It was the summer of 2020, and poet Ivy Schweitzer was aboard a sailboat in Penobscot Bay, Maine—surrounded by water, silence, and the weight of the world. She had been reading books like White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist, and My Grandmother's Hands, feeling vulnerable, guilty, and full of despair.
Then, in the middle of the night, the muse knocked.
“I drafted three or four poems that night,” says the professor emerita of English and creative writing and former chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. “Something was pushing me to say this, to explore this for myself.”
That night marked the beginning of a poetic and personal reckoning—one that would unfold over five years and culminate in Dividing Rivers, Schweitzer’s debut solo poetry collection, published in August by Finishing Line Press. The deeply personal volume traces her journey as a white, Jewish woman from New York as she attempts to process her inherited biases and unlearn what she had absorbed about racism.
Schweitzer doesn’t present herself as a finished product, but as a person in motion—someone willing to sit in discomfort and ask, “Why did I think this way? Where did these attitudes come from? And how do I move forward?”
“Unless you know why, you can’t quite figure out how not to be that way,” Schweitzer says. “It’s not enough to identify behaviors—I want to identify the origins for them.”
Her journey of unlearning was mirrored in her transition from academic to poet. After decades of scholarly work, she had to retrain her mind to write from the heart rather than the head.
“When you’re writing an academic paper, the reader wants to know the thesis and the conclusion, even if it’s an open-ended conclusion,” she explains. “That’s not what poetry is about. I really had to unlearn my need to tie everything up in a tight little bow.”
For guiding her through this process, Schweitzer credits poet Charif Shanahan, Guarini ’10, along with other friends and mentors, including fellow Dartmouth professors Vievee Francis and Cynthia Huntington. They encouraged her not to “mother” the poems or the reader, but to allow her writing to take herself and the reader somewhere unpredictable.
From digital archives to personal verse
Even before retirement, Schweitzer found creative ways to bridge scholarship and public engagement. She began to work on digital humanities projects, including The Occom Circle, a website of primary documents by and about 18th-century Mohegan leader Samson Occom; HomeWorks, which provides teaching materials related to 19th-century women writers; and White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a year-long weekly blog on topics related to the life and time of the poet.
That deep dive into Dickinson’s world helped Schweitzer reconnect with her own poetic instincts—not as a scholar, but as a writer—releasing Within Flesh: In Conversation with Our Selves and Emily Dickinson, a collection of dialogic poems with Al Salehi, MALS ’21.
“I keep saying I was called by Emily Dickinson,” Schweitzer says. “I wanted to approach her as a poet, not as an academic. I wanted to get into her life, to understand what drove her poetry, so that I could reinvigorate my own poetry.”
While Dickinson’s life and poetry inspired her return to the craft, Schweitzer’s own memories became the emotional and geographic foundation of Dividing Rivers.
Schweitzer draws on her deep roots in Dartmouth and the Upper Valley throughout the collection. Transformative experiences, like the Dartmouth shanties of the 1980s and picking up activist June Jordan to speak at an alternative commencement, are the subject of verse. Even the Connecticut River itself serves as inspiration for the collection title—a metaphor for pressure, separation, and the hope of building bridges.
She confronts her past self while also imagining what it would be like to have a “do-over,” to have known and done better.
Some friends cautioned Schweitzer not to include certain poems, as they put her racism on display. “The point is to show the mind or the heart in process,” she would reply. “I’m trying to be as honest as possible. I thought it might be valuable for readers to see somebody struggling, to see it as an ongoing process.”
Schweitzer knows the difficult topics prompt both poet and reader to confront ugly truths, but she views this as a key step in becoming better versions of ourselves so that we can be in community together and prevent future generations from making the same mistakes.
“How do we keep the rivers from continually dividing us?” Schweitzer asks. “In a moment when we’re hearing about hate, division, and exclusion, how do we activate that love for the other person, stand against fear, and create community?”
For Schweitzer, finishing the collection was cathartic, and publishing it was a dream come true. Once it was complete, she found herself writing freely, completing a second book of poetry and already sketching ideas for a third.
“I had to write these poems,” she says. “I believe the muse exists—there is some force that propels us. I could have chosen not to publish them, but I had to write them.”
Celebrate Ivy Schweitzer’s debut poetry collection on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. at the Norwich Bookstore during a reading and signing for Dividing Rivers. The event is free and open to the public.