The rubies have attached themselves to the ruin

As the English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney was shot down by a bullet among the low and icy marshes of Zutphen in October 1586, where he was fighting in the name of Dutch independence, he had already spent a lot of time thinking greatnessboth personal and poetic. Died at only 31 years old, a supporter for the Protestant cause, in an anonymous portrait of a decade before Sidney was with Russian hair with an aquiline nose, beautiful in his collar Elisabethain starch, a white doublet and threaded pants in black and Gold about the cod capacity of towards degenerate souls, aggravated by their clay housing, can be capable. This quote is its A defense of Poesy, The most important work of literary criticism written during the English Renaissance, and a powerful example of this strange kind of “poetica”, by which the vocation of versification is justified, in this partly circumstance by an appeal to ethics.

Lean, athletic and martial, Sidney was the ideal candidate to defend poetry, whose detractors slander him as flasque and effective, a man whose martyrdom in combat earned him a reputation that the Scottish writer of the 19th century Thomas Campbell Described as a life that was “poetry in action”. From Horace has Percy Shelley has Archibald MacleishThe “Ars Poetica” was a genre in verse and prose dedicated to the defense of poetry, to contradict the ancient claim of Plato according to which the verse is located and that poets should be exiled from the ideal republic. If, in the estimate of Sidney, poets were mediators between our human man, our dark world and the transcendent domain of pure ideas, by MacLeish about four centuries later, the conclusion prefers that “a poem should not mean / but to be”, an expression of futility and the totality in all these attempts to justify worms.

Which makes criticism, novelist and translator Ryan Rubyingenious CONTROPMENT OF CONTRAY: a poem containing the history of poetry All the more remarkable in its simulation of antiquity, because it offers nothing less than a “poetica ars” for the era of metadata and social media, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, work ranging from orphic origins of poetry through attic versifiers, Occitan disorders the school in New York, the program of the University of Iowa MFA and producing flarf poetry (Shakespeare, however, does not appear). Yet this is a poem which, for all of its erudition and verbosity, contains an adamant thrill toward its subjects, where ruby’s fragmentary stanzas are able to dip into the slipstream of poetry’s history, evoking eccentric and hermetic world, such as this ekphrasis imagining cathar Heretics and their role in the invention of the sonnet in the court of the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emmeror Frederick II, by which:

Influence of Occitan exiles
Was first felt in Palermo, before the court / Mundi stupor…
Where, among the concubines of the emperor,
Magicians, slaves, shirts, acrobats,
Beloved mathematicians and hawks,
One of the fourteen notaries …
completed the eight lines
Sicilian Strambotto with a sestet
And created the “little song” – to date,
The form of verses par excellence.

I tremble with the task (luckily successful) of Ruby’s agent, and I thank whatever Christian Bok Inscribing the verse in the genetic code of a single cell body, all of this ended with a beautiful Addendum of Terza Rima, so depressing, apocalyptic about the anthropocene. Grim although it may seem, Ruby’s work is in fact in a particularly fun way, because as he writes in his introduction: “Like good joke … (((Context collapse) is supposed to be taken seriously. The kind of daring title that recalls the greats of high modernism rather than the modes of contemporary publishing of Big 5, a work evoking Book‘s Cantos Or Eliot‘s Wasteland (especially with all the Latin, French, Italian, German and Chinese of Ruby) Rupi Kaur.

As a verse – this almost extinct form once practiced by everyone Lucretius has Anne Carson– Ruby advances an argument on poetry which cannot really be advanced by poetry itself, as well as “defamier literary criticism by writing it in a non-standard form”. Throughout the epic of Ruby, its abundant use of footnotes is crucial, not only in that the prose transmits arguments differently from the main work, but because the experience of reading itself becomes interrupted, where you are forced to bifurcated which requires the overthrow between the pages of the poem, an experience which reproduces in several ways of the internet hypertext. Often, several footnote will be modified on a lonely line otherwise pinned in the blank of the page, which recalls more the Talmud than Nabokov Or Danielewski. Consequently, the physicity of the book becomes obvious, the eye moving several times between the lines prohibited not only by the end, but being distributed on several pages. A crucial effect, because Ruby considers poetry as a technology in terms of actual material circumstances which define it, causing itself less from parnassus than printing and in Context collapse The form itself becomes an argument.

