I have loved and taught the Western classical epic for many years. But I find myself increasingly attracted to the aspects of these texts that reveal the costs of the culture’s epic ideals—as if the texts could not resist questioning their society’s investments in the modes of heroism cultivated by epic poetry in the West. In secular epics these modes involve male versions of courage, strength, and above all expectations of single-minded dedication to social goals that eventually can come in for substantial criticism. And in Dante and Milton, such courage, strength, and dedication become matters of spiritual life so that a relation to divine plans supersedes social projects. Probably the richest opposition to the prevailing ideology shaping social goals in secular epic occurs in the meeting of Priam and Achilles at the end of the Iliad. Here, two characters with competing tribal loyalties bond because of a shared appreciation of the power of grief. More important considerations emerge here than those based on opposition between warring factions.
Now I want to look from the outside at problems in classical epic. My vehicle will be Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk, my favorite among the contemporary women poets who dare to take on the most male of poetic genres. In reading Schiff it becomes urgent to recognize two fundamental problems in the classical epic’s treatment of its heroes—in the dispositions they cultivate and in the modes of ignorance that these dispositions cannot but encourage. First, there is in these classical secular models of epic heroism an isolation that would be crippling for any non-hero. That is, for most of these heroes self-doubt is unhealthy and reflective dialogue unnecessary. Councils become sites for disruption rather than the collective weighing of alternatives. (Even Odysseus’s flexibility is a result of determinations by a single self-consciousness, not the result of communal deliberation.) Considering this, it is no wonder that Dante has to invent Virgil and then Beatrice as guides and advisors, since his Christianity honors a rich communal ideal only dimly glimpsed in classical epics.
Second, Schiff seems to believe that classical epic embodies the Hegelian sense that for there to be heroism there must be sharp distinctions from those who fail in their efforts to accomplish that kind of identity. Such binary oppositions matter, because they sustain the pursuit of authority, accompanied by contempt for the features of social life caught up in indeterminacy and bound to complex patterns of fluid interchange. In this regard I will spend considerable time on Schiff’s critique of the Metropolitan Museum’s 1995 exhibition “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” which typifies how such oppositions carry over into the art world, exacting considerable blindness to what many artists can achieve. For Schiff, such blindness necessitates exploring a very different version of epic ambitions, one grounded in a voice that continually pursues states of mind where the poet’s insistence on invention establishes and cultivates variety in the world rather than isolating features of experience into categories for culturally approved values.
Schiff stresses the possibility that the idea of the hero as a person is itself outmoded. Information Desk presents an introductory “Invocation to the Jewel Wasp,” celebrating the amazing ways evolution has developed strategies for procreation. Evolution becomes the topic that requires rethinking epic heroism. And the exemplary conveyor of such information becomes, despite its occasional errors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Then the primary foot-soldiers for conveying this information become the people occupying the Information Desk at the museum, a position the author occupied for almost ten years.
Schiff displays both biting irony and compelling idealization as she pursues various ways that such information proves liberating because it provides seeds that flower as sources of imaginative vitality and social bonding. One form of seeding occurs because of how information takes multiple paths, often blocked by a type of thinking that shares the stress on sequential action basic to epic. Another important mode of seeding involves how such information is presented—hence the stress in this poem on the kinds of voicing capable of resisting comfortable binaries.
