By: Erin Swanson

Carolyn Forché is a nomad, just like her grandmother. She grew up watching her father’s mother disappear for weeks at a time from their family home, and her first book of poetry recalls the roots her grandmother left when she emigrated by herself from Czechoslovakia. Forché has since attributed her own lifestyle and the poetry of witness inspired by her travels to the “wandering women” on her father’s side of the family.

The oldest of seven, Forché grew up quickly. She began writing creatively as a child, winning her first essay contest and a ticket to New York City at the age of 18. In 1975 she graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. At the age of 27, after publishing her first book, Gathering the Tribes, she went abroad for the first time and in her words, “has never really stopped traveling since”.

Forché flew to Mallorca in the summer of 1977 to visit a Salvadorian friend, Maya Flakoll, and her mother and poet, Claribel Alegría. Forché  began translating some of Alegría’s poetry as a personal project, which ultimately resulted in the publication of Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow: 1983 and 1999 respectively. That summer, through Alegría and her poetry, Forché was exposed for the first time to the horrors of the repressive regimes in Latin America. She worked on her translations in the morning over café solo and a pack of “Un-X-Dos,” and listened to the survivors themselves who “passed through [Alegría’s] house like summer guests, recounting their experiences in a salon held on the terrace as the sun lowered into the Teix.” In the fall, she returned to the United States where her work had earned her a Guggenheim fellowship.

 In 1978, upon an invitation from one of Claribel’s relatives, Forché boarded a plane once again, this time for El Salvador, where she would encounter first hand the atrocities that inspired Alegría’s work. Between 1978 and 1981, Forché worked in El Salvador as a human rights activist, wrote her poetry, and also reported on what she saw for The Nation and The Progressive. During this time, Forché kept her work as a poet and a journalist separate, cautioned against mixing “art” and “politics.”

Then, in 1980, Forché was urged to return to the safety of the United States, where eventually she published her first works of “political” poetry shaped by the experiences she couldn’t keep from her writing. The Country Between Us received both critical acclaim and vicious attacks for its rather jarring political undertones, which threatened both poetry and journalism as genres. “It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness,” she wrote in defense of her work, coining a term that would follow her for the rest of her career. The reception of her first book of witness she says “inspired a deeper study of the impress of extremity on the poetic imagination during the twentieth century,” which eventually resulted in her compilation of Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, an anthology she feels captures the sprit of the genre.  It would be 13 years however, before she would publish another book of her own poetry. 

Forché met her husband Harry Mattison in El Salvador in 1980. “A poet and a translator turned human rights activist, and a photographer who had moved from the streets of New York to the world’s proxy wars. Both of us kept notebooks,” she wrote of their time together. They met again in New York, where they worked on a book of photographs together titled El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. Mattison then went to Beirut, and Forché joined him, writing “prose poems from the front lines” for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. In 1984,they moved to Africa to work but left for Paris on March 17, 1986, one month before her son, Sean, was to be born.  The “notes” she wrote while re-fueling in Madagascar would become her formal return to poetry.

Her next two books, The Angel of History (1995) and The Blue Hour reflect further on her experiences with warfare and suffering. Her interest in promoting other works of witness has led her to editing a book entitled Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs. Her articles, essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, The Nation and The American Poetry Review, among others. Forché has also received numerous awards and fellowships including the Lannan Foundation Literary Award and the three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, Forché works as a Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son and is currently in the throes of an experimental memoir.

Carolyn Forché discusses her craft in the following Question and Answer.

Q: What is poetry of witness?
A: “Poetry of Witness” is part of the subtitle I gave to an anthology of twentieth-century poetry that had been written out of conditions of extremity.  The phrase suggests a mode of reading rather than of writing. It is a way of considering a poem in the context of the poet’s experience.

Q: So, any creative work could really be a work of witness depending on how it’s read?
A: Well, you could say that about any mode of critical reading. In my study I have focused on poems that have been written in the aftermath of extreme suffering.

