Apr

14

Book ‘Em: No Other Way To Say This.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 14, 2008 |

Politics in a literary work is a pistol shot in the middle of a concert—a rather coarse matter, but, on the other hand, something which one ignores at one’s own peril. -Stendahl

In Carolyn Forchè’s second book, The Country Between Us, she fired off several pistol shots in the opening section, focusing on atrocities in El Salvador. The section contains her most famous poem, and certainly one of the most famous prose poems in English, “The Colonel”. The poem is terrifying: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” When the Colonel empties a grocery sack full of human ears onto the table, she says, “They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.” The simile fails–intentionally–to ameliorate the horror.

Forchè ignited a firestorm with what she called “poetry of witness”, poetry not so much as a political act but as testimony. She met Archbishop Oscar Romero, who told her she must speak about conditions in El Salvador. When she told him she couldn’t, he replied, “Yes you will. You will find that you will be able to do it.” The criticism she got for writing “political poetry” just confirmed something T.S. Eliot said: “Poetry is condemned as ‘political’ when we disagree with the politics.” In fact calling her poetry political is short-changing it. Forchè’s poems, and the poems she anthologized, serve as reminders of how thuggish governments can be. It’s easy to forget when we’re not being directly affected by the thuggishness of the government we live under. She has continued to write powerful, moving poetry. Although her later work doesn’t necessarily have the same immediacy as the El Salvador poems in The Country Between Us, what matters is the remembering. As she said in a 1998 interview, “We live in the aftermath of these events.” It’s not an accident that many of the poems in The Country Between Us begin with prepositions, especially “In”, giving us, the readers, a point of entry; we become absorbed into the events from the first word.

There is also joy and freedom in this collection, though, particularly in her poem “For The Stranger”, which you can hear Forchè read here.

Forchè also edited the collection Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, although the subtitle is a grim reminder that the young Twenty-First century has already seen horrors comparable with what the previous century produced. Her first book, Gathering The Tribes, was the 1976 winner of the Yale Series Of Younger Poets prize, and she has also worked as a translator.


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  1. Book ‘Em: No Other Way To Say This. | olaglorens on April 15, 2008 1:19 pm

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