On the level of content, the poem takes full advantage of Pound’s definition of the epic as a poem including history. Pound’s Cantos give cultural authority to experiments with foregrounding kinds and sources of information. Schiff follows Pound’s lead in releasing the epic from the need for single narrative in favor of a panoptic sense of how various cultural moments can speak to the present. But she is critical of Pound’s tendency to identify with heroic figures who take stands on important cultural issues. She can be seen as implicitly arguing that Pound does not so much replace the epic hero as subsume the role into the poet’s identifying with cultural models or belittling them. Pound then provides a useful contrast to Schiff’s images of the work done by the kinds of information conveyed by the Museum. Finally, his ambitious ego presents an identification with epic narration that for Schiff requires foregrounding modes of narrative that embody a very different understanding of how an epic can define cultural possibilities for contemporary life. For Pound there is only the center provided by the poet’s imagination. Schiff makes the primary source of information a function rather than a person. Whoever occupies the information desk at the museum must serve as the Virgil of this non-divine comedy. In this case, the occupant of the information desk has a charming fluidity, often dazzling in her shifts of focus as different aspects emerge of what the museum enables her to offer us. Such offers depend much more on charm and lyric invention than on assertions of authority.
_____
Schiff begins with a version of an epic invocation that indirectly but brilliantly defines a distinctive and urgent cultural project. There is no human hero mentioned, and no plot referred to. Instead, we begin with the beginning, with a version of how life takes form in accord with evolutionary designs not exactly suited to human moral sensitivities. Schiff’s “Invocation” does not offer an address to any divinity or muse. It concentrates on the way jewel wasps handle reproduction in strict accord with the script of a primeval “plan,” in effect asking how human attitudes might accommodate this plan. The female wasp, six times smaller than the cockroach it attacks, paralyzes the roach so that it can haul it by one antenna to its nest where it can lay its egg in the breast of the roach. Then the offspring can eat their way out into life:
having soul-hacked the
American
cockroach with a sting to
the brain so precise as to make
the roach stop roach-iden-
tifying and give
itself, body and force, zombie host to the
wasp egg the wasp is laying inside it,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
this is evolution and we’ve
already come this far.
Schiff does not tell us how far is “this far.” But she can use this non-answer as a stimulus for asking in what ways such manners of attending to the non-human can affect our handling of our own relations to evolutionary processes. The key here is to emphasize how the manner of the writing as voicing can help us handle such strange, bleak realities. Notice first how the writing initially gets absorbed in the sheer detail of the jewel wasp serving evolutionary demands. We can be fascinated by what denies our categories of moral judgment. Sheer information makes us aware of the limitations of focusing on those moral judgments rather than what may be the universe’s standards of value. Then we might entertain the possibility that such framing probably would not work if uttered with Poundian authority. Evolution is ultimately a picture of life on every level, so it might be more aptly rendered by a chatty female narrator who likes to say “cock” and recount to strangers her sexual “trespass,” because “poems / are as a good a place for the past as the grass / is for the wasp.” This narrator comes on the stage reflecting on her own childhood where she questioned the relation between “sacrifice and valor.” After a brief delay, she uses the excuse of a parallel between the missing antenna bitten off by the wasp to a crack in a kitchen cabinet so that she can tell us that the crack occurred “in a kitchen I was sharing with a friend / whose ex I should / not have slept with.”
_____
How can the narrator produce an exemplary attitude capable of humanizing this focus on fatality without invoking a fantasy world? Schiff would probably respond by pointing to the various qualities of the voicing involving both varieties of tone and the work accomplished by style. On style, please notice the numerous enjambments in the passage on the jewel wasp quoted above and reflect on what they add to the poem. I see only two lines that are end stopped, probably because they are the strongest statements dramatizing concerns for birth and death. In contrast to these assertive lines, the enjambments here create an aura combining playfulness with discomfort as the verse struggles to set the space of artifice against the pressures created by recognizing how deeply we are caught in a fatality beyond our control. Enjambment provides one subtle authorial counterweight to the force of the sheer narrative of cause and effect by which evolution operates.
Then there is the force of the syllabics themselves. In general, syllabic verse replaces the sensuous measure provided by rhythm with the need for making intellectual judgment the basic vehicle for what can become an alternative invitation to sensual response. And Schiff adds a playful touch to this invitation, because here the counting of syllables is not based on having parallel syllable counts for a given line in each stanza of the poem. Instead, the count is based on the total amount of syllables in each stanza. As an additional device, she asserts the freedom to modify the amount of syllables according to her age when each stanza was composed, perhaps a gesture toward affirming how life can be celebrated. She seems convinced that simpler metrical strategies would not embody the sense of play in contrasting styles of diction and length of words that make the information given by each line a potential surprising adventure.