Q: What is the difference between poetry of witness and traditional journalism?
A: Poetry is a literary art form, drawing upon the semantic, rhythmic, tropic, syntactical and musical aspects of language. Journalism, as I understand it, involves compliance with fairly strict conventions regarding factuality and objectivity, attribution and so on.  The reporter attempts to write clear, concise prose sentences that do not draw on the resources of literary art.  If we can paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the difference between the work of the novelist and the work of the journalist amounts to this: the novelist begins with a moment, a scene, a character, a glimpse of something, and her work is to imagine the world of the novel in all its complexity.  The journalist confronts a complex world and attempts to simplify and order its events.  One expands and creates; the other reduces and contracts.

Q: What are the pros and cons of each type of writing?
A: I’m not sure that I would consider these “types of writing” to have negative and positive aspects.  They are simply different modes of working with written language.  Journalism, if practiced ethically and responsibly, involves honoring very precise criteria for establishing truth claims.  If there is such a thing as juridical truth, that which can be proven in a court of law, there is also journalistic “truth”—that which can be claimed publicly without threat of libel.  A journalist can “know” something without yet being free to commit that knowledge to print. The journalist is constrained as well by the convention of so-called “objectivity.”  In traditional modes of journalism, the writer attempts to seem to remove herself from her report: she does not disclose her feelings or opinions, and purports to set aside her own beliefs and ideological formation in the interests of establishing objective truth.  The author of a news story is absent.

There are problems associated with journalism today though, and especially American journalism. While there is no secret room where a censorship panel decides what the public may read or see, there are nevertheless effective forms of censorship. “The great dumbing down” as it is sometimes termed, refers to tailoring the news report to suit what is mistakenly regarded (in my view) as an immature, uneducated, and unsophisticated American public.  Broadcast news in America—info-tainment, as it is called now—is a show of flashing lights, mindless banter, split screens, fragmented footage and pre-rehearsed “interviews.
My husband and I have both experienced the frustration of having our work edited, and even altered in the interests of appealing to the American public.  In my case, I was asked to simplify radio reports from Lebanon because Americans weren’t capable of grasping the complexity of the warring factions.  And in my husband’s case, I can recall at least one instance of a photograph being deliberately mis-captioned.  

As I described earlier, a poem is a literary art form.  There are no journalistic constraints involved.  There is perhaps a sympathetic contract between reader and writer, but the reader reads the poem as a work of the human imagination.  Poets are free.

Q: People have mentioned the danger of beautifying your subject by making it “art”? How do you reconcile that?
A: Some people try to keep art apart from world, to keep art pure and isolated from other concerns.  They imagine that the “content” of art doesn’t matter, that it is not of any importance. For them, “form” is paramount.  And sometimes this denial of the importance of content actually results in a policing of content.  This accusation of aestheticizing horror is perhaps, at times, a valid one, but is more often applied in the service of denying poetry its expression of truths having to do with uncomfortable social and political realities.   People worry that the descriptions in literary non-fiction are too beautiful for the events they depict, but really “beauty” isn’t the correct word for these descriptions. I have never been shown a convincing example of literary art that betrays its subject through this so-called aesthetization. 

Q:Do you ever avoid writing the uglier things you see?
A: This is a very difficult question.  I write as I must write. 

Q: How do you decide which genre to write in? Which is most appropriate to the situation?
A: There is no moment of decision in that sense.  The experience of writing prose and that of writing poetry are very distinct for me.  Form and content are so deeply and inextricably bound that there can be no separation.  I don’t choose a subject to write about in a poem prior to writing the poem.  The poem begins on the page and I follow it.

Q: Gaston Bachelard once said, “One does not read poetry while thinking of other things” You have gone for long periods without publishing creatively, and in Aide Memoire you mention a time when you actively kept poetry separate from your work as a human rights activist. Does writing poetry require distance physically, mentally, in time? 
A: I publish infrequently, but I write continually.  Often, it is years after an experience that I will find myself drawing upon it.  That wasn’t true with the poems that address my experience of El Salvador, but even those poems were withheld from publication for two years.  I’m suspicious of quick transformations of experience into art—a full apprehension of complexity is only possible with time.

