The Art and the Encounter: A Conversation with Robyn Schiff

Robyn Schiff is the author of four collections of poetry, including the volume Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin 2023) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was awarded the Four Quartets Prize of the Poetry Society of America. A recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schiff co-edits the independent poetry press Canarium Books and she is a professor at the University of Chicago, where she is Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

On October 30th, 2024, The Interlochen Review editors Iliana Demas and Aanya Khairari, along with Creative Writing major Rhegan Stallworth, sat down with Robyn to discuss her book Information Desk: An Epic, her relationship with visual art, and the role of feminist anger in her poetry. 

Iliana Demas: Information Desk: An Epic is, as the title would suggest, a complex epic poem spanning many, many subjects. How did you go about writing a long project with such a large scope? 

Robyn Schiff:  I knew that I wanted to write a long poem, [but] it took a little while to realize the joke that would allow me to call it an epic. That was, to me, very funny, but I believe that a lot of ironic things are also earnest. I've written a lot of poems, also books, with a joke in mind. And just the joke of the epic of, who am I? Just some girl from Jersey. Thinking about what the epic is in our history and who gets to write them and why, that seemed hilarious to me. But once I was able to attach that joke to the process of writing this, it started to become a catch-all for a lot of things. I didn't know how wide that would be until I started working with the material. And the material is, of course, language. But the material also catches memory and all of it. 

My intention of writing the book was…I'd worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the information desk when I was a very young adult. And I thought, well, I have some time coming up. I had a sabbatical ahead. I was like, I will go back to New York. I've always wanted to write about that period, both because it was very much a coming of age as an artist [and] because of when it was in my life and what I did with that time. Also because it's the Met. I felt like I was in the middle of something very alive and very glorious, and very overwhelming and very upsetting at the same time, as the collection of art is. Especially for a museum that wants to be and is encyclopedic. That means that it's pulling things from everywhere, and those things don't necessarily belong in that building. And then, of course, it's not objects. It's people we're really talking about. So there's all of that tragic history at the Met, too. I knew that I needed and wanted to write poems about it. 

I thought that I would go on-site and live in New York for a little while again, and go and visit the artwork and write about what appealed, [but] life doesn't happen that way. Neither does art. It turned out that I wasn't really able to get back to New York very much at all during the composition of the poem. I was living in Iowa City when I started it. And I ended up taking a job in Atlanta, so that movement made it impossible to do other kinds of movement. And then there was the pandemic, and I'm also someone's mom…life got in the way. 

So instead of being just a book about the artwork there, it became a book about recollecting the artwork there. It was very much written in the present tense of what was going on in my life while I was writing it. It doesn't take place in the past. It takes place in multiple pasts, including the natural historical past, but mostly in the present of writing it.

But the present changed, too–I kept writing it for many years. You can track the age of my son in it, there's a presidential election that happens in the middle of it. So even the question of what is now became vexed as I was writing it. The poem became starving for all of the stuff and the passage of time. I didn't set out to capture everything, it's just that time and poetry does. 

ID: So would you say that the form it's in now is largely chronological as you were writing it? Or did you go back and rearrange things? 

RS: There's nothing chronological about it. I edited the beginning after writing the end. I did move pieces and I got rid of so much. Things that seemed later end up earlier. But then the question of time is a really hard one to ask and answer, too, in the book. Because what do you mean by that? Like the motion of an artist sitting down and making something in an order or the narrative order as it arrives. Somewhere as the poem was unfolding, it occurred to me, oh, it's starting to assume the form of the work day. That wasn't what I set out to do. It wasn't like “it’ll be morning and then I'll have lunch and then we will leave when the museum closes.” That was not part of the poem's initial structure. I had to discover that and impose that narrative structure on top of what I'd already written, which meant moving things around a little bit. 

Aanya Khairari: You have many poems revolving around movement, history, place, and objectivity. What strategies, prompts, or techniques do you use during the initial drafts of a poem? How do you create that central thread where all your ideas align in some way? 

RS: Oh, they definitely don't. And I don't have a strategy for starting out to make them align. What happened was they were misaligned or unorganized or disordered or whatever word you want to use. And then as an editor, not after the whole thing was written, but as an editor of the stanza that I'd written last, and then as the editor of the stanza before that one, I started seeing things. What happens is that when you mature as a writer, you stop needing workshop to point the stuff out. You have workshop in your head with yourself. You hear all those voices, and you start to tell yourself, oh, look, there's a theme emerging, or, there's a cockroach again. And just like somebody in workshop would say, something appears twice, that sounds redundant, cut one or the other. Do it once really well, or do it a million times so that you can really work the material. 

