Ryan Ruby is one of the Anglosphere’s most highly regarded literary critics, essayists and Twitter personalities. His first book, a philosophical campus thriller called The Zero and the One, was published in 2017; for his critical work – which includes bylines in The New Yorker, Bookforum, Poetry, and the New Left Review – he was awarded the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.
Born in California, he moved to Berlin in 2014 after a decade in New York City. This month marks the release of his latest book, Context Collapse, a playful epic poem that tells a history of poetry with a Euro-American emphasis, from the ancient Greeks and mediaeval troubadours through Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and various Modernist movements to the postwar US creative writing workshop and finally our present moment of Instapoetry and AI-written verse.
The people who are always the earliest adopters of new media are poets.
At each stage, the book deftly mixes literary history with discussions of economics and media technology, enriched with versified footnotes. We met him at his favourite local bar, braving the dangers of secondhand smoke to discuss ambition, arguing, and the lost bohemian art of hanging out.
This book is a wonderful, original and slightly mad undertaking. In the introduction you say that it “started as a lark, and became an obsession”. When did inspiration strike?
Probably the genesis of this project comes out of an essay I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, about 12 years ago, called ‘On the People’s Mic: The Politics of Post-Literacy’. I was struck by the way that, at Occupy, new digital culture coexisted with a very ancient communications culture, not unlike the one that existed before writing. For my research, I turned to media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, and from them to classicists like Milman Parry and Albert Lord who were trying to figure out how the Homeric epics got composed.
What do you mean by “post-literacy”?
McLuhan periodises media history like this: oral culture, scribal culture, print or literate culture, and post-literate or audio-visual culture, to which we could add its second phase: internet culture. Post-literacy refers to a communications culture where writing is no longer the dominant form of media. My realisation was that when you look at hinge moments – the transitional moments between these communication cultures – the people who are always the earliest adopters of new media are poets.
One way of seeing what’s coming in the future, and of seeing what impact media technology will have on society at large, is to look at the poets doing R&D. With the book, I wanted to create a grand theory of poetry from Homer to Rupi Kaur, oriented around the social function of poets as canaries in the coal mine of new media technologies.
What made you decide to write it as a poem?
Well, as I said, I’d been thinking and reading about this for years, but didn’t have the form for it. I had ideas for a nonfiction book and a book of vignettes. One day I’m walking through the parking lot of the Stabi and a sentence comes into my head – and I like it enough to want to write it down. So I go in, write it down, and that’s when I notice that it breaks up into two lines of pentameter: At first, the question of the audience is quite simple: Where should it be seated?
So for whatever reason, I just continued writing it that way. Just as a joke. I didn’t really think it was going anywhere, I just thought it was a funny thing. But as I followed the argument it kept expanding past the point where a reasonable person would have stopped. From a publishing standpoint, it was a terrible idea. Everyone I told about the project was like, “Why are you wasting your time on this?” But I had inadvertently found my form, and I was unwilling to give it up. My commitment to the bit went past consideration of incentives, like “Can this thing even be published?” Turns out…
The scope of this book is sort of megalomaniac – in a good way…
I’m one of those readers for whom the everything-book, the book that contains the universe, is the ne plus ultra of what a book should be. Obviously not every book has to do that, but those are the kinds of books I think are the ideal. The Anatomy of Melancholy, Moby-Dick, Ulysses. Dante puts the entirety of his world into Divine Comedy, and what’s incredible about Dante is that he invents a poetic form – terza rima – to contain the everythingness in the texture, in the structure, of the book.
From a publishing standpoint, it was a terrible idea.
It incorporates theology and politics and history and even literary criticism into a numerically and sonically perfect architecture. So while I’m mindful of all that did not make it into Context Collapse, since I never expected it to be published and thought it would only be read by my friends, I indulged in myself, and decided to be ambitious and let the argument itself dictate how far the book would go and where it would end.
How would you sum up that argument concisely?
The argument is that the social function of poets is to be early adopters of new media. And that poetic form is determined by the relationship between the poet and the audience, as it is mediated by the particular social and economic structures, publishing institutions and media technology of a given historical moment, which I call “context”. Whether it’s the Homeric epic or Sicilian sonnets or Modernist sound and visual poetry, whether it’s the avant-garde Language poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s or Instagram poetry, form is not incidental or ornamental: it’s functional.
So to take a popular example, free verse – poetry without rhyme or meter. We associate its invention with Walt Whitman, who, let’s not forget, starts off as a printer’s devil and a newspaperman. Whitman in the US, and later Rimbaud and Mallarmé in France, marks a transition in the mid-to-late 19th century from poetry as a primarily oral form to poetry as a primarily written or visual form – that is, not something to be heard but something to be read. And this becomes thinkable for the first time in part because someone like Whitman is embedded in a media culture dominated by forms like the newspaper and the novel.
