"The function of the poet is, first and foremost…to be an early adopter of new media"
Before alphabets came on the scene, we had guys who memorized long things That often contained some rhyme And metering. They were singing, basically. In old-timey times, to sing Was real good for communicating. Like the ancient Greeks--they loved to sing Everyone did, actually. But singing Changed, because...technology? Different instruments, different social Organizery. Sometimes you had a lord And the singer sang to him, but... Other people were listening? What did he sing? Let's not worry About these things. He did sing. Eventually, we had printing! And song turned into poetry But what about singing? Did they still sing? Well, yes, but that's not in our tale. Poetry is the history of new media, Except over time, most forms of new media weren't really poetry? Why is that? Well--because, factually, Prose isn't poetry. Paintings aren't poetry. These are media technologies, But they're not poetry Let's not worry about these things. Let's worry about poetry. It changed, you see, Because of media technology The poets innovated, I think. Like, with the TV--oh wait, Poets didn't use that. Fuck. This thesis might fail on me. But let's return to poetry. It exists, I think. Once people Sang it to thee. Now it's mostly Reading. People still sing. They still sing Taylor in the car, but That's not poetry, unfortunately. And that is, I guess, Because of media technology?
Context Collapse
This poem was inspired by Ryan Ruby’s book Context Collapse—a book that I rather surprisingly did not hate. There are books that I think are both very flawed and extremely tedious to read. This isn’t one of those books. It’s very flawed, but I found it to be entertaining and readable.
Context Collapse is a book-length poem about the history of poetry, going from ancient Greece to the modern American MFA and beyond. As poetry, it is quite bad, for all the reasons Henry Oliver describes here.1 It is a joke to call this poetry. It’s lineated, but there’s no sense of the line nor any sense of rhythm: you could take out the line breaks and it’d read just like prose. In practice, I read it as prose.
But…look…publishing this as a poem is basically an act of chutzpah. Poetry is a minor literary category. Ryan Ruby has a big Twitter following. Billing this as poetry is a way of being a big fish in a small pond and getting people to read the book. If this didn’t call itself a poem, would I have even read it? Part of me admires gumption, honestly. That struggle to break-out, to publicize yourself, to be read—I respect that struggle, in some ways. If this book was published by Knopf and winning awards, I’d be outraged, probably. But it’s published by a small press, and it’s mostly a curiosity. As such, I think it succeeds.
There is also an element of poetic form in the presentation of the book. It is presented in facing-page format, with the main body of the poem on one side, and the footnotes (which are also lineated) on the other side. The obvious thing is for the footnotes to be different kinds of poems. Or for the poetic form to change between chapters. Ruby doesn’t do this, because he’s fundamentally not a poet. Which is okay, I guess. The book is what it is.
However, the book is really hampered by its own seriousness, because there are a lot of tools (such as using simple and oft-repeated rhyming sounds, as I do above) that you can use to create cheap comedic effects in poetry, and these tools allow even neophyte poets to write readable light verse, but…Context Collapse refuses to mock its own obvious ridiculousness. Perhaps the whole book is a joke, I don’t know, but in that case I’m fooled, because it reads very serious to me.
Leaving that aside, this book is largely a rhetorical exercise, meant to demonstrate the author’s own dizzying erudition. And…I kind of enjoyed it. The book is like a Markson novel—just a collage of disparate facts. You remember some of the facts. You forget most of them. And through the profusion of facts, you hopefully glean some kind of point.
There is clearly a mind at work here. The stuff in this book is way beyond what you can get from just googling or Wikipedia. I envy the breadth of Ruby’s reading.
But…it feels a little annoying that this book won’t commit to any idea of what it’s trying to explain. If it was trying to show how we arrived at the features of modern academic poetry: a short lyric poem with line breaks and irregular use of rhythmic features like end-rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and meter—then that would be great! There is a part in Ruby’s book that explains how lineation didn’t become a standard feature of poetry until relatively late in the game. I would love to know more about that! But…that gets brushed aside in a footnote.
