The Age Demanded My Fellow Critics

Ryan Ruby is well known for his literary criticism – often of literary criticism itself. Indeed, he is above all a critic’s critic. In his ‘A Year in Reading’ for The Millions in 2023, he notes his ‘professional concern’ for ‘reading the work of my fellow critics’, listing books by John Guillory, George Scialabba, Dan Sinykin, Emily Ogden, Sheila Liming and A.V. Marraccini as his picks for the year. He has tweeted that ours might even be a ‘golden age of popular criticism’, given some of the new affordances of the world wide web. 

Critics tend to be not only reflectors but explainers. Insofar as they are called upon to give reasons for their judgements – which often include considerations about style, insight, consistency, and originality – explanation is non-negotiable. Such explanations are not merely reflexive but also justificatory: because of this and that this is that is the critic’s unavowed-yet-absolute article of faith. This reflexo-explanatory-justificatory fusion likely constitutes the critical déformation professionelle par excellence (if you’ll pardon the lapse into French), and entails, à la Ted Hughes’ shark, that one often finds critics tracking the most minimal trace of blood to their own sides. (Perhaps in the current epoch, whose mania for quantification is only rivalled by its disdain for egalité, we could nominate the basic unit of criticism the REJ, and use it to provide evidence-based assessments of criticism itself: ‘this is a 3-REJ critical piece’, ‘this critic has a REJ average of 10 per season’, ‘this review gets 2 REJs to the gallon’, etc.)  

So it’s no surprise that Context Collapse: a poem containing a history of poetry opens with a dense seven-page ‘Razo’ at once reflecting upon, explaining, and justifying the subsequent 220 or so pages of this ‘verse essay’. Ruby dixit: ‘I offer the following remarks about Context Collapse with the aim of explaining some of my compositional choices and anticipating a few questions about the poem’ (my emphasis). That a poem begins with a prose explainer is by no means a new or even aberrant phenomenon: in English, one might think of the ‘Argument’ and ‘Note’ that the printer enjoined John Milton to append to his masterpiece Paradise Lost, or of the ‘Advertisement’ and then the famous ‘Prefaces’ that William Wordsworth inserted into Lyrical Ballads, or, in another European language, of the ‘Preface’ that the editors of Cosmopolis demanded from Stéphane Mallarmé for his radical 1897 experiment in poetic typography, Un Coup de dés. (I don’t mention these personages idly, by the way; all make significant appearances in this book.) 

The term razo comes from anthologies of medieval troubadour verse, the word itself from the old Occitan for ‘reason’ or ‘cause’. Typically linked with the vidas, sketches of a singer’s life, from which they are not rigorously distinguished, razos provide compressed accounts of the circumstances of the poem’s composition. In Duncan Hose’s formulation, ‘They are prose pieces which pimp the lyric, lending it the glamour of a living thing’, functioning more as ‘mythic configurations’ than as matters of sober fact. Take the extraordinary razo (cited in Giorgio Agamben’s essay glossing ‘corn’) that introduces the world-historical rap-battle between Arnaut Daniel and his two eminent rivals: ‘Raimon de Durfort and Lord Turc Malec were two knights from Quercy who composed the sirventes about the lady called Milday n’Aia, the one who said to the knight that she would not love him if he did not corn her in the arse.’ Succinct, scabrous, salacious, the razo’s typically a primer for the sizzling scriptural raillery to come.  

Let’s underline, first, that the traditional razo is informative but holds something in reserve; if it gives salient details of subjects and their places, their topical means and ends, it never tells all. Ruby’s razo, however, is not that: it distends itself from one earnestly diligent paragraph to the next. Second, let’s also add that razos and vidas were typically supplied by others, long after the death of the singers themselves; when the performers were alive, they’d have needed no such introduction. This clearly isn’t the case here, either – although these days the living on occasion introduce themselves as if they were already dead, or as if they were the posthumous editors of their own work. 

If razos aren’t typically about giving an extended justification of the particular deep history of the genre of the poem itself, maybe this mutation is nonetheless continuous with the general spirit of our own critical golden age? Consulting the Wikipedia page for the Drake-Kendrick Lamar-J. Cole feud of 2024 seems to confirm this possibility: on the one hand, it serviceably describes an exchange of invective every bit as intense and inventive as those of the warlord singers we now call the troubadours; on the other, it’s as off-kilter and over-bristling with references as an anthology of cultural studies autoethnographies. 

