Information Desk: An Epic

Schiff (A Woman of Property) revisits her days as an employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in this breathtaking sweep through personal and public history. A three-part epic subdivided by invocations to the jewel, oak gall, and cuckoo paper wasps, the text considers the beauty of objects made through tortuous and often reprehensible processes. Schiff shifts between the secret harassment to which she was subjected as a staffer at the museum’s information desk and the famous artifacts she saw every day, including Edward Steichen’s photograph of Balzac’s monument, Ingres’s painting of the Princesse de Broglie, and the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, where photographer Nan Goldin stages a protest and employees are treated to a complimentary lunch that “felt like a disembodied wedding... you’re marrying/ someone you’ve never met named/ Money who has no idea how to/ enter you.” The result is not a surreal layering of images but a flowing, insistent stream, wherein “gushing water/ exposes veins of gold” just as Schiff’s “memory rushes/ down the artifice/ thus.” Returning often to a 1995 exhibition that brought real Rembrandts together with imitations and student works, the poet uses the painter’s “darkness painted with a pigment made of/ cooked bone” as a powerful metaphor for the cruelty in art-making. Schiff has composed a fascinating poetic study of the ways that art relates to its audience. (Aug.)