Still waters run deep (2021) | Foteini Zaglara / CC BY 2.0
For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has all the time been a query of on the lookout for essentially the most truthful technique to document issues that had appeared in any other case inscrutable or obscure. Her new assortment, The Ocean within the Subsequent Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels again the noise of every day life to find magnificence—and with it, a method of creating sense of the world. Schweig not too long ago sat down with Carina Filemyr to speak about shifting from New York Metropolis, elevating her son, and the way writing poetry has guided her to remain linked to all of it.
Carina Filemyr: I’ve a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience, however I grew to become so immersed within the cognition of issues—the motion of the synapse and kinetics of transmission—that, for me, it solely made sense to show to writing. Might you communicate extra about this evolution of the artistic writing Grasp of Tremendous Arts to philosophy?
Sarah Schweig: Having gone into philosophy, I now perceive that poetry is about on the lookout for one thing true. It’s not about developing with essentially the most creative technique to say one thing, which I feel lots of poets and philosophers suppose is the worth of poetry. I don’t see poetry that method. I argue that poetry wouldn’t have the ability it does, and folks wouldn’t flip to poetry in occasions of disaster, if it cared nearly linguistic novelty. It simply seems like one thing I have to do. The best way I steadiness poetry and philosophy—it seems like I’m by no means balancing it. It’s all the time competing calls for, however in methods which might be mutually implementing.
Filemyr: Ending up a dissertation, motherhood, a full-time job, and doing extraneous creator issues, like interviews for Public Seminar—that’s so spectacular.
Schweig: I feel it wouldn’t work if I didn’t really feel like they had been all associated indirectly. I’ve seen—and been affected by—the various sacrifices individuals can find yourself making for educational pursuit, and I used to be decided to not let philosophy come into battle with elevating my son. It needs to be part of it. I’m going to resolve to have time with my son—even when it kills me!—particularly when he’s so younger (he’s three). So, it’s a very intense time, but additionally very joyful, personally and professionally. And it’s one thing that might by no means be attainable with no companion who’s engaged and supportive.
Filemyr: In one of many poems within the assortment, you discuss “getting into life by creating it,” and, later within the assortment, readers be taught that you simply in the end resolve to have a toddler together with your husband. How have you ever used and proceed to make use of poetry to navigate that call?
Schweig: This can be a powerful query about the way to make such a dedication. I nonetheless can’t consider we did it. You additionally learn within the ebook the query of getting youngsters in our notably charged second, with threats like local weather change and the state of the world.
I might say poetry doesn’t essentially assist. It offers—similar to with any inscrutable state of affairs the place I don’t have a transparent reply—language that I, and I hope different individuals too, can belief to supply, at the very least, an outline of the disaster.
The ebook that my son has been obsessive about studying at bedtime is Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. It’s the story of a little bit lady rising up 100 years in the past, and her grandfather says that she has to do one thing to make the world extra stunning. She tries to determine what that’s for her complete life. I feel that may be poetry. I hope it may nonetheless be that straightforward, and I hope that magnificence can nonetheless have an effect on individuals in a method that creates solidarity reasonably than division.
Filemyr: How is your poetry now that you simply’ve moved out of town and from the cubicles of earlier company positions?
Schweig: The poems on this ebook span so many alternative locations. I take into consideration the place they’ve been written—a lot of them in New York, positively considered one of them in that cubicle.
I discover myself actually needing to take even simply fast notes. In every day life, I’m normally not writing poems. Perhaps I’ll consider some idea or line, however l don’t pursue it. I’m immersed in all of the duties of the on a regular basis. I feel we have now a duty as writers to range the circumstances we work in in order that we’re pushing ourselves.
I don’t need to fall again on traces or photos that sound like one thing I might write. I’m skeptical of the inauthenticity of that, and I feel it’s very straightforward as an artist to finish up imitating your self. I write lots of poems that I throw away exactly due to that. I don’t need to simply feed this machine of artistic work. I would like every factor I do to be grappling with a unique inscrutable factor that emerges in expertise.
I’m placing collectively a 3rd manuscript now, and it’s enjoyable to see how the poems do relate. I’m creating this bigger unified complete by making a manuscript, however every poem has to face alone and maintain its personal differently. So, various the place the place I’m doing that form of work is a straightforward technique to range the fabric that comes out.
Filemyr: I’m actually caught on this phrase, “imitating your self.” It’s a novel form of “self-diagnosis.” Did you end up doing that whenever you had been within the earlier days of your poetry pursuits?
Schweig: Once I received into philosophy, I had the sense that I used to be writing poems that sounded just like the sorts of poems I ought to write, and I didn’t actually consider them anymore. I used to be inquisitive about how that would occur. The dissertation I’m engaged on is about how we perceive the worth of poetry and the way we—poets, philosophers, the general public—deceive ourselves concerning the worth of poetry. Attempting to have an aesthetic judgment of your personal work when you’re writing it’s fascinating to me.
Filemyr: How does the picture of the ocean within the subsequent room—the prospect of the horizon, the quiet great thing about loud and enormous nature—perform for you in these occasions?
Schweig: It’s a picture of enormity and of worry, I feel. I feel now we can’t take into consideration the ocean with out considering of sea degree rise. Given these enormities that we reside alongside on a regular basis, a few of us much less and a few of us extra tangibly, I would like poetry to be one thing that’s about solidarity, and solidarity that’s persuasive.
What we’re seeing now could be the necessity for solidarity with individuals who grew to become determined sufficient to vote for a form of fascist, anti-establishment nonpolitician, which is who Trump is. I feel poetry—any work of articulation that we’re doing—must be accessible to individuals, wants to have the ability to communicate for individuals.
Filemyr: Good poetry can’t be summarized, however I’m inquisitive about what “The Nice Unity” represents to you within the context of this assortment. Whereas we’ve been speaking concerning the wider scope of our nation and its individuals, I additionally learn it in a really literal method, just like the unity of an individual and their land, or the unity of an individual in a gaggle of different individuals.
Schweig: “The Nice Unity” is intentionally a large idea. I feel it additionally represents idealism.
Certainly one of my assumptions after I was youthful was that the world would make extra sense than it does, or that the construction of expertise would have a story arc. I feel lots of people assume this as a result of we develop up so immersed in narratives. I spent lots of time realizing that this was not the case and attempting to grasp why it felt so mournful that it wasn’t the case, that there are contingencies on a regular basis.
“The Nice Unity” additionally grew to become a stand-in for what we would hope for collectively, so not simply a person’s arc. It’s just like the spirit of historical past and humankind shifting by way of its developmental phases.
Filemyr: I feel the best factor we will get out of this interview is not any solutions. As a result of that’s the purpose.
Schweig: That’s true of philosophy and poetry. No solutions, however the promise of collective truth-seeking, proper? Perhaps that’s the perfect we will hope for, and that’s adequate for me.
Click here to learn Sarah V. Schweig’s poem “The Blue Home,” reprinted courtesy of the creator and Milkweed Editions.