As we mature out of the workshop necessity, we also sort of lean into our own friends in a different way. So I also shared this poem with my own private people who are great poets who I love, and listened to them tell me, “I want to know more about the, you know, whatever.” Letting the themes emerge, and instead of workshop being the room where we go around the round table, it becomes a game of telephone with lots of different people over time. That kind of poetry community is something I really count on in my life. Friends matter. So the short answer is my friends and I told me. 

Rhegan Stallworth: The poem at large can sometimes be self-referential. Was that something that you just wrote while writing or did you go back after rereading and refer to it after?

RS: There are a couple of moments in my earlier books where that meta thing happens, that self-referentiality comes into play where I catch myself writing and then write that. But it had not happened on such a scale until this book. So once it started happening, I leaned into it. 

The first moment that I can remember where it was happening was when I was on retreat at the artist residency, Yaddo, and I wrote into the poem that that's where I was, that I was having conversations with people outside of my real life. And then it entered the poem. When I started doing that, when you're writing, it's a good idea not to tell yourself to stop. Do write what you want to write. You're going to edit it later. So I caught myself describing where I was in this surface time where the writing that was happening was interrupting the recollection time. And instead of editing it out, I thought maybe that's part of what this book is about, that it needs to acknowledge the forces that allow me to write it. 

So there's this family thing that's going on, and there's the privilege of an artist retreat, and there are other things, other entities that allow the poem to be written or create obstacles to its writing. I wanted to write those in, too. After I started doing that, one of the rules of the poem, to figure out where I wanted to go, was if a digression occurred to me, I could follow it. That meant stepping away from the painting I was describing or whatever, and following wherever the curiosity of the sentence seemed to be taking me. If I was writing a sonnet, there's not a lot of room for digression, so the scale really mattered. Because I was filling up so much space, the digressions became really long. And it occurred to me at a certain point that being in the museum is living a giant digression. Like, do you want to go down that pathway or that pathway? Well, I want to go over there. I see something out of the corner of my eye and I want to get to it, but there’s something over there, too. So a sort of misdirection entered the poem. 

ID: You mentioned in a previous interview, I think at the Met itself, that you would write poems while you were working at the desk. Were you also taking notes of odd things that happened or questions people asked you, and did you reference any of these original poems while you were writing the book? 

RS: I was making notes, but not taking notes, if you know what I mean. I'm not a diarist. I wish I was. I have friends who can go back to the year 1984 and I don't have that.

My writing all takes place in poems, so I don't have good notes about that period. But I etched it on my consciousness, I did make note of what was happening around me. I repeated anecdotes a lot, and I went back to the building so many times, and relived certain interactions.  

I used to read at the desk, too. And although I'd been reading Elizabeth Bishop since I was in high school, I don't think I got her, I don't think I loved her, until that particular period. So I used to sometimes be reading her while I was sitting there. Or on my lunch breaks, I'm reading in the poem, sometimes. 

There was a period where I was living in New Jersey with my family, and the commute was a little bit harder. And on weekends, in order to get to work at 8:30, sometimes I'd have to get there at 7:30, just because of the timing of the train, and I would bring these books with me. I had this almost ecstatic experience of reading Elizabeth Bishop in the morning on those trains, and at the diner before I would go to work. It’s all over the book. Some of the stuff is what I'm still reading, and some of it is what I read then that I tried to recapture, too. 

ID: Did you know that these experiences would turn into a project? And would you ever go back to the information desk to gather more ideas? 

RS: I knew that when I was there, that I was somewhere that was important to my artistic life, both in the sense of building my aesthetics in that building, [and] my sense of history. [Those were] also important years in my own maturity as a writer because I was free of college and high school. And I hadn't gone to grad school yet, so I was living my first intentional adult experience where no one was giving me a syllabus, and I wasn't being guided by a teacher. It was an incredibly potent time. I was alive as an artist in a way that you only get for a brief period. Then you're just in it. I was very aware of that transition in a fascinating way. I knew I had to be writing about that experience and that it would come up later.

Would I go back? Yeah, in a hot second. It was a great job and a weird one. And sometimes I regret ever leaving. I love my life in academia, and I don't think I want to give directions to the bathroom for my whole life, but it was a really, really amazing place to be an artist. And it's a different kind of job than the kind that I take home now. I would take home the tedium, the feeling of time, because it was also boring. But I would, more importantly, take home the art and the encounter. And now I take home a lot of stress. I'm basically a bureaucrat. I direct a creative writing program, and nobody wants that at home or in their poems. There was a purity to sitting at that desk that I really miss. 

