Paul Scott Stanfield reviews Robyn Schiff’s new book-length poem.
Robyn Schiff, Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin, 2023), 144 pp.
Robyn Schiff’s new book-length poem sets itself a challenge in its subtitle, “An Epic.” Not everyone would concede that the epic mode is available to modern poets, but quite a few modern poets have nonetheless taken their best shot. One of those poets, Ezra Pound, defined the epic as a “poem containing history.” Schiff’s poem is set at the Information Desk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked on and off for much of her twenties, and since museums contain history, a poem set in a museum perforce contains history, too—and, accordingly, Schiff’s poem, though set in a confined space, feels big.
If we develop the logic of Pound’s dictum a little, we could say an epic is a museum. That might even be a fair description of Pound’s Cantos. In the same late interview in which he gave his definition of the epic, Pound claimed his epic’s central idea was “that European culture ought to survive.” The Cantos can be read as a museum exhibition supporting that claim, organized by an eccentric, stubborn, and irascible curator. The perspective in Schiff’s epic is not the magisterial one of the curator, but the modest one of the young employee at the information desk—still, she is interested in the same question: ought European culture to survive? She refrains from delivering a definitive answer but keeps steadily in mind the dictum of Pound’s contemporary Walter Benjamin that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. In Information Desk, the institutions that house and display the documents of civilization have a similar paradoxical and problematic role.
Schiff has a long-developing interest in the products of human imagination and ingenuity—couture in Worth, firearms, paperclips, and Lustron houses in Revolver, nursery furniture and sirens in A Woman of Property—and in how those products become commodities. The employees of the Met are surrounded by some of the world’s most renowned and highly valued examples of craft, skill, ingenuity, and imagination; enough, one would think, to elevate the consciousness of anyone spending time in their presence, but not enough, it turns out, to ward off sexual harassment in the cafeteria: “I could not find my no. So down he put / his tray and we talked awhile. / He did something / obscene, I // don’t remember what, / with a red cherry tomato.” But maybe this is not surprising at all, since the same male assertiveness is celebrated on the walls of the museum, even in seeming old-time charm of Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip, in which “bare- / foot princes of Americana / link hands in embodiment of an eponymous / living whip that ripples / up the playground / sacrificing its / outermost segments like the // downsizing, / autotomizing worms / that inspire collective corporate / layoffs.”
For that matter, almost every object in the museum testifies to asymmetries of wealth and power, from the Temple of Dendur to the Louis XV table to Maira and Alex Kalman’s Sara Berman’s Closet. Besides the histories of imperial plunder, the very materials of the paintings themselves are part of a story of exploitation; the “bone-black” of Rembrandt’s deep interiors comes from the “slaughterhouse” (the burning of cows’ bones), the red dress of his Jewish Bride from “grinding dried berries of // “New Spain,” the conquest of which is / inferred in every stroke of red laid by any / Old Master / liquid enough to buy it—.”
The book’s fiercest tones, however, are for the plutocrats who funded the institution and its vast acquisitions through their “murderwealth,” their “slaughtercash”:
this maze of grifts, the gifts
of steel magnates, drug lords,
refiners of sugar, and oil men,
in double-backing avenues of crystal,
moonstone, gold, and lacquer….
A few pages later, Schiff remembers “the Sackler Wing of Ancient Egypt / where last year Nan Goldin threw / hundreds of empty pill bottles….”
This vein of suspicion and denunciation, often present in contemporary poetry, is by no means the only current running through Information Desk. We also have Schiff’s distinctive mastery of the long, unspooling sentence, tangents branching from tangents, traversing broad tracts of time and space in a seemingly infinite drift, then nailing a perfect landing. Schiff has always been good at this; in this book, her style seems the perfect analogue to a visitor’s peregrinations in a museum, where a series of small turns can take one from ancient Babylon to Chinese scrolls to Mark Rothko. Similarly, a Schiffian sentence’s walk may take us through several rooms, as the poem is written in stanzas of six variable-length lines, a contrast of expansiveness and restraint that creates an elusive music, a little like that of Marianne Moore. And like another great American long poem containing history, Louis Zukofsky’s A, the sentences of Information Desk embrace both the then and the now, both the public and the personal, the young woman in a modest position at an august institution housing the treasures of the centuries and the working poet with a family, awaiting deliveries during lockdown.
The book’s institutional critique is also tempered by Schiff’s understanding of the pull of the aesthetic, apparent in the many attentive descriptions of works of art and in such declarations as “How / I love / to touch / this world.” Schiff acknowledges small acts of complicity of her own, as when she does a favor for a curator, not knowing it is a favor, and receives in return “a chartreuse Korean scarf that came / folded in a wooden box.”
I thought it was my job, but never told my
boss what I did when informed by the gift
it must have been wrong.
Milky green silk I
sometimes touch.
Our appetite for art suggests it is a kind of necessity like food or shelter. Information Desk knows that appetite, but also wants to ask exactly what kind of nourishment the food is providing, what the sanctuary provided by art generates. Schiff writes of “the mafioso whiff” discernible when “the force / protecting you is the same / you need protection from— / that fundamental essence of / religion, law, and politics….” Art is not an item in that list, but the whole of the book makes the reader ask whether art’s capacity to do good is inseparable from a capacity to do harm.
Schiff raises the stakes in that question with a turn to the entomological (not a new move for her: see “Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man’s Face, by Feetham” in Revolver). Each of the poem’s three sections has a prelude devoted to a particular species of wasp, each a practitioner of sophisticated parasitism. The jewel wasp stings the brain of an American cockroach to make a “zombie host” for its eggs; the oak gall wasp similarly exploits the oak: “a biochemical je ne sais quoi charms the / redirection / of the oak leaf’s force to // form a cradle for each miniscule / egg.” The cuckoo paper wasp is the most chilling example, as it colonizes the structures built by the true paper wasp, “a / conspicuous / example of how those // of us who don’t know how to make our / homes make the ones we find / ours.” (not unlike, Schiff observes, the college she attended, “built on other people’s loss on farm- / land secured by slaughter”). What if invasion, colonization, exploitation, appropriation, betrayal, and murder are so intrinsic to us and to the world we inhabit that there is no escaping them, no getting clear of them, no rising above them? What if art, instead of transcending our circumstances, reproduces them?
A humble but telling story near the end of the poem underlines the point. With a quip (“Too Much Information Desk!”), Schiff confesses, “recently my family / had lice” (as mine did when our children were at home, as yours has had or will have if children are in the household). To the Lice Clinic they go, where Schiff refuses to look through a microscope at the louse from her own head, “would not lean my / curiosity down into that eyepiece / to meet what I fed….” The louse is everything we wish we were quit of, would rise above if we could: “everything wants / to ascend.” But can we?
Schiff is too wise to attempt a final answer. The poem is written in the spirit of the “Miltonic ‘Or’” described by Peter C. Herman, who sees the multiple “unresolved choices” in Paradise Lost as a sign of a “poetics of incertitude.” Little honored though incertitude is, it may have a role in any major poem. The incertitude that surfaces at the end of end Pound’s Cantos redeems it, if anything does. And if “major poem” is still a category we want to use in a time when we do not entirely trust art, then Information Desk feels like one.
Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and has been a member of the English Department at Nebraska Wesleyan University since 1989. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.
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