volume
Of Confessiones Augustini
To enjoy the view, get in a daydream
Or two about Laura. On the horizon:
Rebirth.

So often in passages like this, Ruby sounds less like Pope and more like a humourless Clive James.

It is not just the foreign words and academic abbreviations that get italicised. So does the phrase Market forces. Ah yes, here is the point. What the world needs now is another account of how capitalism corrupted art.

poets, now
Reliant on sales to survive, get thrown
Overboard into the shark-infested
Waters of the nascent book trade, where they faced
The unscrupulous business practices
Of booksellers and printers, the censor’s
Career-ending wrath, the reputation-
Ruining vindictiveness of reviewers,
And (as if all that weren’t bad enough)
Throat-cutting competition from a horde
Of proletarianized hacks who’d spent
The century since Robinson Crusoe
Demonstrating proof of concept for a new
Prose genre: the novel.

What can we say of this? The line breaks tip over archly on important words (thrown, infested, censor’s, horde), like eyebrows raised expectantly as a bon mot is in progress, or a “not many people know this” anecdote is unfurled. By this stage it is hard not to see the poem as anything other than a string of cliches: “reliant on to survive”, “thrown overboard”, “shark infested”, “nascent trade”, “unscrupulous business”, “career-ending”, “vindictive reviewers”, “as if that weren’t bad enough”, “throat-cutting competition”, “proof of concept”. That Ruby’s presentation of capitalism, market forces, and other familiar baddies, is derived from literary, rather than economic scholarship, is well-demonstrated by this footnote. (Yes, they are all like this.)

It is hard to imagine a purer
expression of the capitalist mode
of production than the eighteenth century
novel of circulation, frequently
narrated by commodities that “spy”
on their owners. (Except perhaps for today’s
intelligent virtual assistants,
i.e., Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s
Alexa, which have made this particular
nightmare real.) A popular sub-genre,
“the specie narrative,” starred the medium
of exchange itself. Cf. The Adventures
of a Bank-Note (of a Silver Penny,
Sixpence, Shilling, Rupee, etc.)

I will stop the cliche counting, partly because it is unfair on Ruby, mostly because it is exhaustingly dull. It is simply unbearable to carry on at this point. In the Preface, Ruby writes, “Context Collapse deprioritizes many of the features we tend to associate with poetry—troping, image formation, self-expression”. But as you can see from this footnote, and from the other quotations, this poem is one long trope. It is a piece of discourse poetry and little more.

As well as being an affront to the reader, this line of thought ought to be grounds for a reevaluation of Ruby as a critic. He says that “rhetoric, argumentation, historicization, etc.” are things “we more readily associate with nonfiction prose.” Well, no, they are not, not in the tradition of poetry in which he is writing. But, by pretending that this mode is dead (though he cites several other modern poets who have written verse essays) Ruby can say this,

My reasons for reactivating this largely forgotten and putatively archaic genre in the third decade of the twenty-first century are threefold: to draw attention to poetry’s participation in the contemporary information economy, to defamiliarize literary criticism by writing it in a nonstandard form, and for personal amusement.

How, one wonders, can something putatively archaic be reactivated? What does it even mean for a poetic form to be “reactivated”? Is this an intentional allusion to “deactivating” social media accounts, or just another over-reaching of vocabulary beyond content, another disguise of grandiosity? There is enough cant pseudo-jargon here to make a new Dunciad.

Ruby doesn’t bother to define “information economy” because, in Context Collapse, all that is required is that he speaks in the tropes of his left-wing, literary-theoretical sect. The grandeur of his ambition has distracted him from seeing the absurdity in his claims: Context Collapse must be one of the most familiar acts of literary criticism I have ever read. At this stage, even the word defamiliarize has become frustratingly familiar. The only word that fits Ruby’s writing here is haughty. Indeed, I wondered seriously if Ruby knew how haughty he was, and was in fact mocking himself.

