Isabella Streffen

On A Tenderness for Category Errors.

—an homage to Ryan Ruby on the publication of Context Collapse.

I think that I am very tender for category errors. And footnotes.

For the body substituted by the pronoun; for evanescence into tangibility; for the use of she when talking about the poet;

Emergent forms reify into architectonics; communal texts; the carved spaces of spectacle and its corresponding financial structure. Say what you mean. / the symbiosis of god and oracular spectacular / this is not a lyric method

Sing / find / disturb / discover / such morbid phenomena / with the Venetian silks and the quest as mode of enquiry.

excluded from love because you work for money, or trade / you can hear it you can't feel the responsive necklaces, the call and response, the love-dialogue.

rhyme is the aural proposition of an ideal social relation [Ruby, fn 24, p35]

the envoi: both a love song and the mishearing of a service song with a quixotic aura, human pulses instead of electronic pulses no longer transmissible.

Bitter intricacies of choreography and scratchings; sweetness and influence like morphine and sinners/sonnets (one autocorrect wants, one I want, who's to say which is which)— but I found myself again in a dark wood (reconfigure forty-eight times)

perforce / the technological and form / create the space between enunciation and reception / is a reading silent or spoken / (oh this is my question, how is the somatically articulated) / score : technology trips out mute fingers, goes around it in voice-active recording / the privileging of eye /

the irony of my reading this, articulated with a single mute digit / not my tongue / lyric as mode of visuality / the cut out of press / edit, decision, declension / scriptal pleasures / locate the breath / from vortex to feedback loop /

this paeon to Kittler, beloved / a media archaeology of the poem / the subtext has quickly become the text (the mysterious topography of SoCal) / the tongue catches on assonances / fear of dissolve.

Pagination as imperialist technology / (that boy you like will come back in style) / put your head close to the page, and hear what I’m whispering to him / poem as a set of capitalist social relations (poem as a set of x relations, recurrent) / one day we will read Theory of the Lyric, but not today.

Let us now imagine the reader as an entity, formed by the logic of the market, and take that as our basis for response / AI and the single crime of writing/scraping, my immortelle. / what is this form of crime, a question, a capture-read-text?

I bought a writing-slope from 1795, and there was a novel inside, forgotten. A terrifying novel. An exchange of letters, scratched on a tiny block of ivory.

The promissory notes of social media, the letters of the 1800s / the frenemies of patch, of which journal you submit to, of editorial preferences reified / an ancestor up to no good / Tiffany kitsch / artifice forever.

Baudelaire. Needed. To Pay. The Bills. / and technological affordances will afford / how many persons are there? / turned to marble / or marble powder, anyway / the range of the copy, the hermeneutic options, the cut-slip quick / dont on sait

autocorrect wanted don’t here, and I was tempted to let it / on the grounds that Derrida (the quoted) would have approved. Don’t il sait. It’s interesting where my French-English double model decides to intervene.

An engraving on the shell of a bath / ok I made the bit up about the shell, but it’s the sort of thing I’d make myself, ever the translator of ideas into things / the shift of hanzi to l’alphabet / and the relentless spread of text / the bloom of copy culture / an alienation of connection /

a zoetropic spin into the hallucinogenic letters that are strictly not about love / but embody love / allow yourself to spin / [ mit Flieder ]

How is your signal received? With what degree of concretizing the text? This is the shadow conversation of art, which feels secondary, even though the world turns on the word.

From verbal object to glamorous edition / in just enough given to get a taste for it / difficult codes for deeper involvements / a new dance with a new technology is an old dance, suffocated / telegrammaticology / let’s decline to touch.

And now. Open your Heidegger at the page of the typewriter / oooh he is so good at this breadcrumbing [now a sport of emotional violence ] cycle through the technological variants until we skitter to a stop at oral performance / I’m way too immature not to laugh.

From the trenches and the subsequent textual forms to my favourite / drumroll / the paratext / and the threshold of interpretation / and the collapse of not meaning but being, of parasitic understandings / of conventions / of syntax / read her like a seismograph as yet untranslated.

What is the meaning of the bots, and how it shifts / from the hysteric, from the séance / electronic hauntologies (my autocorrectional lover, that psychogeographical infatuation) / to radical and twittering attentions.

