MK: One of the most indispensable aspects of poetry is how a poem can change you by shaking you into new perspectives. The Ocean in the Next Room, winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, has a speaker who staggers, sways, walks in circles, and looks up from screens with bleak honesty as she observes a slow apocalypse. “The literal is all that’s left us, them, anyone. / It’s what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been told,” says the speaker of the poem “Waves.” “The scramble of headlines is the world.” 

 

From this chaos is delusory escape: We enter life by creating it. We travel. We crowd out thought with motion. We “bring our little devices along, just to prove / our lives have worth, our lives have use” (“Unaccompanied Human Voice”). 
 

“The Tower” quickly became one of my favorite poems (ever). I love and hate how I inhabit its neo-noir decay. It hurts, like a Dostoevsky novel, but I want to frame it. Here’s a taste of the stripped-down language and relationsitic story of the much longer poem. 

 

Our Director, heir to the field, attended an ivy.

From him we learned that to beget the industry

that creates more industries, some authority first hath

to beget the word beget. It is similar with the population.

Fall came and the breeze changed and the Tower

filled and emptied, swaying. My office came and went

through the tunnel, singing the mission statement

of our company. I came home to unzip my sheath.

I came home to my wounds and worked them

to heal. I unwound with a glass of wine and released

my life from the vise for the length of a sleep.

Honest, our Director thinks of the office as family.

 

The poem's mix of archaic language with modern corporate buzzwords like viral and mission statement is chilling. Under an illusion of choice, the speaker lives a feudal-office-worker life within an all-too-real system many Americans can no longer rely on. The authoritarian Tower proves to be emblematic of the whole unnamed country. The people, including the speaker, have little real autonomy, but worse yet, lack vision of how bad things really are. They don’t fight for principles. They don’t fight for anything better. They slip into lives that grow unbearable, drained of color, full of things calculated so often by their usefulness that people turn into tools. 

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What influences went into creating the unique atmosphere of "The Tower"?

 

SS: I wrote “The Tower” during a few of my lunch breaks when I was working at an office in Midtown Manhattan. It was a job in which I had to write in a very measured, professional kind of voice. I don’t want to reduce the poem to personal details, but the poem arose in those circumstances, and clearly seeks some kind of escape from the status quo of work and how people are valued in that current framework. And I think you’re right that the poem fantasizes about revolution even as it questions its viability. The speaker’s failure of imagination about how to extricate herself from the systemic instrumentalization of people as “human resources” is also my own. We are all so entrenched. The allegorical stance of the poem freed me from reality to some extent, but the myth I ended up imagining was a reflection of the very situation that gave rise to the poem. I’m interested in these kinds of paradoxes. 

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It’s funny you mention Dostoevsky. I was reading some Dostoevsky, but a lot of Tolstoy around the time I wrote “The Tower.” (I finished Anna Karenina during a lunch break in a bar on 9th Avenue. So much had to happen during those lunch breaks!) As for literary influences that specifically shape this poem, it’s hard to say. The aforementioned are always there. And Kafka, obviously. And maybe also Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, thinking about revolution and its limits, and probably streaming hours of The Office. 

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MK: The poem "Tractatus," to me, carries a similar examination of smallness, or in referencing Wittgenstein alludes to how the things the speaker knows, offered up prepackaged and ready-made, form a world – yet constrain it. The Ocean in the Next Room explores an individual's identity within ever-widening circles, as well as how words (and names) build the boundaries of language and life experience. I am drawing this from my brief look at a summary of The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that says, “the world is the totality of facts, not of things” and his quote, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” 

 

I imagine the speaker of many of these poems, if not all, as narrating from a transitory place between an oppressive history (full of things given paternally) and the silence of the grave. Brevity is captured matter-of-factly yet with great feeling, striving toward a necessary blurring of meaninglessness with enlightenment:

 

……

 

Does all that’s lost break

even with all that’s gained? Looking across 

 

some internal skyline of past lust, aftermath 

of ruins that remain, a windless landscape

 

of dust, love

 

is how I account for this. 

Nothing is gained, thus, 

 

I’ve gained 

nothingness.

 

…… 

(Tractatus)

 

There are also instructions on living that are pointedly anti-enlightenment; that say the quiet part out loud. From “Five Skeins”: 

 

….. I work all day so my king can hunt lions.

On my device, I keep contact information

for people I love, as well as video I shot

across borders. My crumbling country still loves

 

borders. Because I am making an infinity scarf

in this moment, I am a Maker of Infinity Scarves.

My country loves this way of speaking. It is

a way of moving through the world without need

 

of thinking. ……

 

You must love

your work lest you have no life left

to love.
 

As mentioned earlier, there is a strong theme of self-deception:

 

​………... I’ve been in the city all this time

telling myself: You are living your life.

Years went by that I didn’t notice the sky

until I glimpsed the sky in the stream of images

I thumb through from time to time.

 

(The Blue House)

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​Did you set out to write some of the poems with themes of enlightenment in mind? Can you talk more about philosophy and its influence on your ideas and poems? 