Nonetheless, if I was to take the book on its own terms, I’d say that Context Collapse isn’t really a history of poetry. It is a set of anecdotes about poetry that are being told in service of its attempts to make three points, which is that:
A) poetic form is influenced by changes in technology (which seems obvious);
B) poets are the first adopters of any new changes in technology (less obvious); and
C) over time, due to changes in technology, poetry has become an increasingly marginal art-form, and therefore…capitalism is bad (not obvious at all).
The problem is that if you’re just trying to say that poetry changed over time because society changed, this is a very banal point. If you’re saying poetry was the first thing in society to change in response to each technological innovation, that’s more interesting, but doesn’t necessarily seem true.
However, if you’re trying to say that poetry was destroyed by capitalism and therefore we should destroy capitalism, well…that’s an argument with a lot of moving parts. First of all, has poetry been destroyed? Early in the book, poetry is mostly songs. Eventually the term ‘poetry’ started meaning something different, and the book does a great job of tracing that difference.2 And that thing that we call ‘poetry’ is now quite marginal. But…isn’t that just a problem of definitions? This book is mostly about changing conceptions of the term ‘poetry’, and the effort to capture the social cachet conferred by that term. Those efforts are now reaching their terminal stages, yes. But…is that really a problem for society as a whole?
The book rapidly alternates between these three points, and never quite settles on which one is the thesis of the book—as the result, it’s very hard to get a sense of the argument as whole.
But I did glean many facts from this book. For instance, only 5 to 10 percent of the population of Classical-Age Attica was functionally literate. I also learned this other fact about the etymology of the word “troubador”.3 And I learned that there was a tradition of Latin-speaking troubadours drawn from out-of-work graduates of the University of Paris, who formed a northern counterpoint to the Occitan-speaking southern tradition. Unlike the facts in, say, Creation Lake, the facts in Context Collapse were individually interesting.
Even some of the analysis was interesting. For instance, I found this footnote interesting and, I think, somewhat true. The thing we call poetry (verse without song) will survive, if it survives, as a speech act, anchored to a time and place—something that cannot be bought or sold. Slam poetry, poetry circles, etc—these will survive, even if written poetry doesn’t.4
Poetry represents an extreme case, not a unique one. Its fate was no doubt sealed centuries ago, when it became a written form, and thus a potential commodity. In market societies, the social function of all producers is pegged to the market valuation of their product. From this, two things follow: It is not that poets lack a social function at the present time, it is that poetry has no function in a market society. Restoring the poet’s social function will require, not new poetic forms, but an entirely new form of social organization.
Interesting thoughts like this are scattered throughout the book. But I do think traditional ways of organizing a text—either as an actual history that aims to be somewhat comprehensive, or as a coherent argument, one that requires you to marshal evidence to support your point—really would’ve created a much more profitable and enduring reading experience.
Further Reading
I’m also listening to Johan Huizinga’s 1919 work of history: The Waning of the Middle Ages. Like Context Collapse, Huizinga’s book is composed of hundreds of little anecdotes. But it’s all in service of one concrete point: the idea that emotional life in the Middle Ages was much more heightened than today, or even than during the Renaissance.
Instead of controlling their emotions, people in the Middle ages expelled their feelings in brutal and frequent acts of catharsis, leading to behavior that, today, we would consider wildly unstable. And that this sort of behavior was common not just amongst marginal people, but at all levels of society and was a major determinant of political and economic life in the Middle Ages.
Is this really true? Who knows! It’s not something you can exactly prove, is it? But through the accumulation of anecdotes, Huizinga makes a great case:
The monks of Fossanuova…after Saint Thomas Aquinas had died in their monastery, in their fear of losing the relic, did not shrink from decapitating, boiling and preserving the body. During the lying in state of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, in 1231, a crowd of worshippers came and cut or tore strips of the linen enveloping her face; they cut off the hair, the nails, even the nipples. In 1392, King Charles VI of France, on the occasion of a solemn feast, was seen to distribute ribs of his ancestor, Saint Louis…
Every paragraph of Huizinga contains anecdotes like this. It’s not that people couldn’t behave like this today, but Huizinga makes the point that in the Middle Ages, people quite commonly did these sorts of outrageous things.
As with Context Collapse, it’s impossible to retain most of this information, but the accumulation of detail is in service of a very clear and coherent point, and this point is something the reader is able to remember.