AK: The language specifically in Information Desk: An Epic has allusions and names of painters like Rembrandt throughout each page. Did you have a background in art history originally before working in the museum? 

RS: I had no art historical background. I must have been aware of art history as a discipline, but it wasn't one I pursued. It never occurred to me to do so. I loved art, and I loved going to museums, but I didn't know that people did that for a job. 

When I graduated from college, I was looking for a job in publishing. I thought that's what writers were supposed to do. And I got temp work. It was what we were counseled to do when we graduated from college, get to know the city and see where you want to work and what kind of office life is right for you. So I temped for a while, and I really had not a good reaction to the office life situation that I was finding myself at nine to five. And I would go to the Met all the time, so much so that I was like, I should just work here. Are there jobs here? What can I do here? I'm just an English major, and I want to write one day, but what can I do in this building? 

So I applied to be a guard, and I didn't get the job, but what they said was, “We don't have any more jobs in security, do you want to be put in touch with human resources and maybe pursue other jobs?” And there was a big binder, and this binder shows up in the book. They were like, here are the jobs that are available, there's one in visitor services, do you want to interview for it? And I was like, hell yeah. That's how I got the information desk job. There was no quiz on what I knew about art. It was, do you look people in the eye when you speak to them? Are you helpful? Will you answer the phone smiling? It was a customer service job, and that I was good at. 

I learned everything I didn't know about art while I was on the job. If there was going to be a Rembrandt show, my job was to go to the Rembrandt show. I needed to know what was up there, and maybe make a recommendation to somebody, those kinds of almost trivial interactions with art. And I had to know my way around the museum really well. They trained us by giving us a scavenger hunt. I had a clipboard and a checklist. It shows up in the poem. 

RS: The friends you mentioned reading through the early versions of this, were they friends you knew while you were working at the Met? 

RS: Well, one of them, yeah. The person I eventually married, the poet, Nick Twemlow. I met him in grad school, and I'd already worked at the desk for a year and the summer before by the time I went to grad school. In fact, there was a period when we were maybe going to break up, I remember he wasn't taking my calls, and I kept calling him from the museum phone at the information desk like, is he going to take the call? What's going on? You weren't supposed to do that, but there were no cell phones. Sometimes you could make a personal call if you needed to, and sometimes you'd get a personal call. So he called me at the desk, then grad school happened, and we moved back to New York, and then I worked at the museum again. 

When I went to grad school, I met some of the people who are in my world. One of my readers from my work and one of my people I've dedicated it to is the poet Suzanne Buffam. The book is also dedicated to David Trinidad and Eula Biss. They're not people that I knew then, they’re both writers who became part of my long history of who I am as a writer through friendship. Like I said before, friends matter.

AK: The past is a vital factor in your writing. You incorporate your memories into your discussion about your time at the Met. How are you able to put your past in conversation with the present? 

RS: You make it sound like a thing that we don't always do. I think it's just how we live. I think we try to live in the present tense, and we make decisions based on who I am now and what I want tomorrow. But all of that is informed by what we already did and what our families already did and how our people already did things. It's such a big history that we take it into the present moment, and we have to deal with it all the time.

AK: How did you portray your mom in the book with your past experiences with her? What was that process like? 

RS: She's a really supportive mom. She's not a reader of other people's poems, but she's a reader, and she reads mine. There was a point in my poetry life where she knew if I was asking a certain kind of question randomly, it was because of a poem that I wanted. She would tell a story, and then three months passed, and I was like, what kind of car was Grandpa driving? She knows I'm detail shopping, and I want to tell the truth.

What happens in the book is sometimes a crisis of truth, that I try to write something and get it a little bit wrong. I think you're talking about my mom at the moment she corrects me. From the earlier question about being self-referential, I knew that I would enter my poem once it happened. I was like, oh, okay, I've just given myself permission to break the wall and write about mine now. It was another whole process to acknowledge other people coming into the poem, and that was sort of fun, too. So my mom makes it in. I was just mentioning my friend David Trinidad. I cut pieces where I called him from the archive at one point. I wrote a lot about the conversation we had, and it's not in the poem anymore. It's just its outtakes. 

AK: How did you create perspectives like the paintings were coming across as alive in a way? They were talking to reality. How did you do that regardless of the time frame? 