SS: I started studying philosophy about a decade ago because I felt my poetry was not getting close to the truth. I was concerned about exactly what you mention: self-deception. Whenever I tried to write a poem, it felt like I was imitating what I thought one of my own poems should sound like. Every image or metaphor felt somehow empty. I pared down more and more. My “poetry” started sounding like bare logical statements. Hardly any imagery. A refusal to claim that one thing is or is like something else. Left, essentially, with tautology, I felt it necessary to understand something about knowledge and its limits, so I started auditing a class on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. To be clear: I was not there to pillage material for my poems. I had stopped writing poems. I was so tired of my brain that I wanted a different one. I would go to work all day, and then one evening a week I attended this class. The class was incredibly frustrating because I was very much behind. All the philosophical vocabulary was new to me. But I was engrossed. I felt I had discovered an alternative to poetry—a way of thinking through experience, concepts, and language that wasn’t poetry. 

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Philosophy also seemed to offer a way out of the Creative Writing Industrial Complex in which I had participated, which at times seemed to value just getting published and deemphasize what had made me, and many other poets I admired, fall in love with poetry in the first place: the fact that other people distant from me in time and space had articulated something that spoke to and for me. That transmission of understanding stood apart from dominant ideologies about creative writing that value literature for its free self-expressive qualities before anything else. What I observed around some contemporary practices of poetry was a kind of obsession with honing a voice, which seemed to be tied to some assumption about marketability. Yet these practices often existed within the echo chamber of institutes of higher education, and seemed to disregard even the question of whether the poetic articulations created there could matter to the general public or popular culture.   

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So, I am sure that thoughts about enlightenment from Kant (and then later Adorno and Horkeheimer) inform The Ocean in the Next Room, as well as thoughts about self-deception. But I had to change my brain in order to make that happen, and it wasn’t something I set out to do for poetry. At one point, I became convinced that my pursuit of poetry was just a blip and what I really should have been doing all along was philosophy. The great twist, of course, is that I kept writing poetry, and now I am writing a philosophy dissertation on the value of poetry that pursues the question of how we may deceive ourselves about poetry’s value. And in another twist, as I have been writing the dissertation, I realized that poetry taught me the inner coherence that I believe to be the mark of a strong philosophical argument.

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MK: Re: "the question of whether the poetic articulations created there could matter to the general public or popular culture." Do you have any personal-favorite poets or poems that you think have notable or unique significance in this way?

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SS: Good question. We've seen this happen with some really good poems that have gone viral, like Maggie Smith's "Good Bones," Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke," and Claudia Rankine's "Citizen." But there are also poems that don't exactly go viral but get featured on social media accounts that finally give them a wider readership, like poems featured on poetryisnotaluxury on Instagram. I've even found some great poets who I had never heard of that way. In both cases, we see people who are not themselves typical poetry insiders sharing or engaging with a poem because it speaks for them in some way, and that's just really powerful. It gets back at the heart of what I think the value of poetry may be. So, I'm interested in the ways poems get seen outside of what might be considered a kind of echo chamber. There are, of course, many poems that I think should be seen more widely that aren't, maybe because of oversaturation, maybe just bad luck. But there are also many poems being produced that do not speak for or to a range of different people. I want art to be both challenging and accessible, which can sound like an impossible paradox. But top of mind for me is something Randall Jarrell said in 1950:

 

"[W]hich of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us and in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw…? And all these things, by their very nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can."

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MK: Earlier, I mentioned beauty as a theme. I think the book critiques systems and mindsets that devalue beauty – and the wonder, subtlety, and nuance fundamental to poetry. For example:

 

The Tower:

 

My soul is a tool in the shed by which the scab

of my body lives. And I put the vise in the center  

like a consulate. Still, I remember the Tower

swaying in the breeze of the city. 

…….………. 

I’d forgotten about beauty. ….

 

Unaccompanied Human Voice:

 

A boy asks, in The Brothers Karamazov,

forgiveness of birds, meadows, trees, sky, saying,

I did not notice the beauty of it all, dying.

 

Or beauty approached in the wrong way:

 

Still, I failed to work my nothing wounds, 

yet felt the coin of my face was worth something. 

 

I didn’t know that "face like a coin" refers to a flat, featureless face – like the smooth, undetailed surface of a coin, implying a lack of expression or a plain appearance – but it fits. Beauty, like art, feels unprioritized, trampled by the speed of toxic productivity and innovation without ethical consideration. The little moments throughout the book where people create something new from a place of destruction, or turn away from a screens, or open a window, or cook, feel precious. For example, the man who arranges peanut shells when feeding blue jays. Watching him, the speaker says:

 

We all create little beauties as consolation for the strife.

 

and,

 

I can’t tell if the little beauties are consolation.

