Sitting at the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Prof. Robyn Schiff felt like she was “spending my life at the center of the world.” Nearly 30 years later, Schiff turned her experiences into an epic poem, skillfully weaving the collections of visual art and connections to the world within it with her life’s journey, her material world, and her imagination.

For Information Desk: An Epic (2023), Schiff recently received the 2024 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America. The international prize recognizes multi-part poems, with the winner receiving $20,000. Previous winners of the Four Quartets Prize include Courtney Faye Taylor, John Murillo, and Dante Micheaux.

“As a young writer, walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day, I was overwhelmed by its contradictions. The beauty of the artworks is very often at odds with the violence of its collection. The history of art is both breathtaking and ruthless,” said Schiff, a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and director of the Creative Writing Program at UChicago. “Being in this building, confronted with these artworks, and traveling through time through the corridors of the museum, you feel like everything is on fire; every single work is an emergency.”

“And yet, despite navigating this vast space that is almost too big and encompasses 5,000 years of history, the Met manages to create intimacy work by work, moment by moment. That too is the task of Information desk; I was trying to express scale and distance, even as I looked at my own life up close in comparison to the emotionally charged works of art I was in contact with on a daily basis.”

Through the halls of the Met

Already a poet and poetry reader, Schiff worked part-time at the Met’s information desk for five years after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1995. She gained experience and knowledge by observing people and works of art, but needed time to mature, refine her writing style, and develop the imaginative presence and patience to write Information desk.

Schiff describes the compositional structure of her epic poem as simultaneously formal and improvisational as it winds in and out of the museum through history, literature, material, and memory. She considers the tangible aspects of the artwork and the lives of the artists, collaborators, and visitors, as well as the insect life that thrives around and within the art objects.

Out of Information deskPage 14:

…There was a car
We transported brochures
from a storage room
to the desk. You had to control it
back through the Renaissance
in a passage that
opens in a dark medieval hallway…

“Chasing Robyn through the halls of the Met, through the prism of memory and through scales of world-historical and microscopic nature in Information desk is absolutely intoxicating,” said Anne Eakin Moss, associate professor and head of the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literatures at UChicago. “When I heard her read from the book last spring, it seemed as if the relentless intensity and erudition had sprung entirely from her mind.”

Hone your craft

Information desk is Schiff’s fourth book of poems. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her previous collection of poems, A woman with wealth (2016) dealt with the urgent and threatened domesticity and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named best book of the year by New Yorkers and the Chicago-TribuneHer other poetry collections revolver (2008) and Value (2002) laid the foundation for the development of her interest in history, visual art as a literary device and formal structure and prepared her for writing Information deskso ship.

“With machine-like precision, Schiff’s poems move at nearly the speed of sound, moving inexorably toward often terrifying ends, challenging the very mechanisms of progress,” says Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Creative Writing Program at UChicago and poetry editor at The Paris Review“Taken together, their poems reveal a deeply disturbing picture of the darkness at the heart of all civilizing projects.”