The malady, the inquiry, the pistol, the pistol. A Contrary review by Gregory Lawless  What if encyclopedias could free associate? What if Marianne Moore hosted Antiques Road Show? What if Vogue and Guns & Ammo wrote cooperative features exploring the history of desire? Revolver, Robyn Schiff’s second collection of poems, is not only the best answer to these questions; it is also a book of generational importance. For years contemporary American poets have been wondering what to do with their freedom. Poets today write in the wake of more than a century of great experiments: Dadaism, Surrealism, the mid-century free-verse revolution, Confessionalism, Language poetry, and others. Historically, of course, we live and write in the Internet Age, which promises radical access to information of all sorts, but which also presents us with a kind of formlessness—an irresolvable chaos of ‘facts’ and perspectives. In Revolver Schiff, a master of digression and absorption, corrals volumes of allusions and information without ever losing control. She uses her own peculiar logic of association to mold the protean content of her poems. John Andrew Rice, one of the founders of Black Mountain College, once said, and I paraphrase here, that John Dewey was one of the few men in America truly suited for democracy. And Robyn Schiff, it seems to me, is one of only a few American poets (perhaps perfectly) suited for our era. Schiff’s work is devoutly curatorial. Her longing for facts, artifacts and exhibitions (several of these poems were inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851) reveals both a collector’s fetishistic longings and sense of impending grief. We make exhibits of things, after all, because they are fragile and would otherwise perish without protection; we hold onto them because we cannot hold onto the world itself. In this way Revolver becomes an elegy for almost everything Schiff holds in her fascinated gaze: “Don’t grow attached,” she writes, “Don’t grow attached. Nothing lasts” (“Project Paperclip”). Her preservational instincts are so forceful that even when Schiff is partly disturbed by something (mass produced mid-century Lustron houses, for example, or butterfly knives), she can’t help but celebrate and record the beauty of an object’s form and function—that is, how even knives and guns can respond perfectly to need. “The right tool for the right / task,” she writes, in a riff on Keats’ oracular proclamation, “is objective truth.” (“Eighty-blade Sportsman’s Knife, by Joseph Rogers and Sons).   Formally Schiff is a fiercely hypotactic poet. Her sprawling sentences boast astonishing feats of subordination. Schiff’s lineation is functionally complimentary to her complex syntactical structures and deft digressive turns. She is, along with Creeley and Williams, one of only a few poets who can meaningfully break lines on articles and prepositions, ramifying significance wherever possible—symmetry be damned. More importantly, Schiff is a poet infatuated with violence and virulence. “Dear Ralph Lauren” intertwines the obsessive psychology of a projecting, father-seeking speaker with the more ordinary lusts of American consumerism. “H5N1” combines a meditation on pandemic viruses with post-911 anxieties over personal and political security. “On the Abduction of Calvin Klein’s Daughter Marci: A Captor’s Narrative” is, we’ll say for the sake of time, self-explanatory. And Elizabeth Hart Colt’s wedding cake, “trimmed with sugar pistols,” in the book’s lead poem, “Colt Rapid Fire Revolver,” becomes a kind of emblem for the work as a whole: the weapon converted into delicacy and vice versa. Thus, the revolver becomes a symbol of both danger and decadence. Schiff’s work is full of such entwinements. The sinister and the exquisite are never entirely free of each other because desire, lust, and obsession so often bring us to a pathological pitch when we long to acquire (or appropriate) what is beautiful. Granted, Schiff’s individual talent is great, but it should be noted that Revolver represents the perfection and not the beginning of a trend. More and more poets today are merging the language of critical and historical inquiry with lyrical forms. I wonder, though, if a book like Revolver, as brilliant as it is, signals the solidification of orthodoxy. Jorie Graham, Lucie Bock-Broido and Cole Swensen, and others have, after all, been working in similar modes for years. Does Schiff, then, represent a turning point in this tradition? Or merely one of this tradition’s greatest and most persuasive accomplishments? Schiff’s ability to cycle rapidly through associations, to investigate, subvert and exhaust her own motifs suggests, I think, something like lyrical hyperlinking—and in this way she is powerfully original. But dangerous too, because great poetry (like radical technological developments, such as the invention of the rapid-fire revolver) is both impossible to ignore and impossible to evade. Its influence follows us everywhere and ultimately we must answer to its power. Gregory Lawless’s debut collection, I Thought I Was New Here, will be published this year by BlazeVOX. He teaches at Suffolk University in Boston. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

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Revolver

Robyn Schiff

2008, Iowa

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