Robyn Schiff has given her fourth book of poetry, Information Desk, the subtitle “An Epic.” What does she mean by that? Ezra Pound defined the epic as “a poem containing history.” That could be a clue, but then you start wondering: What poem doesn’t, if you look long and deeply enough into the grain of it, carry within it traces of history?
Information Desk, though far from the baggy capaciousness of The Cantos or its singular successors (A, Maximus, Paterson…), does encompass a good deal of history. And the bits and pieces of historical data—of information, to follow Schiff’s title—that enter its field are just as disparate as those that Pound and others patched together to create their many-colored ensembles. This is a book in which I learned, for example, that “Churchill called anecdotes / the gleaming toys of history,” that Charles II of England had been “exiled in the France of Louis XIV / where he’d been introduced to / Continental tastes / with Asian influences,” that Charles Manson wore on his forehead a tattoo that, he said, “simulates / the dead head black stamp / of rejection…death, terror, fear.’” And I should add that history as we encounter it in Information Desk also encompasses natural history to a degree that makes me wonder whether Schiff’s epic is not a more sculpted and compact descendent of those male-authored attempts I mentioned but something like an extended fantasia in the lineage of a very different modernist, that fastidious “literalist of the imagination” whose poetry is informed by so many fish, birds and animals of all varieties: Marianne Moore. In any case, Schiff records that she was scolded by “The Great Poet” (never identified) with these words: “You are reducing history to anecdote.” But not so. Or not these days. Her anecdotes aim toward abstraction.
Moore-esque, too, is the shape of Schiff’s verse. It abjures what Charles Olson called “composition by field” in favor of what he claimed, at our last mid-century, to be outmoded, namely stanzaic form, albeit a semi-irregular one. Except for a few rare passages, Schiff’s poem is built in six-line stanzas, with lines not metered nor of consistent length yet measured out with a certain evenness of semantic pace. Enjambment is the rule. End-stopped lines are rare, and rarer still is a full stop at the end of a stanza; besides those at the close of each of the poem’s sections (of which there are three, plus an opening “invocation,” substituting wasps for muses, to preface each one), in the whole book I only noticed about half a dozen—hardly more than the number of stanzas that break, not just mid-sentence, but mid-word.
All that’s to say that Schiff sets syntax, which poetry shares with prose, in counterpoint—I’d even say, extreme counterpoint—to lineation, which is specific to verse. That’s not to say that Schiff’s line breaks up her syntax; quite the opposite: the implicit pause that is the line break seems rather to have the function of allowing her syntax to gather strength in order to hurl itself ever forward. You’d be hard put to diagram one of her sentences as it stretches out from line to line, stanza to stanza to stanza, according to its own idiosyncratically associative yet somehow undisputable logic. And this, in the end, is what seems most impressively epic about Information Desk: the way its serpentine periods keep persistently uncoiling, ranging outward, encompassing ever more unexpected thought. At times they possess a downright Miltonic momentum.
I realize that I’ve gone a long way without explaining the subject matter of Information Desk. Maybe I never will. Its subject, its high argument, eludes encapsulation. And while it is described by its publisher as “a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum,” it really has no consistent location. Yes, it keeps setting out from and returning to the museum, but it reminds me of how I usually feel lost when I’m in the Met—at least, that is, when I’m wandering the collection rather than following the prescribed path laid out for a temporary exhibition. I can’t figure out what’s going to come next, or find my way out. I ask a guard for directions, but before long I have to find another. That befuddlement is not unpleasant, far from it. Still, you have to get used to the fact that you’re always in medias res. In the museum’s mazy ways, one thing keeps leading to another. You know the building has its physical limits—it’s no Library of Babel à la Borges. Walls separate inside and outside, doors mediate between them, but in this mostly windowless expanse there’s no telling how far or near that outside might be. It’s not surprising to learn, from the museum’s website, that the original Ruskinian Gothic structure that opened in 1880 is now completely encased in its many subsequent additions, a sort of Merzbau on the grandest of scales. Information Desk shares something of that labyrinthine, always-in-the-middle quality. In that sense, the Met serves it more as an emblem than as a setting.
