This interview with Robyn Schiff about her book Revolver was conducted during the week of May 18th, 2009 by eight poets: Christine Pacyk, Aaron Delee, Nicole Gallicchio, Andrew Galligan, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Lana Rakhman and Rose Woodson.
Q: When reading Revolver, I noticed that nearly every poem had something to do with an invention, including the envelope machine, the Singer Sewing machine, McCormick's Reaper, and even the revolver itself. Which poem was written first? Did you originally intend on writing a series? If so, how did this series evolve? How do you come choose the images of the antiques that you describe in your poetry?
Robyn Schiff: The first poem I worked on was "Colt Rapid Fire Revolver." I wrote it as the United States was gearing up toward the invasion of Iraq, and it set the tone and helped determine the content for the other poems in the collection. I was interested in invention and destruction, but also displays of power because this was the immediate post-9/11period, and there was all this chest-beating patriotism going on and solidarity expressed on bumper stickers.
Q: The images you construct are very powerful and engaging; however, it seems as though all of your poems are free-associative as you leap from one image to the next. I view this as a strength of your writing because it adds depth to the poems, but I wonder how you are able to draw such connections and still manage to give your poems a sense of completeness.
Robyn Schiff: I try not to free associate so much as perform the opposite of that exercise—what can I call that? Bound association? I'm interested in turns that occur through metaphor, or through other kinds of association, but I like the associations to be substantiated, inevitable, and I work to chart the connections as carefully as I can, even if I elide some of those steps. It's like conspiracy theory—there has to be a relationship, sometimes a probable one, and sometimes the connection is merely possible—and then the fun (or the terror) comes in proving it. I'm so happy that you feel a sense of completeness. Thank you. I work to put the whole puzzle together, even if the poem only represents some of the pieces.
Q: Which poets do you believe have inspired your own writing? Which do you continue to return to with the feeling that you still discover something new?
Robyn Schiff: Dickinson, Moore, Bishop and Plath are perpetual favorites. And lately Schuyler and Koch, too. And lots of novelists: Woolf, Trollope, Proust, anything by or about the Mitford sisters. For contemporaries, I have to name my own husband, Nick Twemlow. And a call out to Canarium authors Tod Marshall and Ish Klein.
Q: How do you see form functioning in your poetry, since you use the white space on the page in various ways, and sometimes in multiple ways in a single poem? And, which is your favorite poem in the book Revolver, and why?
Robyn Schiff: I think you're asking about space and shape-- aspects of a poem's form we don't talk about very often. I think of white space in a poem as the silence that's contending with the articulation the poem is trying to achieve. In a poem there's always a push and pull between what can be said and what can not. That combination is the heart of expression. White space is the silence encroaching upon the chatter. It's particularly threatening in the middle of a sentence in a highly enjambed, violent break in saying. I very rarely use interlineal white space, but the white space that moves me most is the margin itself. I don't often use the weed-wacker approach—you know, a straight, evenly spaced stanza edge—because it tends to neutralize the margin. I like it to look a little wild. I grew up in the N.J. suburbs and to distrust evenly cropped edges of all kinds. Unless I'm in France, and then it's really quite lovely.
I've never been asked to name my own favorite poem! That's a really tough question! Probably "Project Paperclip"—not because I think it's my strongest work, but because it was the most challenging and offered the most rewards. It was draining and took months, years, but it pushed me to try things I never could have premeditated. It was truly a process. An ordeal.
Q: Tell us about "Heroic Couplet." It is unlike any other poem in Revolver. Why did you include it and why is it preceding the last poem?
Robyn Schiff: It strikes me as strange, too. I don't think I can say too much about it, except that it's a love poem, and it was inspired by an article in the Science Times about how out-of-body sensations can be simulated in lab settings by stimulating the brain. The self can become detached from the body! There are certain moments in science—like when those amazing pictures of Mars were published—that make me think, my god, poetry has to completely change its course to express this! And then it both does and doesn't. I placed the poem where I did in the book because I wanted to express a feeling of coupling and its dark opposite, uncoupling, at just that juncture.
Q: Are you always a formalist or was that the evolution of Revolver?
Robyn Schiff: I guess I'm always a formalist to some extent.
Q: Many of the poems in Revolver must have required background research. When in the writing process do you research—e.g., before the poem begins, after you realize what the poem is about, etc? Or to use another phrasing, how did you write Revolver: which came first, the research or the poetry?
Robyn Schiff: I believe the inception of a poem happens long before the first words are down, and that inception inspires a lot of reading and a lot of writing, which are closely related creative acts.
Q: How do you keep track of the themes and movements of your longer poems? During the writing or in the revision process? And how do you know when a longer poem—or any poem—has ended?
Robyn Schiff: I don't distinguish between writing and editing—I'm a really slow writer, so slow that revision happens at a faster rate than writing. I have a physical sensation when a poem feels complete. I can't really describe it. I can't even really remember it from poem to poem...
Q: Do you ever lose track of your poem while composing it? What I mean is that there are often so many subjects/objects and transitions that the reader must depend upon your stitching to keep them arranged, so I wonder how the reverse process works for you, the unstitching?
Robyn Schiff: I think the tracking comes down to grammar for me. "Subject" and "object" are grammatical terms, and I rely on syntax to keep me on track. I definitely lose the thread of my ideas along the way, and there's usually an accompanying symptom—a grammatical mistake—or a more mysterious rhythmic problem. I can usually clarify my thinking by revising my syntax.