Much of this subtlety would be wasted if we could not see the manner of voicing as also an exemplary playing with the ways information in the poem demonstrates what the museum can perform as a social institution. Minimally, we are invited to feel affective consequences for the variety of ways that the voicing engages situations. She seems committed to the idea that when stories are casual and not given cultural authority, the affective intensities produced by the manner of speaking are better able to emerge as links to the worlds experienced by her readers. A spirit of play will not change the sense of fatality inseparable from the text’s invoking evolutionary processes. But this spirit can explore human resources for coping with those processes. Everyday life for the jewel wasp is so adventurous that it can make our lives seem dreadfully ordinary. But also consider the ways that Alexander Calder’s sculpture becomes alive for the narrator or the voicing manages to make resentment of the binary Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt justification for focusing on the painting The Auctioneer in ways that trivialize the frame set up by the title of the exhibition.
As the “Invocation” passes into Part One, the poem enters the world of human agents by means of a critique of the male epic hero (or the biggest of the cocks) and its consequences for general cultural practices. Since this is a story about an art museum, and about the cock, Schiff renders the culture’s image of the hero by means of Rodin’s monument to Balzac. (The statue referred to is in Paris, but it is present for the narrator as a recurring nightmare in New York City, where the Met has a small replica):
The Monument to Balzac might
be a monument to Balzac
jerking off, and there it stands
on my roof at all times, invisible
to the human eye,
but the morning sun castsits shadow on the front lawn nevertheless
over the tremendous, morose hostas
that won’t die,
making the day’s first shade that makes
my shade garden thrive,
head jutting in arrogantecstasy . . .
The material is deadly serious. If one wants a figure of male privilege cloaking itself in the power of mystery, it would be difficult to find a better image than Rodin’s Balzac, especially because the protrusion under the heavy cloak cannot but speak of the cock, an entity that qua roach we have already seen playing a central role in the poem. But the presentation is not exactly traditional epic assertion. Rather than providing a story for this heroic image, the poem shifts immediately to the functioning of the morning sun on her particular garden, thereby providing an alternative everyday world to projections of heroic stature. Then the passage can return to Rodin’s Balzac with greater precision and stronger repulsion.
We soon see that this monument is a dream figure, and the jerking off statement is not likely to be literally true because of the position of the arms in the statue. These details in turn establish fundamental features of the text. The situation is serious precisely because it refers to a recurrent nightmare of oppression by male authority rather than being a mere instance of perception. And the narrator has a strange way of handling what seems nightmare, because she is aware that when disturbed she can simply try to focus on something else afforded by the museum. Information has strange ways of being useful. Also, the hostas won’t die since they like shade and thrive because of the shade cast by the imaginary statue, another benefit attributable to chance and indirection. To follow this epic will entail becoming involved in the narrator’s cultivating her own personal idiosyncrasies, perhaps because an appreciation of radical contingency may be the best way to resist, or better, almost to ignore the authority of the cloaked figure.
Clearly this is not the kind of framing offered by impersonal presentation, which was the primary strategy Pound deployed to revitalize a space for issues involving the epic hero. Instead, Schiff chooses to limit herself to what I want to call “personality driven by elemental forces.” I stress this modification because I need to distinguish the voicing from the presentation of personality that warrants the intense inwardness of poetry in the Romantic tradition up through confessional poetry. Schiff’s character takes herself lightly, treating personality as primarily a locus for casually elaborating experiences rather than theatrically suffering under the burden of intense self. So here the differences forming a distinct personality are all within a range of typicality that her volubility and wayward reflections both honor and extend. The result is that we become involved with a single speaker while exploring a range of shared biological and cultural forces that involve imaginatively collective uses of information. What can be more universal than the way people inhabit their idiosyncrasies as aspects of their biological nature? The idiosyncrasies differ, but we recognize ourselves in the idiosyncrasies of others, perhaps especially when we do not share the behaviors exhibited.
