Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

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

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2024

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.”

RYAN RUBY is a critic, novelist, and translator from French. He is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017) and his criticism has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, POETRY, The Believer, The Point, and the New Left Review. He is the recipient of the 2019 Albert Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. He currently teaches creative writing at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.