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410 CAROLYN FORCHÉ b. 1950 Carolyn forché has innovated the concept of a “poetry of witness.” A former journalist for Amnesty International, she brings the news of political injustice from around the world. Her poetry continues a tradition of moral awareness that includes such European poets as Anna Akhmatova and Paul Celan, and such Latin American poets as Claribel Alegría and Pablo Neruda. Her transnational concerns can also be connected to the work of many contemporary U.S. poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Nathaniel Mackey, Victor Hernández Cruz, Joy Harjo, and Lorna Dee Cervantes (all included in this anthology). Forché has explained that the poetry of witness is neither wholly personal nor wholly political but occupies a “social space” where affairs of state and the havens of the personal meet. She argues that the injustices, exiles, and mass murders that pockmark recent history require a poetry that records such events and stands against them: “The poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred.” Forché not only writes such poems herself; she also has translated such poems, and she has collected examples from around the world in her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. As Forché’s work bears witness to inhumanity, it also exhorts its readers to turn “against despair ” and toward “the spirit of communality.” Forché was born to a working-class family in Detroit, Michigan. Her father was a tool-and-die maker and her mother a homemaker. Forché received a B.A. in international relations and creative writing from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. Although she began as a self-described “introspective poet,” her experiences as a human rights worker and journalist in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa turned her toward poems that “bear the trace of extremity within them.” Forché has a husband and son, and she is presently a professor of poetry at George Mason University in Virginia. further reading Forché, Carolyn. The Angel of History. New York: Harper & Row, 1994. — — — —. The Country Between Us. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1981. — — — —. “El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire.” American Poetry Review 10.4 (July–August 1981): 3–7. — — — — .“The Poetry of Witness.” In The Writer in Politics, ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco, 135–47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. — — — —. “Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness.” American Poetry Review 22.2 (March–April 1993): 17. The Colonel Ø 411 1. “I thought the moon in the poem was just the moon until someone pointed out that it seems to be a white lamp shining in a box in an interrogation room” (Forché’s comment). 2. “There’s an expression, ‘ear to the ground,’ you know the way you can hear a train coming if you put your ear to the ground?” (Forché’s comment). Forché, Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York: Norton , 1993. Moyers, Bill. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, 129–41. New York: Doubleday, 1995. The Colonel What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.1 On the television was a cop show. It was in English. 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. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our...

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