_____
To demonstrate how this kind of personality can become the center for information, we could dwell on the strange features of the opening passage of Part One, with its recurrent dream, its frightening ways of representing male authority, and the imaginative twists attaching these statements to a particular process of voicing. But I prefer to elaborate how the personal fuses with information provided by the museum setting, because this provides an excellent example of what Schiff calls “seeding.” Consider a passage occurring soon after she introduces her activities at the information desk. Here she stresses how attention to specific physical properties takes on significance by affording a sense of trembling “in communion with the movement” developed by two separate works of art:
The anther rocked on the long filament,
trembled in communion with
the Calder stirring way upstairs,
making me aware of
faint currents of air within
the apparent stasis. Not long before
working there, at an
exhibition of Greek gold, I
circled a thinly beaten oak leaf wreath
with a golden wasp and two gold cicadas because
my footsteps shook
the leaves
a little, as in nature, though these were
under glass. It was
the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,
having an impact on an
artifact like that. Vibrating it.
Playing it. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
my memory rushes
down the artifice
thus . . .
Notice that the stress here is not on the artifacts but on the visible impact created by her presence in observing them. In fact, “vibrating” and “playing” offer useful terms for what she does with information throughout. Then there is the change in the verse marking her satisfaction. Again, we encounter a passage that has only two lines not enjambed. Each of these contain very brief complete sentences, one virtually emerging from the other as the physical sensation of vibrating expands to the self-conscious awareness of her role in that event. Notice too how the material work of shaping sounds parallels the activity of “having an impact” on these artifacts. The sense of movement is continued by the play of repeated sounds “hushing,” “gushing,” “rushes,” and even in this context “thus.” Now the sound play suggests that this movement is created by her memory, not just her personality, rushing “down the artifice thus” in order to fuse her awareness of the labor involved in hushing with her self-conscious pleasure in forging the intricate internal relationships active in this poetry.
_____
We still must face the question of why this concern for tracing the seeds planted by the museum can warrant consideration for a new version of epic poetry. Schiff follows a time-tested strategy: set your preferred position against another general set of stances that one can show are harmful and dangerous. Here the opposition is to the link between male models of heroism and the way that the Metropolitan Museum adapted this heroizing strategy by means of absolute binaries, with no room for exploring alternative paths. The text for the blockbuster “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt” show even argues at one point that the author’s research is saving us from forgery. Schiff’s voice concentrates on providing alternatives within the museum that open the mind to differences by producing more vital forms of attention that cannot be absorbed into conceptual oppositions like “true/false” or real/forgery.” Getting absorbed by particulars establishes a relation to information that avoids a practical need for binaries, at least in responding to works of art. Because information is freed from the burdens of sustaining the values of a dominant culture, it becomes possible to explore different strategies for looking and for thinking, strategies that are central for epic’s insistence on modeling values important to a society.
To get started, I want to go directly to her linking the nightmare of Rodin’s statue to models of judgment that reinforce the structure of binaries basic to distinguishing heroes from non-heroes. The key here is aligning the figure of Balzac celebrating the penis with the need for authority figures that drove the ideology responsible for the show separating Rembrandt from pretenders to his status. This is the core passage:
Submit
everything to the binary.
It had the stiff, infrared soul
of connoisseurship;
Rembrandt/
Not Rembrandt, that’s the question;
There follows a highly enjambed passage about the insistence on this binary producing an incapacity to adapt to the “indecisive human,” a condition Schiff dates back to Eve being made to withdraw from Adam so that she has to cultivate her own separate garden. There may be no better analogy for the limitations of the binary, because it invokes Christian needs for boundaries allowing stable expectations about gender roles that also proved basic to the Western epic. The price paid for such binaries emerges when a painting like Portrait of a Man (The Auctioneer) is treated as simply not-Rembrandt and hence as only important for showing us how to spot forgeries. Schiff breaks free of basing viewing on such oppositions by describing the work in considerable sensory detail.