You say that poetic form is “determined” – but then what about the agency of the poet to adopt, mix and abandon new or old forms to suit their own purposes?
The main critique of Context Collapse is that it’s technodeterminist [reduces culture to being the mere consequence of technological developments], and my response is to say: yes, it is in fact technodeterminist! Technodeterminism is just a way of seeing like any other, and sometimes you can see more with an immoderate and generalist claim than with a moderate and specialist claim. Besides, immoderate claims are more fun, no? As far as the agency of individual poets is concerned, I’ll just say that all systems leak, and poetry is a history of exceptions.
Something that makes your work stand out – this book, your criticism, even your tweets – is that you always have an argument to make. Why do you think you’re drawn to argument?
Well, biographically, I come from an argument culture (laughs). I was trained to do this from a very early age. In my family there was an adult’s table and a kid’s table, and getting to sit at the adult’s table meant arguing, usually about politics. What I will say for argument is that it does two things. First, it connects us to something we’ve forgotten, namely, that for thousands of years, rhetoric was the central practice of intellectual life.
Second, argument always reveals the stakes of things. When you are arguing about, say, writing, you are also saying that, actually, we do want to talk about the stakes of ideas, style, taste. When you’re debating questions like that you’re saying that these things are extremely important to us, both in how each of us individually experience life and in how we organise ourselves as a society.
You were born in the US, and you mainly write for publications in New York and London. Does living in Berlin allow you to think and write differently about your subject matter?
I arrived here sort of by happenstance – my partner is from here – but this is a pretty decent spot to have landed. I actually think Berlin, which is best known for its visual arts and club scenes, is underrated as a literary capital. Besides the Germanophones – Alexander Kluge, who’s always passing through; Jenny Erpenbeck; our perennial Nobel favourite, Yoko Tawada – Vladimir Sorokin lives here, Samanta Schweblin lives here, Haytham El-Wardany lives here, and, until recently, Adania Shibli.
The thing about the Berlin lit scene is that it’s not scene-y.
And, of course, Helen DeWitt, Tom McCarthy, Lauren Oyler: three of the best fiction writers at work in English today. For us Anglophones, what is not here is the publishing industry. That means independence from what’s happening in London and New York, but also what’s happening in German publishing. The thing about the Berlin lit scene is that it’s not scene-y. There’s a real esprit de corps, and freelancers run the asylum. We’re always having a good time after hours while our work stirs up trouble elsewhere. It’s not a professional grind, or a hobbyist club, just a group of people who are living the work they produce.
That’s the old dream of bohemia, isn’t it?
Yes. Whatever clichés you might want to cite about expatriate life in Berlin, we’re all out here creating art and hanging out and finding the radical potential in that. There’s a lot of reasons for it – the history of the place, the way the city’s laid out, cost of living, blah blah blah – but let’s not forget that it happens because people deliberately choose to live this way. I remember that, in college, I told one of my professors I had chosen the subject of one of my papers because I was interested in the revolution of everyday life. Pretentious, right? Whatever, I was 23 (laughs). But the professor told me – I’ll never forget it – “You want to revolutionise your life? Organise your life such that you take three-hour lunches.” He said your life would look totally different if it were structured around a three-hour lunch: eating, drinking, talking, hanging.
At the precise moment the economy wants you to engage in profit-making labour, you suspend that and have a ritual of conviviality. I try to do this with friends as often as I can, or if not, at a bar or a party or a reading. Of course, there are numerous forms of obstruction to living in that mode of sociability. Mostly these are economic barriers, but there are also barriers of attitude – people who want to say that this can’t happen, because it’s superfluous behaviour. But my view is that in fact it is central to our lives.
Finally: any poets that you would recommend to our readers?
Since I mostly cited prose writers before, maybe I should give a shout out to the poets. First and foremost: Don Mee Choi, who just concluded her masterpiece DMZ trilogy with Mirror Nation, which juxtaposes Berlin and Korea. Her German translator, Uljana Wolf, has a book called Subsisters, translated by Sophie Seita, which ought to be better known. Then there are Mayröcker’s two translators – Alexander Booth and Donna Stonecipher – who are brilliant poets in their own right. It’s been an amazing experience to watch Donna roll out the prose poems in her new collection The Ruins of Nostalgia at readings over the course of the past five or so years, and her book Prose Poetry and the City is quoted in Context Collapse. Last but not least, let me recommend Tracy Fuad’s Portal and The Feeling Sonnets by Eugene Ostashevsky, who splits his time between here and New York. Besides Berlin, what ties all these poets together, is that they’re working in “translingual” poetry, and Eugene’s seminar on the topic at Humboldt a few years back was crucial to the thinking about language that went into Context Collapse.
- Context Collapse available now from Seven Stories Press. Follow Ruby’s work on his website.