For that reason, just like the encyclopedic museum, Information Desk can’t really be summarized. It’s also, thanks to its winding, wayward, spring-loaded syntax, hard to sample through quotation; Schiff’s sentences are just too long. Consider the book’s second part. It begins at the Met’s entrance, unthreateningly enough with a sentence just two and a half lines long, and then two more sentences bring us to the middle of the section’s thirteenth line, all with a clear referent: a slightly hidden reception desk for bike messengers rather than museumgoers. But then follows a sentence 35 lines long. Shall I quote it for you? No, better not. Let’s just say that it commences with the messengers’ impatience with the security measures in place: “They didn’t even flirt with us,” so annoyed would they be by the “procedure / of needing to look up and call / the four-digit extension of every / curator’s assistant’s assistant / for explicit / permission to send them into the starving maze / / of the Museum,” a path that takes them past a certain marble table that, Schiff informs us, had once been thought lost but had simply been forgotten in storage. This object—and now, sorry, I can’t help but quote at length—was
the overlooked undervalued
gift of a duke who,
having purchased it
from a famous estate sale
called by the New York Times
“a curious revelation of ennui,”
wrote to the Museum’s first director, “My dear
General” (rank the director
claimed “without any supporting evidence”
was “awaiting Abraham Lincoln’s
signature on the night of his
assassination”)
“I shall be happy to
present this to the Museum,
providing it is willing
to pay the boxing, transport and freight from Paris
to New York.”
Schiff’s diction here is plain, and no overtly figurative language is used; if it were not for the lineation the passage could read as prose—albeit prose of an idiosyncratic sort, with a reckless, mercurial rhythm that is quintessentially one of poetry. The table was supposed to be nothing more than a place marker, a sign that one had gone the right way toward the nestled-away bank of elevators by which the museum’s executive offices can be reached. So much for the messengers. But the poem is no messenger and need not pass the table so quickly. It becomes a stopping point, or maybe I should say a sticking point. We learn a lot about this object, but not, here, what it looks like or when it was made, nor who the duke was who donated it and why the estate sale (whose? where?) at which it was purchased was so noteworthy. Nor does the poet bother to tell us the name of that first director, the would-be almost-General. What we understand is that in the context of the Met, even something as conspicuous as an antique marble table has a destiny that may include being lost and found, and that even when ostensibly no longer “overlooked and undervalued” it may still be rarely looked at.
But the story of the so-called table doesn’t end there. A few stanzas later, we do learn something about its design, how it “symbolizes the depressing extent / of the whole universe around which / the twelve signs of the zodiac / death-loop the marble / / rim in low relief.” And through this symbolization figurative language seeps back into the poem, though it’s handed off to the artist. We learn, too, that the marble of which it is made came from “Carrara where Napoleon sent the artist”—so it’s a nineteenth-century piece, and the artist presumably French? In fact, it’s a bit of a disappointment to realize that there are notes in the back of the book that offer information the poem itself withholds (but which I am happy to have): that marble structure is called the Demidoff Table and was carved by the Italian neoclassical sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini. What you wouldn’t know from the poem is that the so-called table is really a piece of sculpture rather than of furniture, however lavishly ornamented, one whose integrated base takes the form of a table; the three “marble / children” atop the table-plinth are not (as I’d at first imagined) in the same low relief as the astrological signs around them on the table’s edge, but full-bodied dimensional forms, which is why it makes sense when Schiff writes that one of them “points up to God or the / Director’s Suite”: a finger rises toward the ceiling, or heavens.
Bartolini’s own explanation of his symbolism, which can be found in the entry on this work on the Met’s website, is worth quoting:
Stretched out upon the plan of the world is Cupid, god of generation, sustaining and watching over the symbolic genius of dissolute wealth without virtue, who snores in his sleep . . . dreaming of past diversions in pleasure. Left to himself, the genius of ambitious rectitude in work sleeps the agitated sleep of misfortune and glory. . . his head extending beyond the periphery of the world.
I imagine the reason Schiff did not cite Bartolini’s words was that earnest idealism would have been too easy a target for her own disillusion, as evidenced, for instance, in her conflation of the heights of godly aspiration with the physical position of the director’s office. And yet “misfortune and glory” undoubtedly coexist for her too, and that “head extending beyond the periphery of world” touches her tenderly, poignantly, as she sees “unbearably dangling / in the void over table’s edge, / the lushest curl any mother / ever lingered over / before / smoothing back.”
