Information Desk: An Epic

Robyn Schiff’s dazzling book-length poem, Information Desk, brings readers inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Schiff was employed some 30 years previously. Much as it is for visitors, the titular Information Desk serves as both starting point and anchor as Schiff’s epic roams the halls of museum and memory, burrowing deeper and deeper into the process of art making and the grain of all her poem touches. Dense with allusions to art, literature, and the natural world, Information Desk traces the narrator’s fascination with creation, moving from the grinding of Rembrandt’s pigments to create “bone black” from animal bones, to the parasitic method wasps employ to supplant another wasp’s eggs. Schiff’s voracious interest in detail is never merely ornamental, but central to her poetics, as in the following lines:

                                           Who told 
you that 
   one paints with emotions? 
One makes use of emotions, 
   but only paints with material.

The movement of these poems is never expected. Wry humor and an ever-present awareness of the void nestle together, as when Schiff traces the origin of the phrase date rape:

     1973, 
        so technically is as old as 
     me. We grew up together 
        in the semifinished basements 
     of the suburbs 
        listening to the upstairs plumbing rush the  

     shit of our fathers 
        into the earth.

Through six formally and emotionally sophisticated long poems, Information Desk offers readers a journey that is singular, nostalgic, and ultimately, a lot of fun.