Is this what Ruby means by ‘context collapse’? (Just collapse, did it? Oh that cheeky context!) Not so fast, dear readers! For the answer to that question, Ruby teases, ‘you will have to continue reading to the end’. In the interim, thankfully, there’s always a subtitle to orient us. This is ‘a poem containing a history of poetry’, a post-colonic addendum functioning like that of any Anglo-American academic article in the humanities for the past fifty years. But that’s no surprise, either: in Ruby’s words, ‘Context Collapse is mock-academic in the way The Dunciad is mock-heroic’. Alexander Pope, confronted by Milton’s Paradise Lost – which appeared to him as at once the apotheosis and exhaustion of the epic, that most ancient, encyclopaedic and prestigious of genres – ingeniously responded by continuing the genre of ‘heroic verse’ by means of its satirical inversion. Does Ruby mean, then, that he’s intending to continue the work of academia by other means?  

The subtitle does after all promise us ‘a history of poetry’. In other words, this is not just a poem, or even a poem about other poems, but a poem about temporally-marked ideas about a genre. But before we get onto that thorny issue: why specify, let alone write, a poem containing ‘a history’ at all? The ‘Razo’ expressly nominates Ezra Pound’s massive post-epic The Cantos as an authorising precursor, which Pound himself determined as ‘a poem containing history’. But ‘a poem containing history’ is a completely different concern from ‘a poem containing a history of poetry’ – indeed, a completely different kind of concern.  

Pound was obsessed with poetry, not just with ideas about poetry, and his use of the word ‘containing’ is heavily freighted with both poetry and history. The Cantos ‘contain history’ in the very direct sense of being nourished by ‘real events that actually happened’ (if I can put it like that) as well as by how those events are told. This division within history becomes at once fuel and target for Pound’s poetry. Indeed, Pound – like his detested progenitor Walt Whitman – expressly contains multitudes, writing in an extraordinary range of voices, forms, styles, and genres, as well as performing their disruption. If you’ve somehow missed reading The Cantos, take this: 

So many languages, names, happenings, allusions, rhetorical topoi and tropoi forged together here with an eye – and/or ear – to the generation of extraordinary effects and affects. As Miguel Vatter has recently argued about Pound’s ‘Malatesta Cantos’ of 1923, the depth and inventiveness of Pound’s engagement with the historical figure of Sigismondo Malatesta gives new impetus to an old fusion of poetry and politics whose consequences are with us still: ‘the overall theme of the Malatesta Cantos is the Machiavellian one of the conflict between fortuna and virtù and its resolution in an astral theology whose central principle is amor fati.’ The Malatesta Cantos thus constitute a decisive moment in Pound’s work, moving from the melancholia and malediction of his earlier experiments to an exercise in poetico-political power whereby the hazards of the age might be transformed into a stellar destiny. Off to Mars, gentlemen, the pleasure will all be mines! 

In other words, Pound is also seeking to contain history in a quite different sense of the word ‘contain’ – not because history is, as James Joyce phrases it in Ulysses, a nightmare for the wakening – but, quite to the contrary, because he’s desperately dreaming up an emergent fascist Aristotelianism in which a new planetary poetic anti-form, the Cantos themselves, will trump the mere contingencies of degraded democratic happenstance. Plato had considered poetry and philosophy rival educators of the young, but in his Poetics the balder Aristotle reconfigured the decisive polemic as taking place, not with philosophy per se, but between poetry and history. Poetry, Aristotle proclaimed, ‘is a more speculative and more “serious” business than history: for poetry deals more with universals, history with particulars.’ But this rule could no longer hold as easily for Pound as it did for Aristotle, given the horrors of modern European civilisation he prattled about everywhere. Thus we read in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920): 

For Pound, demotic, democratic mediocrity was engulfing the good forms of poetry and politics; everything was being overrun by ‘a rabble / of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor’ (as he says in the little 1916 poem, ‘The Garden’). So Pound went ballistic on history. Poetry – no, rather, some poems, great poems, ambitious poems, were at once smaller and bigger than history.  

There’s no indefinite article in Pound’s vision, only history itself – history coupled with poetry as Milton’s Sin is with Death, an incestuous mother and son locked in an infinity war where the domination of one of the combatants by the other would spell mutual destruction, yet between whom no peace can ever be made. By contrast, what Ruby’s subtitle offers is more immodest in its breezy attitude, yet lacking in comparable ambition. ‘My appropriation of Pound’s line may be tongue-in-cheek, for example [what’s this ‘for example’ doing here?], but the second indefinite article is deliberate.’ Was the first indefinite article not deliberate? Context Collapse may essay to ‘contain’ ‘a history’ of (some) (ideas) (about) ‘poetry’, but it doesn’t muster sufficient linguistic energy to touch on history – let alone ‘contain’ it.  

