Still waters run deep (2021) | Foteini Zaglara / CC BY 2.0
For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has always been a question of looking for the most truthful way to record things that had seemed otherwise inscrutable or difficult to understand. Her new collection, The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels back the noise of daily life to locate beauty—and with it, a way of making sense of the world. Schweig recently sat down with Carina Filemyr to talk about moving from New York City, raising her son, and how writing poetry has guided her to stay connected to it all.
Carina Filemyr: I have a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience, but I became so immersed in the cognition of things—the movement of the synapse and kinetics of transmission—that, for me, it only made sense to turn to writing. Could you speak more about this evolution of the creative writing Master of Fine Arts to philosophy?
Sarah Schweig: Having gone into philosophy, I now understand that poetry is about looking for something true. It’s not about coming up with the most inventive way to say something, which I think a lot of poets and philosophers think is the value of poetry. I don’t see poetry that way. I argue that poetry wouldn’t have the power it does, and people wouldn’t turn to poetry in times of crisis, if it cared just about linguistic novelty. It just feels like something I need to do. The way I balance poetry and philosophy—it feels like I’m never balancing it. It’s always competing demands, but in ways that are mutually enforcing.
Filemyr: Finishing up a dissertation, motherhood, a full-time job, and doing extraneous author things, like interviews for Public Seminar—that is so impressive.
Schweig: I think it wouldn’t work if I didn’t feel like they were all related in some way. I’ve seen—and been affected by—the many sacrifices people can end up making for academic pursuit, and I was determined not to let philosophy come into conflict with raising my son. It has to be a part of it. I’m going to decide to have time with my son—even if it kills me!—especially when he’s so young (he’s three). So, it’s a particularly intense time, but also very joyful, personally and professionally. And it’s something that would never be possible without a partner who is engaged and supportive.
Filemyr: In one of the poems in the collection, you talk about “entering life by creating it,” and, later in the collection, readers learn that you ultimately decide to have a child with your husband. How have you used and continue to use poetry to navigate that decision?
Schweig: This is a tough question about how to make such a commitment. I still can’t believe we did it. You also read in the book the question of having children in our particularly charged moment, with threats like climate change and the state of the world.
I would say poetry doesn’t necessarily help. It gives—just like with any inscrutable state of affairs where I don’t have a clear answer—language that I, and I hope other people too, can trust to offer, at least, a description of the crisis.
The book that my son has been obsessed with reading at bedtime is Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. It’s the story of a little girl growing up one hundred years ago, and her grandfather says that she has to do something to make the world more beautiful. She tries to figure out what that is for her whole life. I think that can be poetry. I hope it can still be that simple, and I hope that beauty can still affect people in a way that creates solidarity rather than division.
Filemyr: How is your poetry now that you’ve moved out of the city and from the cubicles of previous corporate positions?
Schweig: The poems in this book span so many different places. I think about where they’ve been written—many of them in New York, definitely one of them in that cubicle.
I find myself really needing to take even just quick notes. In daily life, I’m usually not writing poems. Maybe I’ll think of some concept or line, but l don’t pursue it. I’m immersed in all the tasks of the everyday. I think we have a responsibility as writers to vary the conditions we work in so that we’re pushing ourselves.
I don’t want to fall back on lines or images that sound like something I would write. I’m skeptical of the inauthenticity of that, and I think it’s very easy as an artist to end up imitating yourself. I write a lot of poems that I throw away precisely because of that. I don’t want to just feed this machine of creative work. I want each thing I do to be grappling with a different inscrutable thing that emerges in experience.
I’m putting together a third manuscript now, and it’s fun to see how the poems do relate. I’m creating this larger unified whole by creating a manuscript, but each poem has to stand alone and hold its own in a different way. So, varying the place where I am doing that kind of work is an easy way to vary the material that comes out.
Filemyr: I’m really stuck on this phrase, “imitating yourself.” It’s a novel kind of “self-diagnosis.” Did you find yourself doing that when you were in the earlier days of your poetry pursuits?
Schweig: When I got into philosophy, I had the sense that I was writing poems that sounded like the kinds of poems I should write, and I didn’t really believe them anymore. I was curious about how that could happen. The dissertation I’m working on is about how we understand the value of poetry and how we—poets, philosophers, the public—deceive ourselves about the value of poetry. Trying to have an aesthetic judgment of your own work while you’re writing it is interesting to me.
Filemyr: How does the image of the ocean in the next room—the prospect of the horizon, the quiet beauty of loud and large nature—function for you in these times?
Schweig: It’s an image of enormity and of fear, I think. I think now we cannot think about the ocean without thinking of sea level rise. Given these enormities that we live alongside everyday, some of us less and some of us more tangibly, I want poetry to be something that’s about solidarity, and solidarity that’s persuasive.
What we’re seeing now is the need for solidarity with people who became desperate enough to vote for a kind of fascist, anti-establishment nonpolitician, which is who Trump is. I think poetry—any work of articulation that we’re doing—needs to be accessible to people, needs to be able to speak for people.
Filemyr: Good poetry can’t be summarized, but I’m curious about what “The Great Unity” represents to you in the context of this collection. While we’ve been talking about the wider scope of our country and its people, I also read it in a very literal way, like the unity of a person and their land, or the unity of a person in a group of other persons.
Schweig: “The Great Unity” is deliberately a wide concept. I think it also represents idealism.
One of my assumptions when I was younger was that the world would make more sense than it does, or that the structure of experience would have a narrative arc. I think a lot of people assume this because we grow up so immersed in narratives. I spent a lot of time realizing that this was not the case and trying to understand why it felt so mournful that it wasn’t the case, that there are contingencies all the time.
“The Great Unity” also became a stand-in for what we might hope for collectively, so not just an individual’s arc. It’s like the spirit of history and humankind moving through its developmental stages.
Filemyr: I think the most productive thing we can get out of this interview is no answers. Because that’s the point.
Schweig: That’s true of philosophy and poetry. No answers, but the promise of collective truth-seeking, right? Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, and that’s good enough for me.
Click here to read Sarah V. Schweig’s poem “The Blue House,” reprinted courtesy of the author and Milkweed Editions.