I can’t tell if all new art is mere amalgamation

 

These moments of simple connection with nature, with art, with neighbors, may be becoming both more scarce yet also precious to life in a new way. In a media flooded with AI writing and images, will people come to poetry as a refuge? Did your experience writing the book, holding space for contemplation and experimentation that might be harder to find these days, change the way you approach creativity?

 

SS: The poems in this book were written at different times over many years and always in pretty brief increments. A teacher once told me that poetry comes out of life, which I have taken to mean that poetry requires no special space outside of life to exist. This has been liberating for me, as I do not see creativity as needing to be separate from everyday living. This means I end up having less time to write, but I think my poems are better for that. 

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I’m not sure if the book critiques systems that devalue beauty because I am also troubled by the limits of beauty, or beauty used as a distraction from other urgent needs. Some systems for the betterment of life are necessary and have nothing to do with beauty. But the book definitely critiques what I notice in myself, that so often in fulfilling the tasks of the everyday, I do not make space for aesthetic experience. I am troubled by the question of who has access to both art beauty and natural beauty and how. The idea that beautiful things or experiences are increasingly becoming luxury commodities is deeply disturbing. That is, there is nothing simple about these connections now: The connection to nature is shot through with how we have altered nature. The connection to other people is mediated by our distrust. AI adds to this distrust. And the connection to art is so often hampered by a sense of class, some people being more in-the-know or deserving of art than others.

 

Stanley Cavell wrote that “everyone stands in need of the power of poetry, so long as anyone does. Society merely limits who may have it. This is one measure of the disorder of the world.” Notice the strength of that symmetrical claim: if one person needs poetry, everyone does. I am committed to this idea of poetry as a mark of our dependence on one another. 

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MK: I loved how much richness is added to lines by words' double meanings, especially those we use both in the natural world and in society. Field, skein, streams – particularly sheath, because it was a clue that the woman was born to be capable, sharp, dangerous. I got the distinct impression of the speaker of "The Tower" as a weapon that’s been dulled; neutralized. 

 

Sheath (noun):

a close-fitting cover for the blade of a knife or sword.

a structure in living tissue which closely envelops another.

a protective covering around an electric cable.

a woman's close-fitting dress.

a condom.

 

It comes up again with the hanger: symbol of utility, domesticity, and desperate, deadly, yet also nonchalant violence. And the aforementioned vise:

 

Vise (noun): a mechanical apparatus used to secure an object to allow work to be performed on it. The etymology of vise can be tracked to Latin vitis: "vine," which calls to the use of “ivy” in "The Tower."

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The deliberate and creative choice of vocabulary in this book feels like a reclamation of language from a world of flat jargon as well as an ironic dig at how modern life really feels, with the rhyme backing that up sonically. For example, when people “steal time” (so called even when not during work hours, blurring those boundaries) to watch TV, it made me see this everyday act as a bizarre yet romantic form of bonding in our world:

 

Our lives have worth, our lives have use. 

So, come lie with me to binge-watch streams. 

 

Stealing time is one project I won’t ever refuse, 

and television means more than exchanging memes. 

 

(Unaccompanied Human Voice)

 

How do you approach word choice in your poetry? Do you prioritize precision, ambiguity, or a combination of both?

 

Good question (and beautiful interpretation, by the way). I prioritize precision—precision in the service of truth, at least as I understand it. I do like it when one word has multiple resonances, but I definitely want each resonance to add to the sense of the poem, rather than distract or be puzzling for the sake of being puzzling. Like I said, I want a reader’s time to be used well. 

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MK:

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The Tower: 

 

…. we attended vocational universities,

where we learned to put our lives in a vise

and work them.   ….

…….……….  This is why we were built.

This is why the Tower was built.

 

In this system designed from the start to funnel children toward money-making, I am desperate to know how to not fall into the decay that the poem imagines. Is it human nature to accept a status quo as long as we are (at least) surviving? Is this the dystopian state of things – if we don’t nurture a deliberate, constant, collective awareness – and change? What do we do? 

 

SS: D.W. Winnicott wrote that it is “creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” That word “feel” haunts me because I want life to feel that it is worth living, yes, but I also want it to be worth living. I think what you say about anxiety about the preservation of beauty is ultimately about trying to ensure that life—as helplessly entrenched, even complicit, as we are in so many systems designed to instrumentalize human potential for various forms of injustice and domination—is worth living. What can we do? 

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I can say what I am doing. I am trying to be a good friend and a good parent; by that, I mean I am trying to be honest and direct, and trying to remember humor and beauty. I am always trying to come to some greater understanding of other people and our collective situation. One way to subvert our divisive hellscape is to be almost unnervingly kind to strangers, offering sustained attention and treating them, whoever they are, as indispensable. This is something the status quo does not encourage. I think poetry can be a way of treating people well; it can be a kind of extension of friendship, and as Berardi writes in Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, “Friendship is the condition for the experience—the existence—of meaning.” I think we care, on a very deep level, that other people—even strangers, even people who do not align with our beliefs—have lives worth living. I hope that we can build some kind of radical solidarity. We cannot give up on each other.​​​​​​​​​