In any case, what’s in this project for us? More REJs gush down the pipeline:  

Batter my heart, three-person’d Critic! Personal amusement (or obsession) is more than fine, but is it a book? Surely ‘literary criticism’ has already been substantially ‘defamiliarized’ in this day and age? How many writers have not already drawn our attention to poetry’s ‘participation in the contemporary information economy’? Does poetry even exist? Am I a camera?  

Ruby, again, flushed with the sincerest empiricism: 

UGH. THE THING IS NOT THE THING. Poetry’s not poetry, didn’t you know, it is a media technology! We must strip poetry from the poem in order to be able to make ‘meaningful generalizations’ about this poetry-not-poetry! And we will do it in the form of … a ‘poem’! But what makes a poem a poem when poetry is not poetry but rather ‘the quintessential media technology’? What form can such a self-professed ‘poem’ take? Beyond a critic’s knowing irony? 

Don’t worry, an answer is coming: ‘Although it is written in loose, largely unrhymed pentameter, Context Collapse deprioritizes many of the features we tend to associate with poetry […] in favor of many of the features […] we more readily associate with nonfiction prose’. Jeepers, what’s going on in this sentence? First of all, why not just say ‘blank verse’? The term even appears on the back cover as a moniker for what he’s up to, although nowhere inside does he affirm this of his own lineation. We know he knows that ‘Dr. Johnson thought that blank verse was “verse only for the eye”’, though Ruby is simultaneously putting such claims into question (if not into context). But the fact that the assignment of any particular feature to ‘poetry’ as opposed to ‘prose’ may turn out to be contingent doesn’t mean that the distinction is itself nugatory. Concomitantly – and ignoring its creepy managerial overtones – Ruby’s ‘deprioritization’ of poetic devices prioritises a rhetorical operation we see everywhere these days: the projection of a norm, a gate, a prohibition that no longer exists (if it ever really did) in order to imply that one is (courageously? wittily? ethically?) contesting, breaking, or transgressing it. But such an operation of dissimulating projection will, of course, transpire to be an uncircumventable effect of … context collapse itself. The die is cast as the Mallarméan ship goes down: Ruby wants his context, and he wants it eaten too. 

Dedicated ‘to the poets of the future’ in lower-case italics, the poem ‘itself’ is comprised of seven, numbered but otherwise unnamed, irregularly shaped ‘Parts’, accompanied by the aforementioned ‘Razo’, a ‘Tornada’, a ‘Bibliography’, and ‘Acknowledgements’. Each ‘Part’ has the poem ‘proper’ on the left side of the divide; on the right hand, explanatory notes provide references and further information in a smaller font. Each ‘Part’ notionally focuses on a particular epoch:  

Here’s a taste of the prosody, from the beginning of Part 1: 

Those already familiar with Ruby’s criticism will find many echoes and overlaps here. What differs then between Ruby’s ‘poem’ and his ‘prose’? Glad you asked! ‘(For those who suspect that, in writing it, what I have done is simply chopped up a preexisting prose essay into metered lines, I encourage you to perform the experiment of “restoring” its lines to prose and read the results.)’ Perhaps, symptomatic parentheses notwithstanding, we might not completely confirm our suspicions by simply citing the criticism, but we might come close. Compare and contrast Ruby’s 2021 review of Rosmarie Waldrop (who has, by the way, provided the front cover blurb for this book): 

Tone and repetitions aside, is Ruby thereby trying to make a claim for the functionality of his own metre? If so, what is it?   

Ruby denominates what he’s up to as ‘loose pentameter’, which you can verify with respect to the extract above. But it isn’t really. What it really is is syllable counting. More often than not there are exactly ten of them in each line. It’s not the beats, the rhythm, but the count as such, ‘rung out in a machine voice’ (Kenneth Slessor), which is – we presume – part of the AI point. But why then use this (so-called) ‘meter’ at all? Might not another metrics have done as well? If, as Mallarmé proposes, there is ‘a unique number that cannot be another’, why ten? Is it at once an allusion to and diversion from Pound’s desideratum ‘to break the pentameter’? Pound wanted to do so because he not only had an eye for the unpronounceable grapheme, but also an ear for the sound of poetry, for the musical phrase. The Cantos, again: ‘poor old Homer, blind, blind as a bat / Ear, ear for the sea-surge.’ Ruby, by contrast, doesn’t have an ear. But he does have a defensible doctrine as to why he no longer needs one. That said, he presumably still needs fingers to keep ticking off those syllables, in order to mark some difference between prose and poetry – or what could the function of this metre possibly be? 

