Robyn Schiff, Worth (Kuhl House, 2004), $16
The
revival of the lyric in “experimental” poetics is still
being assessed. Some poets, such as Elizabeth Willis, prefer to
call this return to the mode of the lyric as the “late lyric”
rather than the “new lyric.” And she may have a point.
The use of new is becoming increasingly suspect in our commodity
culture. And besides, the “late” lyric owes as much
to the textual poetics of Emily Dickinson as it does to the various
practices of so-called Language Writing. The traditional use of
the lyric mode is dependent on a central self. The trajectory of
the poem is inward, towards the speaker of the poem. Sincerity is
prized.
Robyn Schiff’s
first book, Worth, uses many subjects, from the figures
of high fashion, such as Versace and Tiffany, to Marie Antoinette
and Marilyn Monroe. She operates mostly in the lyric mode, but sometimes
makes use of the narrative mode as well. However, both the lyric
and narrative modes are disrupted. Ultimately, the subjects of these
poems are neither a person, a story, nor a speaker. The second section
of the book, “House of Versace,” demonstrates this use
of a disruptive narrative:
When the
suspect
touched
the
corpse
and
the
corpse
bled
a-
new,
it
was
proof
in
New
England.
Here, the corpse could be seen as the
lyric mode itself. The murder of the lyric is continual. It is an
ongoing project. This murder is contained in both the narrative,
an investigation into a murder, and the disruption of the narrative
through sliced lines and lyric interjections reminiscent of Dickinson.
For example, after the speaker tells us the suspect was wearing
a cloth cloak, a Dickinsonian dash interjects with:
As
near
like
it
as
is
one
Cloth
Cloak
a-
nother.
This doubleness of a cloth cloaking another
cloth suggests the doubleness of language itself. An unraveling
of layers without a center. Yet the search for clues persists. The
speaker says:
the
arc
of
stor-
y
hold-
ing
and
holding
is
lett-
ing
you
fall
This fall is not only enacted through
the shape of the lines on the page but is accomplished via the allusion
to the narrative/myth of the Garden of Eden. After partaking of
the fruit from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve attempt to clothe
themselves with fig leaves. Genesis tells us Adam and Eve are ashamed
of their nakedness and in the last stanza of Schiff’s “House
of Versace” the speaker exclaims, “and I / was ash-
/ amed.” The connection between knowledge and desire/sexuality
is well precedented in the Hebrew Bible. And, while myth and desire
have been subjects of lyric meditation for many poets, Schiff creates
another spin. Desire here is equated with clothing. And clothing/fashion/style
become a focus (locus) of lyrical meditation for many of the poems
in Worth.
As is the case with
most poems in the lyric mode, desire is the engine of Schiff’s
language. But unlike most poems in the lyric mode, the trajectory
is outward, away from the speakers of the poems. There is no bard
here. The intensity of perception is centrifugal rather than centripetal.
This move outwards is not a wide dispersing of energy. The focus
is on the objects themselves with a cool baroque sensibility, rather
than a wild Romanticism. The poems are architectural; the language
chiseled and meticulous.
In meditating on
various objects of the material world, Schiff equates desire with
transaction. In “Good-Bye Finch,” the speaker says:
Do
you know the word for
what
you do not
want.
Transactions take place
Always
a disruption
Transactions
take the place of you
What is a transaction? My nearby Webster’s
defines it as follows: 1. The doing or performing of any business;
management of any affair; performance. 2. That which is done; an
affair; as, the transactions on the exchange. Transaction,
in common use, often refers to buying and selling. Schiff’s
poems meditate on the goods we buy and sell (jewelry, dresses etc.),
but the poems are not concerned with an anti-consumption/anti-capitalist/pro-Marxist
stance; not, at least, in any simple application of anti-market
rhetoric. Instead, these poems implicate language in buying and
selling suggesting that what we buy and sell is, in the end, arbitrary.
Desire is the real transaction. Desire is the real performance,
the real money or means of exchange, and also the “object”
exchanged.
The intensity of
these poems is achieved through highly skilled word texturings and
repetitions. These texturings highlight the constructedness of language.
In most of the poems, language unfolds and refolds as it meditates
on its objects. Consider “The House of Dior,” the last
poem in section one:
Now
we are on the chapter of pleats.
The
impatience to fold, the joys of having folded,
the
pleasures of folding them again.
Fabric
enough in the sleeve to drape the dress,
in
the skirt to drape a chest of drawers,
in
the dress to drape the view of trees blacked-out
along
the walk from here to the next
house.
Walking in the dark inside the house
this
is the black we black the windows with.
Whether these objects are natural or human-made
does not, in the end, determine their worth. Both the natural world
and the world of high fashion are explored with equal intensity.
Neither is privileged. Words are weighed down with decorations no
matter how much we may attempt to strip them down. In the title
poem, ‘Worth,” for example, the speaker remarks, “The
dress was so big, / one’s hand is useless to take glass from
the table.” How is movement possible when words are decorated
in such lavish attire? Schiff re-reminds us of the connection between
art and artificial. Language is dressed (drenched) in the material
world.
Worth ends
with a diamond thief named Adam Worth. It is a fitting way to close.
Schiff is a thief. She steals objects of beauty (including language)
and refines (rebinds) and compresses them. Unlike poems aligned
with the concerns of the Romantic lyric, Schiff explores the fetish
of objects without masking the constructedness of language.
In Worth,
language is both an instrument and object of beauty; a blade of
beauty and utility; a “diamond/ diamond- cutting blade with
which the diamond is sharpened.”
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