Q: That differentiates it from journalism in which a writer wants to sit down and write immediately after the event so as not to forget any of the specifics.
A: Yes. With journalism, it’s important to keep facts and sources exactly straight. In a poem, you want to convey more than just a sequence of facts. You want to convey an emotional truth and that takes some time to develop.

Q: Reportorial stance: People’s response to you as a journalist.  In Aid Memoir you mention the pejorative effects of “just poetry  This sentence doesn’t make sense—what are “pejorative effects”??. “Is it easier to get close to people as”just  a  poet”?
A: In most countries, people are very receptive to poetry and to poets.  At least, I have found this to be true.  In the specific case of reporting for National Public Radio, I had been asked to do a kind of literary reporting—to write short pieces, almost prose poems, that gave the sense of what it was like to be in Beirut at that time.  In most countries, people are also intrigued by radio, and they are willing to talk to people who work for radio.  With journalists, it is my impression that it is often more important who one works for than who one is—when people talk to journalists, they are talking to a certain newspaper or magazine or television station, and the more well known the station or paper, the more interested people become. 

Q: Do you ask people’s permission when you include them in a poem, in the same way you would a news story?
I don’t really include peoples’ surnames in my poetry. There were a few instances in which I’ve dedicated certain pieces to people who have died.  I have, on rare occasions, also asked permission to dedicate a poem to a living person. But for the most part, I don’t include specifics that would require permissions—. 

Q: Do you take notes or do you work from memory?

A: I carry small black moleskin notebooks with me, and I am always writing in them.  Sometimes the words I collect, the images and notes, later enter my literary work, and sometimes not.  I’m grateful, years later, when I read these notebooks, grateful to myself for remembering to write things down.  

Q: How many drafts does a poem go through? How do you work through your pieces and is it different for a prose piece or a poem?
A: I revise continually—poems can be revised hundreds of times.  Only rarely has a poem seemed finished after one draft.  That has happened to me twice in forty-nine years of writing.  One thing that’s very important for both poetry and prose is the pen.  Back in the days before computers, when you wanted to change something, you had to start at the beginning again re-write the entire piece.  Each change created a new draft. Now we can delete a section and continue right where we left off, but I think there is something to feeling your way through the work. With poems, I print out each version and mark it up with a pen. Every draft of a poem is placed in a folder. With prosee pieces it’s impossible to start at the beginning again each time a change is made.  I revise by re-writing a paragraph, one at a time. I number all of my drafts in my computer. The memoir has already been through over seventy-two drafts. I save each one.

Q: Describe your writing process. Where do you write? What time of day?
A: When I was staying at Hedgebrook, which is a women writer’s colony on Whidbey Island, I found that I worked best during the early morning hours. I would wake up at around four and write as the sun was coming up. I like to work as the sun rises. Then I’d have a break and come back in the afternoon, and if things were going really well, again in the evening, but never too late into the night.
Of course, there are lots of distractions now, and writing in an ideal setting is almost impossible. I write mostly whenever I can fit it in. Isolation is very important for writers. There is an old wives tale that if you want to remember your dreams, don’t look out the window when you wake up. It’s that idea that you must keep your eyes closed so as to shut out any distractions that might make you lose sight of your dream. Sometimes I spend time alone just sitting still, and I am actually writing during that time. Most of writing actually happens in the quiet moments before the page.

(Interviewed, edited and condensed by Erin Swanson)
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Creative Works of Witness

Interested in exploring further creative works of witness?  Forché recommends these books for a start.
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993)
The Witness of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz (Harvard University Press., 1983)
Writing Into The World by Terrence Des Pres (Viking Adult., 1991)
Praises and Dispraises by Terrence Des Pres (Viking Adult., 1988)