Carolyn Forché

“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret AtwoodThe Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR“History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World . . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New YorkerOver four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fireWhat You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. These poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.

The language and images of Carolyn Forché’s poetry are so closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body’s functioning, that it is surprising to realize how many of her poems deal with uprootedness―hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, the loss of grandparents and other elders, people leaving and being sent away. But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history―both natural and social―and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché’s poetry, gives it is depth and dimension.

Follow a young African American girl as she discovers God's Creation and delights in its many colors. Through her adventures she realizes that she is also an amazing creation of God as she affirms "God made me a beautiful brown!"

The history of the political turmoil in El Salvador from the coup d'etat in 1979 to the present is traced in photographs and accompanying text

Ustvarjalnost Carolyn Forché močno zaznamuje njena humanitarna izkušnja, saj že več kot štiri desetletja s svojimi pesmimi budi zaspanega, v udobju živečega bralca, pri čemer se močno naslanja na pričevanja in izkušnje drugih. Njena poezija pričevanja, razpeta med grozotami Auschwitza in prebežniki na reki Rio Grande, intenzivno in iskreno razpira bolečino in trpljenje, zato so jo številni kritiki imenovali za politično pesnico, ker je natančna opazovalka nasilja in groze časa.Pesnica vztrajno opominja na nujnost strpnih medsebojnih odnosov. Izbor njene poezije, prek katerega bodo bralci lahko spoznali ustvarjalni prerez cenjene ameriške pesnice, je pripravila in prevedla Kristina Kočan. Večina pesmi v izboru je iz pesniške zbirke Zamujanje sveta (2020), za katero je bila avtorica nominirana za Pulitzerjevo nagrado. Za slovensko izdajo bo pesnica napisala tudi avtopoetični esej.

Carolyn Forché (f. 1950) har kallats den stora amerikanska samvetsrösten och har i över fyra decennier varit en av de mest tongivande och inflytelserika diktarna inom den amerikanska poesin. Med sin diktning har Forché bevittnat och dokumenterat bland annat konflikterna i El Salvador vilket har kommit att ge namn åt den så kallade vittnespoesin för vilken hon har varit stilbildande. En poesi hon menar syftar till att återta det sociala från det politiska och i och med det försvara det individuella mot påtvingande former. Forchés förmåga att väva samman det politiska och personliga har hyllats av bland andra Joyce Carol Oates, som jämställt henne med Pablo Neruda. Mot slutet är ett större urval av Forchés författarskap gjort av författaren själv tillsammans med översättaren Lars Gustaf Andersson som också författat ett efterord till samlingen.

Book description to come.

90 min, reading THE ANGEL OF HISTORY entire/intrvw

Best known for his work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and '80s, Harry Mattison's life is one of extraordinary encounters and events. Surviving the death squads of El Salvador and Nicaragua, he went on to be present in the last days of apartheid in South Africa, documented the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon to Tunisia, and witnessed some of the most spectacular political events of those decades.During the years of hard-bitten journalism, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice were of central concern to Mattison. His own decision to abandon the pretense of impartial journalist (he was then photographic bureau chief for Time) to become an impassioned participant in a Soweto anti-apartheid rally in South Africa caused him to be ejected from that country, accused of "disseminating images of unrest." Mattison later made a decision to change his path to a more reflective one, and in the next decades, as a professor of political philosophy, he documented inner city Washington, Minnesota's Iron Range, and, in an ongoing multi-year project these last years, charted the unfolding psychological landscape underpinning modern China.In this process Mattison has grappled with pivotal questions about a photographer's relationship to his subject, the use of images in the media, and the relationship of images to history and memory.

NOT A CD! THIS IS THE AUDIOTAPE CASSETTE OF 2 LIVE POETRY READINGS BY CAROLYN FORCHE! THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS AUDIO ARCHIVE. APPROX. 45 MIN. TOTAL PLAYING TIME. SIDE 1: AT THE NEW SCHOOL 10/25/94--INTRODUCED BY CYRUS CASSELLS--SELECTIONS FROM "THE ANGEL OF HISTORY". SIDE 2: AT THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM 12/7/78--INTRODUCED BY LAUREN SHAKELY--NEW POEMS.