The description begins with the catalog commentary:
“it is
surprising how
successful the unknown
painter was
in imitating Rembrandt’s manner
in the light effects on the sitter’s
left cuff. . . .” And so I came to love that
cuff, its lace and dust, and loved the
wrist that cuff suggests, obscured here in the painting
by the ledger
the auctioneer is holding
on which the trembling value of what?—some cows?—
suggests a field, in mind,
where a calf moves
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I think I touched that cuff and more
at a keg party in Slonim Woods
and sensed
its tragic aptitude,
counterpart to your dull right
wrist
lacking the vision of an artist’s truth. Is that
the word? “Truth”?
Not only does attention to the wrist lead to the quite remarkable ledger, but it also changes the mode of looking—first to speculative projection on the ledger connecting it to forms of Dutch farming life, then to reflection on whether the language of “truth” can capture the “tragic aptitude” of this image of dutiful isolation in that world of ledgers. Now this questioning of “truth” takes on considerable resonance. Were concerns for “truth” the appropriate context for looking at any painting, the account would be likely to be “without vision.” The limitations of this commitment to “truth” then lead to the voicing providing a way of saying “yes.” The poem returns to her doing her job as educator, which in various ways shapes the rest of Part One:
Stand up visitor, this is your hour.
Here is your map.
Choose your cradle. Ancient Egypt to
the right. Ancient Greece to
the left as the crow flies, if the crow flew . . .
The picture of history just got more complicated. It seems we have some power to select (not choose) paths of curiosity whereby information provides different possibilities for concrete attention capable of altering the qualities pursued by individual agents. Here all these possibilities are contained within the figure of cradles, where there are no binaries in sight. Cradles matter for all creatures because they provide ways of nourishing seeds, which involve as many ways of giving birth as there are digressions in this text. Basing its information on a traveling exhibition devoted to “the several ways a tree / disperses seed,” the text moves from how rivers carry seeds as pontoons, to ants spreading dog violet seeds, to acorns that she and her sister played with, to this great passage on birds in the thrush family who
eat a kind of vivid berry
encapsulating a tiny adamantine
seedcase requiring
a hard-grinding gizzard
to wear it down and passes through
the mill of the thrush
as through history
belittled, belittled, and belittled
until belittlement is the freedom
awakening each seed in shit
in the alert procreative natural state
of revenge by which we will
outnumber you;
time is the best maneuver.
No better craftsman than
the clock inside heather,
a seeding that insinuates into the future
by investing in soil
and being turned on
by the temperature
of fire rolling above the moors
We are likely to take seriously this analogy between the spreading of seed and the craftsman doing evolution’s work because the language labors so intelligently and assertively to transform belittlement into “freedom.” Perhaps the most important aspect of this passage is the way that it connects the “shit” of depressing detail with the possibility that “shit” can be the medium or cradle for a sense of awakening to the complexity of one’s situations in life. Then the narrator’s attention soon gets bored with what she thinks are obvious political generalizations, so moralizing gives way to fascination with memories of rocking an oak cradle. And that leads to information about the history of styles for cradle making, available—you guessed it—in the Metropolitan Museum. These historical ruminations prepare for a final brilliant stanza offering a picture of uses of information that do not entail domination but do characterize the possible importance of the narrative taking so many directions:
accomplished
by new joinery known as dovetailing
in the reign of William and
Mary. Into whose where in which
of by on up off on with including
against among during upon despite
concerning beyond.
Such multiplicity aligns the mind with the principles of evolution.
