The Ocean in the Next Room, a poetry collection by alum Sarah V. Schweig ’09, has been published by Milkweed Editions. Selected by Cynthia Cruz for the Jake Adam York Prize, a collaboration between Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions, the collection seeks to disentangle us from the Anthropocene—the mark in Earth’s history when human activity began to weigh heavily on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. A decade ago, Schweig began studying philosophy—and is currently writing her dissertation—because she “felt [her] poetry was not getting close to the truth,” she said in an interview with Bicoastal Review. “I realized that poetry taught me the inner coherence that I believe to be the mark of a strong philosophical argument.”
Schweig points to a separation in the arts—in effect, the haves and have-nots—when it comes to experiencing beautiful things: class barriers determine who gets to access, even be deserving of, the arts; our screens sever us from the beauty of nature; the enlightenment of our minds is blurred by the meaninglessness of capitalistic consumer culture, branding, content-creation.
While writing this collection, Schweig's inspiration came from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Frank Kafka, and Spinoza—and even, surprisingly, streaming The Office—and she credits philosophers Kant, Adorno, and Horkehheimer for guiding her thinking over the many years she spent writing it. She references The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s philosophy on language, which is that humanity can’t go further than language allows—how language limits what we can do and be and imagine about the world around us. Schweig essentially says no to this framework. “Whenever I tried to write a poem, I was imitating what I thought one of my own poems should sound like…My 'poetry' started sounding like bare logical statements. Hardly any imagery. A refusal to claim that one thing is or is like something else,” she said in the same interview.
About The Ocean in the Next Room, Cynthia Cruz says it’s an “extraordinary collection of poems [doing] that strange thing Hegel tells us all great art does…art makes appear the structures that would otherwise remain invisible to us. This collection works through and brings to light the complexities of life lived in the twenty-first century.”
Sarah V. Schweig's poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, BOMB Magazine, Boston Review, Tin House, amongst others. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Columbia University. She is working on her dissertation in philosophy at The New School for Social Research on the value of poetry.
