Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore some of the books SIU Press is celebrating for National Poetry Month this April.
A literary discovery of considerable magnitude, the 98 previously unpublished works collected in The Poems of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, written principally in the 1910–18 period, illuminate an emotive aspect in Dewey’s intellectual life often not manifest in his prose works. Rumors of the existence of the poems have circulated among students of Dewey’s life and writings since 1957, when Mrs. Roberta Dewey gained possession of them from the Columbia University Columbiana collection. But except for the few persons who saw copies made by the French scholar Deladelle five years after Dewey’s death, the poems remained inaccessible until their publication with SIU Press.
Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy: The Past is Not Disappearing Ink, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place.
The remaining titles on this list are part of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, including Sara Henning’s Burn, which draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible. A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
These titles and more on this edition of Inside The Blanket Fort.