I must switch to summarizing fundamentally thematic concerns in discussing Parts Two and Three of Information Desk so that I can spend some time elaborating why I think the conclusion earns the right to stand with classical epics. But with Schiff, even when concentrating on theme one must attend to stylistic innovation. For example, the major thematic concern in Part Two is various ways in which attention to art and attention to life weave into one another. Correspondingly, the major stylistic concern is to provide an amazing multitude of narrative positionings and stylistic innovations that enact in imaginative ways how that weaving takes place. This diversity risks outrunning any controlling metaphoric presence, but Schiff is willing to take that risk because interactive variety seems fundamental to a dialectical relation between art and life, or perhaps between metaphor and metonymy. Voicings become responses that extend the text’s concerns for evolutionary seedings. And stressing modes of adjacency within the museum provides a means for recognizing how life can take an immense variety of forms.
For me the most effective voicings in Part Two involve the text’s commentary on two paintings. The first is an advertising poster of a Sugimoto seascape, which makes our narrator think about “Illusion and Deception”:
even collaging distant coasts
under
different skies during different
times of the day in single impossible evening
sunrises and moonlit noons
We are cued to think of collaging differences as the sense of possible impossibility given by art to life. Then Rembrandt takes the stage again to develop the contrary situation—what material life can give to art because of how the elements deployed by the painting bring reality to illusion and literalness to imaginative projection.
As Schiff returns to Rembrandt, she now stresses how his works afford powerful examples that life in art need not be only figural or representational. His palette itself depends on intricate preparations of various minerals and chemicals whose vital activity is fundamental to our emotional responses. Her treatment of Rembrandt’s respect for the material foundations in his paintings eventually grounds general reflections treating the artist’s sense of materiality as analogous to what nests provide in the animal world. Art cultivates a range for feelings of intensified vitality.
I choose a brief example to justify my assertions. This is her description of Rembrandt’s actual practice with red pigment:
in which sulfur
and cinnabar in its quick liquid
mercurial form
heat together to a vapor
that crystalizes and gets scraped out
as in a D&C a deep slaughterhouse red
blazing the huntsmen’s coats,
robes of Saint Jerome,
and the vivid, burning gowns
of how many tragic, triumphant
inexperienced married widow
experienced virgin . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
dancing and strolling,
reclining and standing,
throughout the Museum . . .
It is difficult to imagine preserving materiality within figural language in any richer or more startling manner than this sudden and quick shift to “D&C” (dilation and curettage), where blood is scooped out of the uterus. Such associations bind the physical human body to its imaginative extensions evoked by the work of metaphor. This passage produces a space at once literal and fantastic. And that space is anchored in gorgeously expansive syntax that is constantly aware of how museums can affect a range of psyches by offering means of grappling with the fatality inherent in our involvement in evolutionary processes.
Following this surprisingly intimate analogy, Schiff almost has to put her own emotional orientation completely on the line. But in order to accomplish this, she first has to recognize that the emotion she is talking about does not depend so much on personal expression as on recognizing how deeply personhood is mediated by materiality: “Who told / you that / one paints with emotions? / One makes use of emotions / but only paints with material.” Yet freed by that admission, she can summarize the feelings present in this entire section by direct statement of emotion:
How
I love
to touch
this world.
This bare contrast between the particularity of the I’s touch and the generality of “this world” combines with the spacing to marry full personal intensity with the work of material forces.
_____
Schiff’s writing seems to enact a constant interplay between an endless mobile mind inspired by the museum’s awesome diversity of treasures and an emerging need to establish personal identity in the telling of this tale by establishing constant echoes within this diversity. The echoes gather into discrete emphases in each part. Part One is primarily concerned to introduce the museum’s evolutionary function within society as providing nests creating possibilities for imaginative living to thrive. Part Two wants to go deeper by insisting on how the museum brings materiality alive and so encourages attention to “the things of this world.” The focus changes in Part Three to an interlocking chain of stories elicited by various kinds of materials, from cockroaches (returning from the “Invocation”) to paintings to the devious motives of the major donors who make this diversity possible. It is crucial that there is usually no opportunity at the Information Desk to develop single stories complete in themselves. Various needs emerge, soliciting various desires to define paths promising enlightenment to specific visitors. So the narrator indulges in having stories interwoven, often taking up already stated issues from new perspectives.
