'Vision makes poems': An Interview With Robyn Schiff

At the Rumpus, Robyn Schiff lets loose a deluge of wisdom in an interview with Emma Winsor Wood. The two focus on Schiff's latest title A Woman of Property, questions of form, motherhood, epics and mythology, and fact-checking poems. In her introduction, Winsor Wood describes Schiff's verbal acrobatics: "Most people do not speak in actual sentences. They speak in fragments, they interrupt themselves, they stop, they start, they leave out verbs and nouns you need to fill in when you transcribe the interview. Not Schiff. She spoke the way she writes: in long, winding, brilliant sentences filled with allusion and fact that seem to lose their way, yet somehow manage to loop back to where they began before reaching the period." Indeed. The interview begins with Schiff discussing the multiple meanings, references, and coincidences attached to the title "A Woman of Property."

The Rumpus: A Woman of Property is a fantastic title. Where does the phrase come from? How is it in conversation with the poems in your book?

Robyn Schiff: The title is a nod to the first book in John Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga novels, which is titled The Man of Property. In that novel, the eponymous “man of property” is having a house in the county built in order to transplant his very reluctant wife from the social life of the city to his newly acquired isolated property in the country. He’s semaphoring his power—the land is his property; the house upon it will be his property; the wife inside the house is his legal property, too. Naturally it all goes tragically wrong, and my title engages with the folly of his failed machinations. There’s also an inside joke with myself to the title that’s not stated in my book—Galsworthy’s man is erecting his country house on a property called “Robin’s Hill.” It’s also a coincidence that my own house was built in 1906, the year The Man of Property was published. I can’t resist a good coincidence. I remember reading the book while pregnant in a room in my house that was then the guest room. In the course of writing A Woman of Property it was transformed from guest room to nursery to child’s room. I suppose it’s made these transformations many times since 1906.

By invoking the problems of “a man of property,” I was thinking about the larger fictions of ownership. I mean, in America, we know it’s all stolen property, so “buying property” is part of a long con. Not only is this not our land to buy and sell—we might as well call it what it is: a multi-generational fencing scheme whereby, as a home owner I knowingly bought stolen goods to sell later at a profit—not only that, but the absolute fiction of the mortgage system. Most people, myself included, don’t own the property they call their own, they’re mortgaging property. Another long con with its own predatory traditions. Within these fictions we determine our “sense of place”—a phrase I abhor!—and to me it’s a very Gothic notion in which our possession of the land and the houses we build upon it is haunted by violence and deceit. The Gothic, as an aesthetic category and literary mode has everything to do with who owns what: what history do we face when we encounter ruins, what past haunts it, and whose property are the ruins on? Who owns that history?

Schiff takes a detour to talk about the Iliad and the Oresteia and the origins of Western literature before settling into a discussion of form:

Rumpus: And how does the form develop? Is it something that clicks into place early on?

Schiff: It does. Form is usually one of the first commitments that I make in a poem. And I don’t just mean received form—I mean all of the ways a poem might have material bearing, including tone. These commitments, for me, are made very early in almost a procedural or operational way. Locking into form is very generative for me, even if it’s free verse; to know what a poem’s proportions are is to know a lot about a poem. Of course there’s all sorts of tension and abandon and rebellion and improvisation struggling against those commitments. To me, that’s fundamental to the writing process. I’m not very interested in poems that don’t make a case for their own shape, poems that don’t seem attached to the emergency of their own utterance. To me that’s where poetry differs from prose.

Make your way to the Rumpus for the interview in full.