Motherhood is one of the things that keeps the poem swerving away from the Met as a setting (and from the time in the poet’s life when she worked there in the 1990s). “I have an eight-year-old,” Schiff informs us flatly, though her statement, in poem written over a span of years, sets me to wondering how the present tense in any passage in it accords with the present of its completion. Just as the poem’s evasion of any stable setting, not even the Met, is part of its method and also its subject, so is its ambiguous temporality. One passage in part two marks a specific date, October 26, 2020, and notes among other thing that the following Tuesday would be Election Day,
as good a time as any
to confess I don’t know what to do
about the fact that the Now I keep
rising to the surface of
keeps changing
in the course of this
poem while time courses through me,
as when
a teenager swimming with friends in an
unsupervised backyard pool we didn’t
skinny-dip nearly enough in but
into which I plunged once alone through
an aqueous, unforgiving kingdom of light
that penetrated to
the lowest depths
I held my breath to madness to behold
—a passage I can hardly forgive myself for having to cut off here, 68 lines or nearly a dozen stanzas before the end of the sentence of which it is part. It soon veers away from autobiographical reminiscence to consider various kinds of pigments and what’s made of them: cobalt, and the smalt glass made from it; umber, and the cave paintings that used it; chalk from Dover that was even found “at the bottom of / an almost intact clay pot / found in a cesspit / under Rembrandt’s house”; finally vermilion and the cinnabar from which it is derived; and finally therefore the
reluctant acknowledgement
of the Spanish convicts and
enslaved North Africans
who died extracting it
from the same mine whence comes
imperceptible trace bleeding
from an incision in the neck
of a Bronze Age Cycladic figure
which ultraviolet light
trained like a knife at the jugular
makes perfectly clear.
How did the sentence commencing October 26, 2020, take us so far afield? To understand it, I had to look a bit further back and when I did, realized that the sentence did not start there, despite the appearance of it caused by the presence of a question mark just before. I should have read that question mark as functioning something like a semicolon in the midst of a longer sentence whose true beginning was a few lines further up, a sentence giving a list of pigments used by Rembrandt, starting with azurite, heading the list “in honor of NASA’s announcement this morning / of the discovery of water / on the sunlit surface of the moon” on that day. What I’d taken for a beginning was just another middle.
That’s just one example of how, for all its implacable forward movement through its incessant series of six-line stanzas, Schiff’s poem also made me read backwards as well as forwards, maybe the essential way in which the Now of the poem keeps changing course. History is bigger than any poem and cannot be contained, but the time within it is subject to a strange geology in which multiple histories overlap. Since they cannot necessarily be discerned simultaneously, reading becomes rereading, history becomes revisionist and the “lavish scorn” that is such a fundamental note in Schiff’s tone seems reserved for the too knowing—which is why I hope to be forgiven for having found my way into this poem but not yet my way out.
Image credit: Olivier Bruchez (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
Robyn Schiff has given her fourth book of poetry, Information Desk, the subtitle “An Epic.” What does she mean by that? Ezra Pound defined the epic as “a poem containing history.” That could be a clue, but then you start wondering: What poem doesn’t, if you look long and deeply enough into the grain of it, carry within it traces of history?
Information Desk, though far from the baggy capaciousness of The Cantos or its singular successors (A, Maximus, Paterson…), does encompass a good deal of history. And the bits and pieces of historical data—of information, to follow Schiff’s title—that enter its field are just as disparate as those that Pound and others patched together to create their many-colored ensembles. This is a book in which I learned, for example, that “Churchill called anecdotes / the gleaming toys of history,” that Charles II of England had been “exiled in the France of Louis XIV / where he’d been introduced to / Continental tastes / with Asian influences,” that Charles Manson wore on his forehead a tattoo that, he said, “simulates / the dead head black stamp / of rejection…death, terror, fear.’” And I should add that history as we encounter it in Information Desk also encompasses natural history to a degree that makes me wonder whether Schiff’s epic is not a more sculpted and compact descendent of those male-authored attempts I mentioned but something like an extended fantasia in the lineage of a very different modernist, that fastidious “literalist of the imagination” whose poetry is informed by so many fish, birds and animals of all varieties: Marianne Moore. In any case, Schiff records that she was scolded by “The Great Poet” (never identified) with these words: “You are reducing history to anecdote.” But not so. Or not these days. Her anecdotes aim toward abstraction.
Moore-esque, too, is the shape of Schiff’s verse. It abjures what Charles Olson called “composition by field” in favor of what he claimed, at our last mid-century, to be outmoded, namely stanzaic form, albeit a semi-irregular one. Except for a few rare passages, Schiff’s poem is built in six-line stanzas, with lines not metered nor of consistent length yet measured out with a certain evenness of semantic pace. Enjambment is the rule. End-stopped lines are rare, and rarer still is a full stop at the end of a stanza; besides those at the close of each of the poem’s sections (of which there are three, plus an opening “invocation,” substituting wasps for muses, to preface each one), in the whole book I only noticed about half a dozen—hardly more than the number of stanzas that break, not just mid-sentence, but mid-word.
All that’s to say that Schiff sets syntax, which poetry shares with prose, in counterpoint—I’d even say, extreme counterpoint—to lineation, which is specific to verse. That’s not to say that Schiff’s line breaks up her syntax; quite the opposite: the implicit pause that is the line break seems rather to have the function of allowing her syntax to gather strength in order to hurl itself ever forward. You’d be hard put to diagram one of her sentences as it stretches out from line to line, stanza to stanza to stanza, according to its own idiosyncratically associative yet somehow undisputable logic. And this, in the end, is what seems most impressively epic about Information Desk: the way its serpentine periods keep persistently uncoiling, ranging outward, encompassing ever more unexpected thought. At times they possess a downright Miltonic momentum.
I realize that I’ve gone a long way without explaining the subject matter of Information Desk. Maybe I never will. Its subject, its high argument, eludes encapsulation. And while it is described by its publisher as “a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum,” it really has no consistent location. Yes, it keeps setting out from and returning to the museum, but it reminds me of how I usually feel lost when I’m in the Met—at least, that is, when I’m wandering the collection rather than following the prescribed path laid out for a temporary exhibition. I can’t figure out what’s going to come next, or find my way out. I ask a guard for directions, but before long I have to find another. That befuddlement is not unpleasant, far from it. Still, you have to get used to the fact that you’re always in medias res. In the museum’s mazy ways, one thing keeps leading to another. You know the building has its physical limits—it’s no Library of Babel à la Borges. Walls separate inside and outside, doors mediate between them, but in this mostly windowless expanse there’s no telling how far or near that outside might be. It’s not surprising to learn, from the museum’s website, that the original Ruskinian Gothic structure that opened in 1880 is now completely encased in its many subsequent additions, a sort of Merzbau on the grandest of scales. Information Desk shares something of that labyrinthine, always-in-the-middle quality. In that sense, the Met serves it more as an emblem than as a setting.
For that reason, just like the encyclopedic museum, Information Desk can’t really be summarized. It’s also, thanks to its winding, wayward, spring-loaded syntax, hard to sample through quotation; Schiff’s sentences are just too long. Consider the book’s second part. It begins at the Met’s entrance, unthreateningly enough with a sentence just two and a half lines long, and then two more sentences bring us to the middle of the section’s thirteenth line, all with a clear referent: a slightly hidden reception desk for bike messengers rather than museumgoers. But then follows a sentence 35 lines long. Shall I quote it for you? No, better not. Let’s just say that it commences with the messengers’ impatience with the security measures in place: “They didn’t even flirt with us,” so annoyed would they be by the “procedure / of needing to look up and call / the four-digit extension of every / curator’s assistant’s assistant / for explicit / permission to send them into the starving maze / / of the Museum,” a path that takes them past a certain marble table that, Schiff informs us, had once been thought lost but had simply been forgotten in storage. This object—and now, sorry, I can’t help but quote at length—was
Schiff’s diction here is plain, and no overtly figurative language is used; if it were not for the lineation the passage could read as prose—albeit prose of an idiosyncratic sort, with a reckless, mercurial rhythm that is quintessentially one of poetry. The table was supposed to be nothing more than a place marker, a sign that one had gone the right way toward the nestled-away bank of elevators by which the museum’s executive offices can be reached. So much for the messengers. But the poem is no messenger and need not pass the table so quickly. It becomes a stopping point, or maybe I should say a sticking point. We learn a lot about this object, but not, here, what it looks like or when it was made, nor who the duke was who donated it and why the estate sale (whose? where?) at which it was purchased was so noteworthy. Nor does the poet bother to tell us the name of that first director, the would-be almost-General. What we understand is that in the context of the Met, even something as conspicuous as an antique marble table has a destiny that may include being lost and found, and that even when ostensibly no longer “overlooked and undervalued” it may still be rarely looked at.
But the story of the so-called table doesn’t end there. A few stanzas later, we do learn something about its design, how it “symbolizes the depressing extent / of the whole universe around which / the twelve signs of the zodiac / death-loop the marble / / rim in low relief.” And through this symbolization figurative language seeps back into the poem, though it’s handed off to the artist. We learn, too, that the marble of which it is made came from “Carrara where Napoleon sent the artist”—so it’s a nineteenth-century piece, and the artist presumably French? In fact, it’s a bit of a disappointment to realize that there are notes in the back of the book that offer information the poem itself withholds (but which I am happy to have): that marble structure is called the Demidoff Table and was carved by the Italian neoclassical sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini. What you wouldn’t know from the poem is that the so-called table is really a piece of sculpture rather than of furniture, however lavishly ornamented, one whose integrated base takes the form of a table; the three “marble / children” atop the table-plinth are not (as I’d at first imagined) in the same low relief as the astrological signs around them on the table’s edge, but full-bodied dimensional forms, which is why it makes sense when Schiff writes that one of them “points up to God or the / Director’s Suite”: a finger rises toward the ceiling, or heavens.
Bartolini’s own explanation of his symbolism, which can be found in the entry on this work on the Met’s website, is worth quoting:
I imagine the reason Schiff did not cite Bartolini’s words was that earnest idealism would have been too easy a target for her own disillusion, as evidenced, for instance, in her conflation of the heights of godly aspiration with the physical position of the director’s office. And yet “misfortune and glory” undoubtedly coexist for her too, and that “head extending beyond the periphery of world” touches her tenderly, poignantly, as she sees “unbearably dangling / in the void over table’s edge, / the lushest curl any mother / ever lingered over / before / smoothing back.”
Motherhood is one of the things that keeps the poem swerving away from the Met as a setting (and from the time in the poet’s life when she worked there in the 1990s). “I have an eight-year-old,” Schiff informs us flatly, though her statement, in poem written over a span of years, sets me to wondering how the present tense in any passage in it accords with the present of its completion. Just as the poem’s evasion of any stable setting, not even the Met, is part of its method and also its subject, so is its ambiguous temporality. One passage in part two marks a specific date, October 26, 2020, and notes among other thing that the following Tuesday would be Election Day,
—a passage I can hardly forgive myself for having to cut off here, 68 lines or nearly a dozen stanzas before the end of the sentence of which it is part. It soon veers away from autobiographical reminiscence to consider various kinds of pigments and what’s made of them: cobalt, and the smalt glass made from it; umber, and the cave paintings that used it; chalk from Dover that was even found “at the bottom of / an almost intact clay pot / found in a cesspit / under Rembrandt’s house”; finally vermilion and the cinnabar from which it is derived; and finally therefore the
How did the sentence commencing October 26, 2020, take us so far afield? To understand it, I had to look a bit further back and when I did, realized that the sentence did not start there, despite the appearance of it caused by the presence of a question mark just before. I should have read that question mark as functioning something like a semicolon in the midst of a longer sentence whose true beginning was a few lines further up, a sentence giving a list of pigments used by Rembrandt, starting with azurite, heading the list “in honor of NASA’s announcement this morning / of the discovery of water / on the sunlit surface of the moon” on that day. What I’d taken for a beginning was just another middle.
That’s just one example of how, for all its implacable forward movement through its incessant series of six-line stanzas, Schiff’s poem also made me read backwards as well as forwards, maybe the essential way in which the Now of the poem keeps changing course. History is bigger than any poem and cannot be contained, but the time within it is subject to a strange geology in which multiple histories overlap. Since they cannot necessarily be discerned simultaneously, reading becomes rereading, history becomes revisionist and the “lavish scorn” that is such a fundamental note in Schiff’s tone seems reserved for the too knowing—which is why I hope to be forgiven for having found my way into this poem but not yet my way out.
Image credit: Olivier Bruchez (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.