新日日新: Modernism’s motto
May have first appeared as an inscription
On the bathtub of Emperor Cheng Tang
A thousand years before the alphabet
Arrived in Greece, but, as ideas are wont
To do, it reemerged in the early
Twentieth century to serve needs closer
At hand, viz., product differentiation
On a glutted literary market
More and more subject to the centrifugal
Pressures of mechanical reproduction¹

A rare sighting in this poem: a line that scans! A thousand years before the alphabet. Alas, that it is unpoetic. For all his erudition, Ruby often slips to the Wikipedia level (like his recent essay about Alexander Pope). Footnote 75, which is appended to some lines about “improved Methods for storing and distributing Texts”, reads: “Result: the supply curve shifts to the right.” There is nothing worthwhile of poetry or analysis here. Yes, technology means we can make more books. Yes, in your first ten minutes of learning economics you will see this called a supply curve shift to the right. No, that is not a clever, useful, or poetic footnote. This is the perpetual problem with Context Collapse. Ruby isn’t saying anything very new, and he needs something to do with all that research. Nor is he saying anything in a new way, viz. all those cliches, the use of inter alia, pace, Russian lettering, and so on. So the whole trick is to keep up the density of allusion. The appeal is to people who agree with him. It’s a game, not a poem. If you believe that mid-century creative writing departments were “A neofeudal archipelago/ Rising with the neoliberal tide”, then you will surely enjoy this poem. If you enjoy poetry, you will not.

At times this results in lines that are sure to be quoted by posterity, as examples of the desiccated intellectual and stylistic dead-ends our times forced themselves into,

Anglophone modernism,
Esp. in its classical mode,
Ramifies the poem, complicates it,
Occulting its meanings, which are at once
Overdetermined and indeterminate,
But to the precise extent that a poem
Calls for exegesis to be understood,
Its attempts at communication are
Genuine.

Ruby deserves something like a high-brow equivalent of the Bad Sex Award for that. Italicising communication is *chefs-kiss*, and the phrase “occulating its meanings” has the distinction of being an unintentional self-satire. “Overdetermined and indeterminate” means nothing. Presumably to the precise extent that Ruby ceaselessly calls for exegesis of his own poem, his attempts to communicate are no doubt genuine. Those attempts are, none the less, failures, viz. poetry, art, beauty, and originality. Context Collapse is an insistence: not an argument, not a poem.

The sort of critical ideas Ruby has been for so long the epitome are revealed here as narrow and myopic. The weight of his learning cannot conceal the lightness of his ideas, nor can the extent of the literary scholarship cited make-up for the lack of any outside influences. This is, in many ways, the Dunciad of the modern Theory writers, but the victim of Ruby’s mock mockery is himself.²

After the great poetry of the eighteenth century, but before Romanticism, came the Age of Crabbe. Crabbe was a good poet, but he was no original. He produced reams of rhymed couplets, all in the style of the previous generations. He epitomises an exhausted aesthetic. After a century of Dryden, Pope, Johnson, & co., Crabbe sounded the same but lesser. It was much like the early twentieth century before modernism. Readable, enjoyable, capable, at times rather wonderful, but nothing new, nothing exciting. Minor.

That’s what Ruby has done. He has written what might become the defining poem of our own Age of Crabbe. (The “Era of information overload”.) The problem is that he doesn’t recognise this. He is far too grand. There was one sublime piece of wit in Context Collapse, which is the dedication, to the poets of the future. Pope himself couldn’t have satirised this book better.

In the Life of Pope, Johnson said that “it was the felicity of Pope to rate himself at his real value.” Alas that Ruby lacks Pope’s felicity in all ways.

1. There are other moments when the joke is surely, knowingly, made by Ruby upon himself,

In other words,
“[It] faces a Malthusian limit,”
An unavoidable, “catastrophic
[C]alculus: the rate of consumption quickly
[H]its an arithmetic limit (any
[Individual] can only read so much),
[B]ut the rate of production is increasing
[G]eometrically.”

Can this be anything other than self-absurd?

2. Here’s another typical example of the clever-sounded but ultimately redundant writing that defines this “poem”.

When the set of producers overlaps
The set of consumers in an Euler
Diagram of the literary field,
The centrifuges of innovation
Spin that much more quickly, actualizing
And exhausting the potential resources
Of the medium, as the rapacious
Scramble to lay one’s claim to novelty
Comes to operate under conditions
Of informational saturation