Sometimes giving off vibes like the samizdat notes of a hardworking professional, and sometimes waffling like the daffy, inconsistent ruminations – at once canonical and eccentric – of an idler floating round a generic Lazy River at the apocalyptic water park of the post-poetic present, Context Collapse just keeps on going, ten syllables at a time. Why not an article?, you might not be able to stop wondering – though with so vast a historical sweep, so drafty a critical revisionism, ‘poetry’ turns out to be the perfect opportunity to get to say it, but also a legit alibi for any lingering scruples about accuracy, novelty, exhaustiveness, affect, whatever. A little bit of sociology, a little bit of history, a little bit of media theory, philosophy, legal studies, some motifs from engineering and technics, it’s all good man, say what you like, we’re just sporting like dolphins here in the heavily chlorinated waters of the guiltless play of ‘my own amusement’. Best of all, because it’s poetry – or rather ‘poetry’ – none of this really matters, and readers can’t call you on the impertinence, impermanence, or impotence of your assertions without immediately coming a cropper of their own incapacity to understand your clearly-marked generic self-exculpations. 

Almost anything goes as poetry in a context that has collapsed, and so the writing here basically forges its own signature on its sick-note to substantiate to the suspicious schoolmaster (that’s me in this analogy, dear readers!) that the author does not need to attend P.E. classes. The note might be flagrantly fake, but as Barbara Cassin always emphasises about the ambitions of sophistry, it’s only the effects of an utterance that count, not its truth-value. Right? Right! 

See, guys, in modernity, lyric poetry, 

Funny-enough and truthy-enough I guess, but so what? In the matter of lyric poetry, scarcity doesn’t necessarily make the heart grow fonder; nor is it lyrical over-production that inevitably destines its devaluation. But this invocation of the effects of extreme virtual productivity indicates that we are now getting close to the unveiling of the meaning of the book’s title itself:  

OMFG! It’s another riff on the death of God – this time masquerading as an empirical description of the effects of social media on the masses. Parleyed, moreover, into an ecstasy of academic referencing. It’s no surprise that, despite the ‘poet’s’ fluctuating attention to the details of history (or histories), the real winner in Context Collapse is what Lacanians like to call University Discourse. Pervasive throughout, most obviously as the satirical focus of Part 6, it’s also patent in Ruby’s own formulae, citations, and modes of address. On page 103, Ruby cites James Joyce’s notorious statement about Ulysses: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles / that it will keep the professors busy / for centuries arguing over what I / meant, and that’s the only way of insuring / one’s immortality. (Emphasis added.)’ You can’t beat that parenthesis as a marker of academicism, whether in prose or rhyme (as Milton might have put it). 

Yet Joyce, despite his incandescent prophetic genius, may well have misjudged, at least this gamble: it seems that even he overestimated the resilience of the university confronted with extermination capitalism. In his own ‘media situation’ – an impoverished fin-de-siècle Dublin – where Joyce himself recognised the irremediable sclerosis of those great imperial institutions of spiritual and temporal governance, the Catholic Church and the British Parliament, he found himself forced to put his trust in the hermeneutic self-regard of imaginary arts academics from the future. But are Puzzles for Professors really the best investment in self-indemnification for the continuation of a posthumous futurity? Exagmination round his factification, indeed. 

Ruby writes in Vinduet that ‘Why have the past five years been such a fertile period for public criticism? The first factor has to do with the dire state of literature departments in universities in the United States and Britain, which have begun to hemorrhage talent and cultural capital.’ This is surely correct. International University Discourse (IUD) of the twenty-first century no longer requires the services of the institution of the university; it has no desire for supporting painstaking archivage or education, just the planet-murdering dreariness of a deracinated knowledge economy in which everyone everywhere spasmodically doses themselves with lichettes (Lacan) of jouissance (Lacan) drawn from the alethosphere (Lacan) by means of lathouses (Lacan), at once uber-connected to and simultaneously entirely de-coupled from each other.1   

Every online search, every Chat-GPT prompt is literally doing you – and the world – ever-exponentiating damage. The reign of AI copypasta is one disheartening ontological revelation of our age, propagating itself in an autophagic festival of too, too late capitalist devastation. If you want to write that out in verse, you’d better be up for it. Among Ruby’s best lines is the following couplet: 

But even this is still ‘poetry’ as IUD, committed to turning all the little rats into rat-units. (It also cannot be overstated how irritating the US academic idiom of ‘the impact of X cannot be overstated’ and its relatives can be [see n. 24, p. 35], a brand of imprecise-yet-earnest hyperbole familiar from a publish-and-perish intellectual economy.)  