Q: The poems in Revolver do not read formulaically, but I'm curious if you have any kind of ad-hoc rules, timing mechanisms, etc. that you may go back to when revolving through and reintroducing images/subject matter, metaphor, etc. throughout a piece in order to engender/preserve balance and/or aid the reader in staying in step. In composition, do you have a sense of when it's time to take the poem down the next path, or does it happen more or less organically depending on the poem?
Robyn Schiff: That's a really interesting question—I guess the answer has to do with a sense of order that I can't describe—it has something to do with the music of the syntax. But I'm as interested in losing my way as I am in finding it in a poem. The poem feels like it's getting somewhere if it's askew and disproportionate and digressive. I try to enact the sensation of falling out of step, and also the pleasure of getting a little bit ahead, too.
Q: I admire in your poems the way you jump from idea to idea—in "Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face," for example, there is a connection between death and the negative space in an unstrung tennis racket. How completely unexpected and incredibly original! My question is—how have you trained yourself to see these connections in the world?
Robyn Schiff: Hmm. I don't think we have to train ourselves to see connections; we're born set theorists! — but we do have to train ourselves to resist the obvious or most apparent relationships. Maybe this has something to do with pace and patience. For me, an image takes a really, really long time to compose ("Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.").
Q: Your poems often become labyrinthine in structure—how concerned are you with your reader understanding what you've wanted to get across? In other words, how do you balance your poems being sophisticated with them also being accessible? And how do you decide the structure of your poems? (Ex: the chaos of "Singer Sewing Machine" versus the relative order of "Project Huia")
Robyn Schiff: I don't think there is something I'm trying to get across—the labyrinth is all there is. I think poetry is very well suited for exploration, but not particularly good at communicating information. The question about accessibility is related to this, I suppose, and I see the connection you're making. I don't think there's a poem in the world that is inaccessible; we certainly have different temperaments as readers, and we are not all interested in the same kinds of arrangements. Some of us like to walk in the city, some of us ramble in the country, and some of us prefer to walk in one straight line along a coast; that doesn't mean the other routes are inaccessible. They're just not preferable. Preference is highly temperamental and entirely personal.
Q: What words do you avoid/are cautious about using?
Robyn Schiff: It seems to me that strategically attempting to avoid a word is a good reason to force yourself to use it.
Q: Many of your poems necessitate a careful reader; in your poem "H5N1" there are some dense lines that may require re-reading, because either the line is complicated or is an intentional run-on. Do you construct your sentences with the intent to slow a poem (or reader) down or is it a product of your natural diction and pacing? Do you regularly fall into using lengthy run-on lines? Why do you use them?
Robyn Schiff: I'm very interested in the line between convolution and clarity. I use a lot of long sentences to foreground the exasperation of striving toward full articulation. Description and exposition are daunting, but that attempt at full articulation has something to with wanting to live forever—wanting to delay that ultimate end-stop. I'm interested in how enjambment (is that what you mean by run-on lines?) and other enforced silences (like the introduction of parenthetic statements and asides) interrupt lucidity, but I'm not particularly moved by run-on sentences. I don't think there are any intentional run-on sentences in Revolver. Though grammar does get the best of me sometimes, I believe that all of the sentences technically behave.
Q: A number of your poems allude to or are grounded in popular culture or current events (Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, avian flu). Did you intend for these poems to serve as societal markers or do they simply serve as grounds for conveying culturally relevant meaning? What benefits/challenges do you think exist when someone references cultural icons or events?
Robyn Schiff: All poetry is embedded in its moment. Dickinson's volcanoes; Hopkin's ship wreck; Uranus swimming into Keats' ken. Our poems date us—and not just through our references of course, but different modes of composition go in and out of style. We can be writing in a period style and not even know it. I think we more often don't know it in fact, and literary style is just taken for granted, like other trends—hairstyles and hem lengths. I'm interested in poems (like Dickinson's, like Plath's) that name their time, rather than being named by it.
Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (Iowa, 2008) and Worth (Iowa, 2002). She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she is the director of the undergraduate creative writing program. She also co-edits Canarium Books.
from Revolver
Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face, by Feetham
Has no fly laid a sac of eggs
in the wet hole in the house finch
dead on the back porch
a week, ten days, not even
the eyes missing, sometimes
I sit by it and read, it's March,
there is fatness to the air, walking
to the bus, back from the bus, I
miss the confidence
swift burial of the dead
gives us. I used to believe the wild
takes care of itself. I used to believe
maggots arise
like a spring of death
that need only be tapped,
but the flow of incarnation
is much too slow and nothing
comes to debride the flesh
so that my finch
can matriculate into the hall
of its next house
the door of which
is guarded.
You've seen door knockers
with the faces of men. In the novel,
the face warms to your approach,
but it's so few of us who can even
get our body all the way through
the cold negative space
of an unstrung tennis racket
we're holding. Pilloried in a past life,
who joins us here in this awful heat
clinging to the screen
door? A swarm of mayflies clutching
the wire mesh on their only night on earth.
They defile it until they
die, though it's not exactly
true they live their whole
lives in one humid day.
They were larvae first, that takes years,
then they emerge starving with no
mouth. Someone hates us very
much. If you walk back from
the lake late in the afternoon, as my
mother did when a girl, you'll find thousands
on the kitchen door when you return. A thousand
bodies who want in. I don't
want there to be a thousand faces
on the other side but
my grandmother must have seen them
when she pushed open the door for you.
