Poetry about work: Information Desk by Robyn Schiff

Information Desk by Robyn Schiff

Last week, a video popped up in my YouTube feed, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I’ve long been interested in poetry about work, so I ordered it right after watching the video. I’m also familiar with the Met from living in and visiting NYC. I loved the fact that the Met invited her back to her old workspace to read from her book.

I’ve long had a fascination with epics, as well, although I wondered how one would write an epic without writing nationalistic propaganda. Fortunately, it’s more of a mock-epic with invocations to wasps, and each six-line stanza being made up of as many syllables as years in Schiff’s age when she wrote them.

I’ve read it through twice now, enough to know that I want to read it many more times. It reads quickly as Schiff’s sentences sprawl forward with associations and parentheses. My younger daughter said, “oh, you speedran it.” I said, no, I felt I was being pulled through. For her, the hardest thing about the book is the wasps, on the cover and in the poem. For me, was Balzac was the toughest (implicitly Rodin’s and explicitly Steichen), which I got over by Googling. For a poem set in an art museum, you either need to know the museum very well, visit it many times in person, or Google.
I got the book because I was interested in poetry about work, and it does not disappoint. Schiff mentions the “antisocial aspirational vocabulary” she picked up as a bad telemarketer for lifestyle magazines. She reflects on the weekly cycle of rot of the flowers placed beside the information desk. She describes the trip from the cashier’s office to the desk. I felt in a keen way the anxiety of being a young woman working in a public space, the crass comments of visitors, the sexist pranks of co-workers, and the creepiness of a menacing guard, before he was arrested.

I also wondered at what a poet could say about a previous place of work. Apparently, quite a bit. In addition to the slights mentioned above, she also recounts some of her own transgressions, such as leaving one of her hairs in an informational file. I’m impressed with how much Schiff says about the Met and still got invited back to do a video.

As for the question of epics, yes, an art museum is exactly the place to think about colonialism, forgery, theft. Schiff brings all of that in, with a sly humor. The wasps do get thematically more important as the poem continues, escaping somewhat their role in the invocations, and personifying in some way the contradictions of survival, of history, and of making poetry and art.