RS: I don't think I knew I did. The present tense of looking is a really active one, so any painting or object is in our time frame. I'm looking at it, so it must be. Tracing the history back, I knew that I wanted to trace a little bit of the lives of the artists, but I don't do a whole lot of that. It's more of the life of material that I wanted to engage. The past of a painting might be its pigment. I don't know how that makes its way into the present, but I think that it has something to do with research of, I'm standing in 2022, and I'm writing some particular passage, and I have to look something up, and now I'm in the past tense. I'm looking that thing up, and it turns out there's a research history that goes backward. Maybe I want to learn a little bit more, and the sentence is moving forward, but the research is moving backward. It's inquiry that links us from the present into the past.

ID: You have a lot of erotic imagery and themes of the body in your poems. Why do you find yourself returning to these themes, and what significance do they have to you? 

RS: I think that being in denial of the writing body is somehow sidestepping the truth, that it's humans with bodies who write poems, and that there's some kind of contortion that we get into as poets. We're all formalists, whatever we're writing, there's some form of denying that I have a body, I'm just a mind thing, and the mind is in the body. I think that if we try to write only about ideas and not write about how ideas come from the flow of blood, we're not really being honest with ourselves. I don't think that there's any gentle sensuality in the book. There are negotiations with yes and no. And that came out quite politically because of what was going on in the world.

One of the wasp poems I had written right around the election of Trump, and then the Kavanaugh hearings happened, and I was pissed. This was just the stuff that was going on in the world, [which] comes up in our poems in curious ways. Some people write toward, and that's a very obviously political poem. And some people write around, and I think I'm a write-around kind of person. In this book, I'm writing around, and my feminist anger was coming up. That turned into poems about consent and poems about the grotesquery of being a vulnerable body. Sometimes I subverted it and said, I'm not really writing about a female body, I'm writing about wasps. And that was a good place to put the energy. Poetry is an excellent place to hide. We don't always have to hide, but sometimes if we don't know what we want, you have to play a game to figure out what your poem needs you to write. 

I also got to a certain age, and I was like, I don't care if men can read this poem. I don't care if this is embarrassing. I'm a woman of a certain age. I gave birth. If I want to say something crappy about a man, I'm going to say it. I think I was afraid of that early in my life. I hope you'll never be afraid. We all get the feminist movement that came before us, and I hope your poems are full of the anger. And I hope that you don't have to be angry your whole writing lives either.

RS: In your wasp poems, do you think that their colors and their bodies and your interest in them was a parallel to your interest in visual art? 

RS: Yes, but I don't think I knew it until I was almost done with writing them. What I know about myself as a writer is that I have nothing if I'm not describing something. And I think of myself, my first book or even my first forays into writing as a child and certainly through my high school years, I love to write about art. I'm basically an ekphrastic poet, and it doesn't matter what the thing is, I'm going to aestheticize it and make it into something so that I can hold it still long enough to write about it. As I've matured as an artist, I'm more interested [in] writing about processes than stasis. Wasps' movements gave me something to describe, but I think they do become ekphrasis. 

I knew that I was in a strange place of writing about art in the book before this one, A Woman of Property, when I don't write about as much artwork as I had in earlier books, but I write about my son and giving birth. And I realized, am I writing mother poems that are ekphrastic and the thing I made is this kid? It was sort of mind blowing to me as a maker. I started to ask myself some fundamental questions: is making art a metaphor for any of us having been made and who made us? I don't mean just parenting, but creation itself. I'm not a spiritual person. I'm a poetry person, but I think they're the same. My traditions come from outside the poem, but my spirituality comes from within it. 

AK: Do you have an artist or mediums in visual art you gravitate towards specifically? And how does that correlate with you writing poetry? 

RS: I've been asked, what is the kind of artwork you like best? Even from my first book, because I've been writing about art for such a long time. My answer as a younger poet was, it's not any one medium or mode. It's curation. It's like the art of the curator to put the stuff together in such a way that any one of us can enter that museum space and move through it and be moved via juxtaposition. That's still true, and is still my real answer. But I think that I have a different relationship to art now than I did when I started writing poetry. I have a better relationship with visual art than I did even when I worked at the information desk. Writing this book gave me more appreciation too. The history of painting is an amazing one. Right now I'm interested in still life, and the history of property and things. That's a mode that I'm curious about at the moment, among so many other things. Maybe still life is a way of saying that the painter was a curator because the painter made those decisions about what's in there. 

ID:  After having worked at the information desk and writing this book, do you find yourself moving through museums differently? Do you interpret and understand history in a different way or through a new lens? 

RS: I am less reliant on authorities who tell us what history was than I was when I started writing the book. I had to ask a lot of questions about things and found out answers I wasn't aware of. So it's not that it's a different relationship with history, it's a different relationship with the presentation of history.