Digression is standard in epic from the catalog of ships in the Iliad to the history of Satan in Paradise Lost. But Schiff is not content with digression as an alternative to the main story. Digression becomes the main story because of the way it encourages the honoring of different priorities and imaginative domains within a museum, which itself can be considered a constant temptation to digression. And digression offers a version of sociality very far from the insistence on binary oppositions in mainstream culture. I suspect that there are no binaries in evolution. Even the immense difference between life and death is modified by various creatures taking advantage of the circumstances of others. Analogously, stability stems not from discrete structures but from accepting this endless diversity as a productive condition. This need for acceptance becomes a challenge that a contemporary epic must address, since the traditional epic commitment to one basic story tends to be inadequate for addressing the constant change in the kinds and qualities of experience that seem to matter for various groups of beings.
But however much an effort at epic structure seeks to afford a distinctive grasp of contemporary life, it probably would be wise to provide a parallel to how classical epic produces a resonant ending that takes the story virtually out of time by shaping a distinctive mental space. Hence the frequent shift at the end of classical epics from steady narration to the elaborate construction of scenes like the meeting of Priam and Achilles. Schiff handles this need brilliantly by staging the daily closure of the museum as Miltonic expulsion into the wilderness, but tempered by the fact that we expect it to re-open with new possibilities of seeding.
Let us track the major shifts in story near the end so that we have a clear picture of the complex emotional states established and intensified by the internal play among the narrative situations. Part Three builds toward this conclusion with a strange twist on evolution. The cockroach returns as a force bothering the human elite seated in the trustee’s dining room (a condition the author hopes to emulate). Then the mood begins to change with a transition to her own Egyptian cotton pants and the possibility of redirecting a troublesome character by “faster convoluting routing . . . through the Sackler Wing” dedicated to ancient Egypt. Attention shifts to one heroic person in the story, Nan Goldin, who threw hundreds of urine-colored pill bottles in the water surrounding the Temple of Dendor because she was incensed by the Sackler family’s using donations to the museum so that they could cover over their rapacious profit-taking from overpriced and sometimes deadly drugs. It becomes impossible not to mention in conjunction with this the selfish purposes of many on the Board of Trustees, who follow the example of Henry Clay Frick’s assertion that the ultimate pleasure for him is in out-collecting one’s rivals. As Schiff writes,
Behind every great fortune
is a great crime. Behind every great
hoard into which that fortune pools:
a slaughterhouse.
Her own act of revenge is much quieter than Goldin’s, since she does not have the status of well-known artist. But she has the poet’s inventive mind capable of combining mock-heroic aggression with her reverence for insect life. Like the trustees, she can make self-interested gifts. She had lice in her hair because her son came back from school with them. So she takes three pages to record lovingly how she embedded some bloated lice in an exhibit. The shame she feels does not block pleasure in her deed. But her need for relief does elicit identifications with memories of watching the illusionist David Copperfield seem to overcome the laws of gravity. As in evolution, what seems evil can be balanced by what can seem to provide a miraculous lift to the spirits.
