Robyn Schiff

I am the author of four books of poetry and am an editor at Canarium Books, a distinguished small press of extraordinary poetry. Both in the classroom and in my Directorship, I strive to motivate creative life beyond coursework, inspiring students to sustain the thrill of their craft and the fulfillment of literary community long after graduation.

My most recent book, Information Desk: An Epic (2023) is situated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I worked at the information desk in my young adulthood. The compositional mode is simultaneously formal (counted in syllabic stanzas) and structurally improvisational and peripatetic as it wanders in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, contemplating the physical properties of artwork and the lives of artists, staff, and visitors, as well as the insect life that thrives on and in art objects. Like the museum itself, comprised of various overlapping timeframes that give visitors a simultaneous sense of stasis and momentum, immediate presence and the sublime undertow of the everlasting, Information Desk shifts between lyric time and narrative time, the present tense and memory, to contemplate the spiritual and material significance of time’s passage.  

My previous collection, A Woman of Property (2016), takes urgent, imperiled domesticity as its subject matter. Writing for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson compared the book’s attentive, unsettling poems “of almost forensic specificity” to Hitchcock’s atmospherics: “Schiff’s poems, with their Hitchcock-like distrust of appearances, their alertness to hidden binds and snares, offer something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world.” My earlier books, Worth (2002) and Revolver (2008) set the stage for the development of my interest in history, ekphrasis, and syllabics, and together with the deeply personal subject matter I attended to in A Woman of Property, prepared me for the undertaking of Information Desk: An Epic.

Additionally, my longtime editorship at Canarium Books, a distinguished small press dedicated to the publication of poetry, has brought me profound fulfillment in the literary community, and it has been moving both to shepherd books of extraordinary literary merit into the world, and to model this ethic to my students.