Context collapse, It should be emphasized is a very strange book, although this evaluation is signified in all possible ways. True to the great Russian formalist criticism Viktor ShklovskyAffirms that the verse is defined by being its own subject, Ruby does not focus on poets but poetry. “What is the story of poetry”, notes Ruby, “if not a series of more or less closed texts responding to other more or less closed texts?” Easy to assume that a story of poetry would only provide a litany of big names, but Ruby’s intention is not fortunately to provide a simple exercise in hagiographic canonicity, because although certain poets are mentioned –Dante And Petrarch,, Baudelaire And Whitman– They do not appear as figures in the liturgy of grandeur, but rather as simply verticles and nodes in the wood of the evolutionary tree of poetry. What emerges is a discussion on poetry not only on the character, but also in terms of patronage and courtiers, copyright and fees, not to mention the size of the page and printing arrangements. In Context collapse “Poetry is treated as media technology – like media technology par excellence and perhaps even original – and only secondarily as a series of forms and genres”, or for this question of canonical authors. Basically, Ruby considers poetry in terms of production and consumption, the latter intimately linked to the relationship between the poet and his audience. “At the beginning, the question of the public / is quite simple: where should it be seated?” Request Ruby in the first line of the poem, where the epics would normally evoke the muse, and the answer to this question is imperative to define poetry, whether it is a dionysius theater or someone who scrolls on their phone.

This requires a consideration of how the movement of the oral verse in the textual verse, as well as the passage of the manuscript to print, and today the transition from analog to digital. Such material developments inevitably modify the relationship between the poet and his audience, as when the kind of recitation by which “seventeen / a thousand people gathered each year / at the Wine God’s Festival to look at what / We now call the attic drama” would be irrevocably modified with the insuriment of reading for solar reading, a victory, an empire of the ear. According to Ruby, changes like these are important not only because written poetry allows the introduction of certain characteristics associated with the verse (such as lineage), but because the social experience of reading and thought is forever modified. “The proscenium where, in Rome, dramatic / monologues have been made, shrink from the size / of a skull and, at the same time, swells / to the volume of an imagination,” he writes.

How do we understand our transition to this second orality, this emergence of the undifferentiated digital marsh, where the contemporary overproduction of poetry makes it impossible to attract the attention of an audience or to read in a credible way everything that can deserve an audience? In his footnote notes, Ruby offers figures that give reflection on the pure preponderance of written poetry, a Malthusian condition where the number of writers exceeds that of readers. Then there is the warning that Ruby gives in one of its most memorable lines – “Exit: the well -informed urn. Enter: ai. ” Citing a study which believed that in the era of Reddit and X, Facebook and Bluesky, we each read on average 100,000 words per day – although consider the quality of these words – Ruby emitted the hypothesis that “poets” are no longer language generators but conservative large amounts of text already existing. »»

More words are produced and consumed today at any time in human history. In the era of content-creator of the versifier content and the founded text poem, there could be something desperate in all these slag, but Ruby clearly shows that the definition of poetry itself has always had contingencies, identifying what is verse and what is not eternally a problem of framing more than anything. In addition, that says nothing about the question of whether we owe it or not to write Poetry, an activity that Ruby understands as a deep human act. He writes that “in the end, the context of / poetry is death”, because although “immortality is nothing / a metaphor … too / is time. The dark future and the present from which I attack you / can only be seen if the light of its own / future shines there. ” Not just a human act, but also ethical too. Maybe not so different from what Sidney said after all.