In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing well nigh forever is better understood as a medium than a form. Poetry is a way of storing and transmitting information, a mechanism of entertainment and authority, and a speech act that attends to changes of state.

In the episode, Ryan references Eric Havelock, author of The Muse Learns to Write (Yale UP, 1986), who described the Homeric poems as the encyclopedia of Bronze age Greece. He also cites Marcel Detienne’s book The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd, Zone Books, 1996) who describes poetry as a form of “magico-religious speech.”

Ryan Ruby is a writer, most recently of the book length poem Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024). It got reviewed in The New York Times. He has also written a novel, titled The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), and book reviews and essays for all the fancy places: The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, New Left Review, etc. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux.

The image for this episode is a still from an animation of a supercomputer simulation of a pair of neutron stars colliding, merging and forming a black hole, created at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Image courtesy of the NASA Goddard Photo and Video Flickr account. This image is in the public domain.

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