After I re-stacked Oliver’s review, Ruby offered to send me a copy of his book, so I could see myself. Normally I refuse such requests by authors unless they’re personal friends—usually, if I’m interested, I just buy the book myself, so I won’t feel beholden to the author. However, in this case, I accepted the offer, because I was already a bit biased against this book, so I didn’t want to pay for it. I’ve since bought a copy of the book and will endeavor to refuse such requests in the future.
One of the more interesting parts of book is its description of the changing social role of the poet: first we had the 18th and 19th century figure of the poet-entrepreneur who wrote and sold books of poems for money; in the 20th century poetry became associated with avant-gardists, who largely functioned within a tiny coterie of critics and connoisseurs, and now, in the 21st-century, poetry is synonymous with the poet-academic, who exists mostly within university creative-writing programs. Here, for instance, is Ruby’s description of Whitman as poet-entrepreneur:
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn . . . Fittingly enough, It was a former printer’s devil, type- Setter, newspaperman, hack novelist, (By his own estimation: “one of the roughs”), Who had been self-financing experiments Into the other paradox that results When print is taken to its logical Conclusion: free verse.
Per the text:
For such an apparently simple word there is surprisingly little consensus about its etymology....Scholars (e.g., María Rosa Menocal)...point to an Arabic rather than a Romance origin for the figure and hence the term have a more straightforward explanation: it is derived from رب ط (to sing).
As a sidenote, the practice of including Greek and Arabic words in the original, rather than romanized, alphabets—it is kind of annoying. The Last Samurai also had a similar practice, but in that book the point was to encourage the reader to learn these alphabets—it was so easy even a five year old could do it!
In Context Collapse, the point seems very different. Ruby’s book is full of unattributed quotes, untransliterated Greek and Arabic words, and untranslated German, Italian, and French passages. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the point is just to make Ruby seem very smart. It’s successful in that purpose, but it also comes off as somewhat hostile to the reader, who, as Ruby knows, surely does not speak all these languages and know the source of these quotes. Aren’t we reading this book in order to learn something? How can we learn if we can’t even read the text?
I did take a year of Arabic in college though, so I know رب ط is pronounced something like rabat. The frequent Greek-alphabet words meant nothing to me though.
I do not think it follows, as Ruby says here, that poetry will only survive if capitalism can be destroyed. In general, this book has a shocking level of cynicism about the idea of…writing for readers who enjoy your work and will pay money for it. Is it really so bad to provide value to your readers? What is the sin here? The reasoning seems to be: poetry is good; however, not enough people think poetry is valuable enough that they should pay for it; ergo a system where people pay money for writing is bad.
The inability of poets to earn a living from writing poetry is because, as Ruby puts it, “Many more people write poetry than read it.” As a result, supply vastly outstrips demand. To him this suggests that the law of supply and demand is obviously bad. Personally, I am unconvinced.
The prior world, where poetry was more valuable, also had a mismatch in poetic supply and demand. It’s simply that in this world, poetic demand was high because almost everyone was illiterate so communication was often done through singing; and poetic supply was limited because because most people were directly engaged in food production and didn’t have the time to train as poets and singers. That, seems to me, like a world much inferior to our own.
You’re never recovering from Creation Lake, are you ;-).
This is helping me draw a comparison between music performance and poetry. I've been preoccupied lately thinking about how music performance, especially of amateurs, has become so devalued because we have recorded music available literally at our fingertips, while 120 years ago live performance was basically the only way to experience music. Of course it was easier to make a career as a musician! And of course a young woman could gain social status by being e.g. a decent pianist, because this helped her to be a hostess whose parties people would want to come to for the entertainment.
Poetry strikes me as similar, but the technology that transformed the genre (printing) predates recording technology by several centuries. Storytelling became less personal, something that could be received in private from a book rather than from a person in front of you. The form evolved in response to this - innovating directly on the page or else split into the separate art of songwriting. But that immediate need for stories was satisfied by a technological solution, and modern poetry is constrained by the fact that its initial purpose no longer exists in the society we have. If what you're after is a story, you read a novel (or watch a film or etc.). What's left is meter, language, feeling - which in my personal opinion is too abstract to be as popular.