Carolyn Forché in conversation with Sandeep Parmar, The Wolf issue 14

Sandeep Parmar interviews the American poet Carolyn Forché in issue 14 of The Wolf. A short headnote notes that her debut, Gathering the Tribes, took a Yale prize for young poets, that a 1983 collection followed from Cape, that she translates and edited the anthology Against Forgetting, and that her latest book is Blue Hour, from Bloodaxe in 2003.

Parmar opens with endings. Forché reads experience, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, as a risky crossing through danger, and describes poetry as resisting eschatology: The Angel of History closes on a cloud over an annihilated city, Blue Hour follows a consciousness from life into death, and both are meditations on ends without endings. The second question turns to Mahmoud Darwish, whose Selected Poems she helped translate, and to whether Western poets can write for a community. She recounts how Darwish's own story became Palestine's, and how Archbishop Oscar Romero told her in 1980 that her place was with her own people. She concludes that poets, philosophers and humanitarians keep watch for a larger community, an idea she links to Robert Desnos.

Much of the conversation concerns the charge that her 1983 book was too political. Forché says the poems grew out of her time working for human rights in El Salvador and were first-person lyric narratives like her earlier work; she thought of her activity as ethics, not politics, and held that the purpose of her poetry was poetry. The controversy, panels and arguments she found simplistic led to a thirteen-year project on twentieth-century poetry written under extremity, which became Against Forgetting. She also reports asking Leonel Gomez Vides, who first urged her to go to El Salvador, whether he would again choose a poet over a journalist, and gives his answer that newspapers of the period hold nothing.

The last questions cover the Cities of Asylum network for threatened writers, which grew out of a Norwegian town's offer to Salman Rushdie, and the shift in her recent books from a single first-person voice to polyphony and an I/Thou of encounter. Forché explains that the abecedarian long poem On Earth borrowed its form from third-century hymns found near the Taklamakan desert, without taking on their Gnostic belief. She says she is writing a memoir, essays and a new book of poems. Readers of poetry of witness will find a considered account of how it differs from advocacy.

Work

Blue Hour

Author

Carolyn Forché

Publisher

Bloodaxe

Poems in this selection

• On Earth

The end is continual, open, and unknowable.

Carolyn Forché, The Wolf, issue 14

the purpose of my poetry was poetry.

Carolyn Forché, The Wolf, issue 14