The prevalence of IUD in Ruby’s ‘history of poetry’ means that it basically reads as an eccentric extract from the syllabus of a good North American comp lit program. Hence the heavy critical reliance on Milman Parry & Alfred Lord, E.R. Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Jacques Derrida, and Friedrich Kittler; on well-known poets such as Susan Stewart and Lyn Hejinian; as well as right-on references (such as to Byron’s card-punching daughter Ada Lovelace being more influential for Romanticism than Byron himself). Hence the sententious inventorying of significant personages:  

This is spruiking as moralising, intoning an exemplary shortlist of proper names as the effective purchasing of spiritual indulgences (one of the poets named here has also provided one of the blurbs on the back cover). In this sense, the book may not be so deeply concerned with the mediatic vicissitudes of the enigmatic event-site of poetry as it is about a cosplaying hobbyhorse racing itself to the critical cannery. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: these days, we’re all condemned to act as unoriginal content creators in a screwball chronotope in which Rupi Kaur and a host of Instapoets dominate the-art-formerly-known-as-poetry. 

As Tom Ford remarked to me at the Labour in Vain (that’s ‘labour’ with a ‘u’ FYI) earlier this year: ‘Has Ruby never read Michael Farrell?’ (Or Evelyn Araluen or aj carruthers or Lionel Fogarty or Bella Li or Lucy Van – I can spruik too!) Clearly not. Ruby could really try some contemporary poems and poetry from some other places, including the first-rate-second-rate settler colony of Oz. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the self-professedly limited foci of Ruby’s history as if that limitedness were inimical in itself; to the contrary, such professions are vital and limitations are constitutive. But some limitations are more limiting than others: it remains surprising that the Bible is barely mentioned by Ruby, given that it crucially underpins and directs a lot of the other stuff discussed here. Moreover, when ‘gods’ (Greek, plural, pagan) turn up more than ‘God’ (Judaic, Christian, monotheistic) in the media situation of ‘Western’ poetry, this sidelining paradoxically renders Ruby’s historical sequence more linear, monotheistic, and presentist than it might be – rather than rift at its origin and in its elaboration. 

But aside from the individual brilliance of the forementioned poets, there’s a more profound saliency about Australia that upsets the putative inscription of ‘a history of poetry’ as a series of ‘media situations’. And that is Aboriginal poetry, which emerges from the oldest continuous civilisations on earth, while registering and expressing the ongoing impacts of colonial invasion and their contestation on the grounds of Country. This isn’t simply a question ‘of oral tradition surviv[ing] into the present’, or of alphabetic v. pre-alphabetic adaptation, but the actuality of an utterly singular polemos, in which, as Fogarty puts it, ‘[t]housand sightings are keeped to the anthem of the struggle’. In other words, what Ruby invokes as ‘context collapse’ is not so much a post-post absolute of late internetty capitalism as a local distress call from one flailing anglo-node of the becoming-planetary of the game of poiesis. 

This state of affairs has political as well as poetical consequences. On the one hand, Ruby’s politics are fine-grained and right-on insofar as we’re dealing with items acceptable to the milquetoast liberalisms of the post-Soviet global left. The ‘Tornada’ that concludes the ‘Parts’ is basically a (pretty good) terza rima rendition of a Guardian opinion piece about climate change. On the other hand, Ruby’s politics are only too absent or tin-eared when dealing with the real powers and real histories of the real political affiliations of real poets. Sure, Ruby says a few pacifying words – as he cannot not – about a figure as politically compromised as Pound, but given the relatively recent furore, say, about Gertrude Stein’s wartime commitments and her potential fascist-adjacency, this taciturnity begins to look not just unfortunate, but like carelessness (to recite his own recitation of Oscar Wilde’s famed boutade). I’m not arbitrarily demanding that Ruby should have undertaken a rigorous deconstruction of the reactionary commitments of the great modernists; I’m pointing to how his own forms of attention to the media situations of emitters, messages, and receivers tend to miss the circuit between poetry and politics altogether, failing even to approach (let alone account for) the (often grotesque) powers of poetry to effect and inspire extreme political action. In this, Plato’s Phaedrus remains correct: ‘If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.’ 

Far too fretful about its cultural moralism to have the courage of its critical provincialism, Ruby’s ‘poem’ frays everywhere into a ‘metrics’ of explanation. In the disarray of our present, seething with incomprehensible acronyms, random polyglossolaliacs, and corporate neologisms, context collapse is probably better considered as paratextual prolapse, the coiling guts bursting through the distended belly of the earth in an agony of symbolisation.  

P.S. If any publishers out there are interested in my 500-page versification of a recent philosophical treatise on set-theory, I can be contacted at the following address: