Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk: An Epic is a repository of facts. For example: Rembrandt painted the red dress in “The Jewish Bride” (1665–1669) with pigment made from ground cochineal insects; in order to reproduce, a jewel wasp may paralyze a cockroach, then lay an egg inside its “soul-hacked” body; Iowa City is 1,049 miles west of the Atlantic and 2,032 miles east of the Pacific. Schiff’s epic poem enacts its title, answering questions readers never knew they had.
This quality is in line with Schiff’s specific subject matter. She writes about working at the information desk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she answered banal questions to guide visitors to artworks … and to the bathroom. This focus on the knowable world is a stark contrast to the unanswerable questions at the book’s heart. The poem’s speaker asks how to reconcile the parasitism of nature, art making and patronage, and the United States with our attraction to the insects, objects, and institutions they produce. While she finds no easy answers, the author suggests language itself may hold a key.
Schiff breaks her epic into three parts, each preceded by “invocations” to different wasps. The insects receive the same meticulous study she grants paintings and furniture throughout the rest of the poem. The writer details both the wasps’ beauty and destruction as they colonize cockroaches’ bodies and oak trees in order to reproduce. Yet the jewel wasp “moves like the hybrid of green tin / and blue glass, gem-tragic cerulean” while the oak gall wasp grows in “something like a wooden pearl.” In this way, the wasps become as precious as what lies beneath museum glass.
While describing her Met days, the speaker offers a similarly devotional study of a Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition poster. The artist’s seascapes, she says, are “as identical / to the inattentive as / the horizon seems to the lost.” Schiff suggests that close looking is required to both appreciate the artist’s work and find one’s way. Her larger project might be summed up in her account of Balzac, who “knew the world / by describing it object / by object.”
For the speaker, description makes meaning of experience and the passage of time. The epic extends back to earlier episodes in her life and up to her present situation, married with a child and living outside the New York of her youth. Schiff carefully curates impressions and memories alongside hard facts.
The poem also finds plenty that’s rotten at the Met: sexist colleagues, the inherent colonialism of the collecting project, and unsung labor. Schiff cites the Spanish convicts and enslaved North Africans who died in the toxic process of mining for cinnabar, used to make vermilion pigment. And, of course, there’s the “slaughtercash” of the family who purchased and gifted Rembrandts to the museum. The author again invokes Balzac, who wrote: “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”
The speaker must eventually navigate out of the museum, and the poem. She offers a final image that grants both reverence and accountability to her former employer: museum guards file down the Great Steps, down every “pillaged-earth corridor of goods / hammered, blessed, blown, ground, dyed, / smuggled, lacquered, carved, painted, threaded, / sold, stolen, polished, given, / and cursed.”
The speaker recalls anticipating that the guards would start dancing in perfect formation, like the Rockettes. She ends on the lines: “But of course they would not; and did not; / and still are.” The poet ultimately embraces not information or memory but multiplicity and the power of language. By shifting verb tense, Schiff makes many things true at the same time. The guards do and don’t dance. Violence and beauty, the banal and the sublime, all coexist in the same, generative space of a poem itself.
Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff (2023) is published by Penguin Books and is available online and in bookstores.