The stage is set for the narrative returning to her relationship with the museum, introducing now the figure of magical thinking crucial for the ending: another implicit fantasy of desired escape emerges as she thinks about discomfort with her family situation. Perhaps the only thing capable of reconciling herself to the life she is leading is a sense that she regularly encounters a kind of magic when she thinks about “how to exit / the Museum?” This question turns out to generate a marvelous extension of what “exit” involves, providing a final echo of the evolutionary framework beginning with the Invocation’s tale of birth for the jewel wasp but now focused on the activities involved in closing:
Each day
during the final ten minutes the
Museum is open the army of Museum guards
surfaces from within the maze,
creeping around statuary and
columns and inches in
slow motion down the Great Steps
in formation
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They stream from
all directions into
the Great Hall down every
pillaged-earth corridor of goods
hammered, blessed, blown, ground, dyed,
smuggled, lacquered, carved, painted, threaded,
sold, stolen, polished, given,
and cursed, and hold themselves there in a circle
around the Information
Desk until every visitor’s gone and the locked
doors deadbolted again. Like the Rockettes,
my boss said the first day
I worked the Desk. They circled us.
He said they’ll dance a kick-line now
before clocking
out and I believed him
and thus I remember them
dancing. I remember
anticipating the dance, and the high kicks I imagined
I remember because I
anticipated with my
eyes they were in perfect formation kicking,
my whole soul against the glass
behind which the next moment is and the past
where they would and would have danced.
But of course they would not; and did not;
and still are.
I love this ending. Let me count the ways. If you want to compete with the classical epic, you need to imagine an army, even in a museum setting. You also need a history of destruction, along with this remarkable summary of the kind of actions that this army must perform in defense of the art. And because all the people exit, this sense of enforced departure seems to challenge any kind of idealization that wants to find ways of believing in the existential effectiveness of imaginative states. There is no escaping death in the real world. But perhaps we can escape attending to that by virtue of remembering what life can be like, especially in poetry’s power magically to turn the guards into the Rockettes on the one hand and how the dangling abstraction “every” generates an elaborate list of actual conditions defining what the information desk at the center helps us negotiate. Thinking about such negotiations also turns out to provide a means of balancing criticisms of the Museum’s politics by returning to the importance of offering historical backgrounds for the art.
These final passages attempt to reconcile oppositions among several issues raised by the poem—between the museum as nest and the museum as rapacious thief and, more generally, between an evolutionary process demanding a sense of fatality and the capacity for inventive metaphors that suggest countering thinking of fatality with awareness of our possibilities in facing this condition. Then there is the bold move of basing that grappling with fatality on the almost absurd simile comparing the synthesized army of guards to the Rockettes, dancers who performed elegant routines at Rockefeller Center.
What nerve—to end an epic with an extended simile and with a reference that has nothing to do with the museum except its being a part of another story also contained within the memories of museum workers? But this simile invoking popular professional dance provides a significant way of looking at the entire process of evolution, embodied in what we can see as Schiff’s elegant choreography. Here her manipulation of syllabics and intricate weaving of levels of diction remind us that dancing can also be performed in language as it puts various interrelated stories on stage. An audience cannot deny loss, but it can also value how the imaginative vitality of this poem can establish an attitude defining investments in the fascinations life offers after the closing. The Museum becomes a treasure trove for examining how lives begin, flourish or fail, and eventually end, but leave seeds for what make possible renewed appreciation of dancing.
The final stanzas offer performances based on two operations basic to shaping such appreciation. The first one stresses memory, partially in fidelity to everything the Museum stands for. The second stresses the power of “would” to establish the concrete ways memory can work. “Would” expresses a condition of desire shaped by what memory can contribute to the present. “Would” is not “will.” “Would” is the expression of a memory that can make nothing happen. “Would” is helpless against fatality. But fatality can be experienced quite differently depending on the force of “still are” in relation to the Rockettes, who now give delight and provide a way of viewing the army of guards in a distinctive way. The figure of the Rockettes enables us to remember the onslaught of the guards in the context of the many ways that the Museum continues to provide the fullness of the nesting process even though its closings signal the limitations inherent in any struggle against time, and perhaps against entrenched authority. That dance will return and will seed creativity for those who take advantage of the re-opening.
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Information Desk: An Epic. By Robyn Schiff. New York: Penguin Books, 2023. 144 pp. $20.00.