Throughout conversations on Cultural Mixtapes, Ryan’s work came up several times as I examined the zeitgeist of creative and cultural production with several writers. I first came across his work as he started publishing this hybrid piece of poetry, history, and literary historiography in sections, in various literary magazines around the world, and I’d hunt them down whenever they’d drop from the various corners of the internet. I was intrigued, and baffled at the fact that he was able to create robust arguments about the trends of poetic production, within a structure of blank verse iambic pentameter.
Ryan is a very prolific literary critic who has published pieces on fiction, poetry, non fiction, and other genres of art in storied magazines around the world. He is also the author of the novel The Zero and the One, and the forthcoming book of essays Ringbahn, a psychogeographic exploration of his adopted home-city, Berlin. We touch on his other work, but this conversation centered upon his latest work, Context Collapse.
The book’s argument teases out ideas that are commonly not regarded in the study of literature: He places poetic works in conversation with media theory to elucidate how the environments of capitalism, and technological evolution influenced the works, and in several instances, helped bring them into existence.
It’s funny, the line of poetry that is always running through my mind is from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The various meanings and wit behind that line have been interrogated in english classes around the world, so I’m not going to do that here; but in a time when poetry and literature seem to be the last thing in everyone’s minds, I wanted to give it some time; and what came of this conversation were some pleasantly surprising arguments that reaffirm what literature can do; and cements its place an art form of the now, and constantly articulating the core ideas and sentiments of the present.
Recommendations
The Political Unconscious - Frederic Jameson