Ryan Ruby presents Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, in conversation with Christian Lorentzen
Monday, November 18th at 6:30pm ET
McNally Jackson Seaport
4 Fulton St.
New York, NY 10038
Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.
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.”
"Ruby’s effortless synthesis of artistic, cultural, and technological developments makes him an excellent historical guide, and the verse essay format—consciously modeled on the argumentative poetry of Parmenides and Alexander Pope, among others—proves a novel reading experience. This literary history stands in a class all its own." —Publisher's Weekly
"Ryan Ruby has written a daring kind of essay. The verse text and verse footnotes conflate and flail, destabilizing and stylizing one another like conjoined twins." —Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony
"What a joy it is to think alongside Ryan Ruby. In Context Collapse, critical argument and literary history become sensuous and playful, provocative in the best sense and, by the end, deeply moving." —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
"Context Collapse is an erudite and a perceptive essay in the form of a poem, which traces the history of poetry from ancient orality to the electronic age. Using both the line and the footnote in a self-referential and sophisticated performance, it argues that what poetry is depends on the economic, social and technological conditions of its production." —Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets
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.