I’m quoting now : hysteria is a disease of attention / we are all hysterics now, in the weeds of screens / the 24 rue de Fleurus hive and whose minds and bodies of work they touched/ and how many words can a be poured through a human in a single day / and they live.

And redefining language’s relationship with the visual arts is not a one way street / or done yet, quite frankly / so although —YES — I might agree, in part, / it’s not what it’s not.

[back later]

time for the shiny fetishes, the unknowable, unreadable, inconsequentiality of authorial intent / from the bone yard / the yard of bone / the bone dessert / the discours transitoire / who cares what the author does / only it turns out, everyone.

And everyone wants délicieux gateaux and not some lumpy shite scraped from your life / let’s turn to computational poetics / through a mirror / through a glass non-human and / through a Claude glass / a black glass / a camera noire / an aleph / a glamour

Oh do not ask what is it / just go and make your [meet-cute] visit. / the uncanny flicker of a thousand devices shuttling between sentient and not / a faint trace of telepathy / in the stacks / as we decide to punch the fuck out of people wanting to get better by learning / mainly, amusingly

from those who have not made that specific grade / but these are internal wrangles / and anyway, they’re beneath us and they’re boring.

[a longer pause of some weeks]

Mimeographs / and aspen / and the discourse of the university / but is a university just a place to shelter / from a larger storm? / sometimes we are just pretending. / isn’t it just another minor shift in meaning, for a time? / I’ve spent more time on this bit than I’d like,

It’s like a question that shimmers in front of the real question / a dazzle cam / a distraction / what is criticism / and who is permitted to speak / the discourse must congeal, and the pressed liquid leak

To refuse the academic formation, and at the same time be caught in its trap. And of course, I lack the smarts and the skills [and the care] to slice through this, I just want to — like the red shoes — dance to death on the field

And here, in the unconscious, ruby slippers, and I’m really laughing.

an aside about the Pope, which I, text-drunk, can only figure as Alexander. A mix up of Popes extreme.

Mimeographs and letterpress, let’s make it look natural, lyric is definitely not the lowest art denominator except in raw material terms / still the space for learning needs to be accounted for / the hours of permission to practice / the reading space, the access to learning, and yet /

the exponentially-expanding fractalvalache of circulatory text / and its binary relation / its blinding, murderous whiteness / yet another conversation about expressing yourself clearly / clearly I say / yes clearly / simply and with clarity / wrap around our cloaks of painful obscurity once again / a dangling fuck

as with syntax {Shockley page ref needed] / the agonising focus on form, content, social function is solipsistic / shake down the trees / seek innovations in new millennial findings and erasure / don’t devalue your paper with poetry / don’t discuss the poets born under the 4th October’s moon / their broad appeal and income / and what they did or didn’t do in the genocide.

the readers multiply / run away back into the sung text, feel the early bones / seen like a dragonfly eye reflected into distorted infinity / where machinic desire is articulated / where machinic parsing is performed / where metadata is code is poetry / what are the contexts and cares of machines / a poetry virus of the robotic.

always-already sender and receiver / transmission and reception / medium and message / and massage / where two machines fall in love and infect each other through the virus of classic Romantic poetry [Solanki, 2001] / until collapse / until care / until zombie / until – – –

all of this will return to its atomic state / and nothing will have ever mattered as no-one will remember us

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Statement of HomagE

Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby is a dazzling invitation to an intellectual and poetic dance. Beguiled by the form, and curious to see how Ruby articulates his poetic roots, I could not resist entering into conversation with it. Written over several weeks, my response to this living poet is not merely a paraphrase or a close reading, but an alive writing, which delights in the conversation and in the reading suggestions I’ve generously been given as I try to decide whether text is a thing that works for me.

Ryan Ruby

Ryan Ruby is an Angeleno writer currently living in Berlin. His book-length poem Context Collapse was published in 2024 by Seven Stories Press. His essays have appeared in LitHub, Poetry Foundation, Liberties Journal, The New Yorker, Vinduet, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times among others. His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in 2017 by Twelve Books. In 2023, he won the Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.

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