THE POETRY of WITNESS
An interview with Carolyn Forche
ALL journeys are wise - when viewed with enough time and distance. Looking back on life's passages, the wrong turns and chance meetings, even dead-end streets can assume a place in a clear and purposeful progression. It's in the day-to-day navigation that an individual's inner compass and determination are tested. And for an artist, the sum of those daily choices, both mundane and monumental, leave an indelible mark on the character of the individual and the content of the creation.
Entering the middle passage of her life, poet Carolyn Forche has received more acclaim and notoriety, witnessed more instances of cold brutality and generosity of spirit than one might expect in several lifetimes. This past month saw the publication of ``The Angel of History,'' the first new collection of her work in over 13 years. I met with the poet at her Maryland home. The two-hour interview I'd arranged somehow expanded into an eight-hour marathon conversation. And the lasting impression I came away with concerns the tangled, dangerous, and utterly guileless path she has traveled in her life. Hers has been a triumph of the honest choice over the expedient, the strength of personal commitment over the tidal sway of public opinion. Along the way, and very likely because of it, she has created a collection of verse that addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the 20th-century political landscape - and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit.
Her literary career had the most auspicious of beginnings; her first book, ``Gathering the Tribes,'' won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1976. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed shortly after. Trying to work her way through writer's block, she began to translate the poetry of Claribel Alegria, a Salvadoran poet living in Spain. She was invited to spend the summer in Deya, Majorca, at Alegrs home. In 1977, Forche was a young poet making her first trip away from the United States.
HER friend, the writer Terrence Des Pres, insisted she make a little pilgrimage during her brief stopover in France. ``Terrence said, `when you get to Paris, go to Notre Dame ... and walk across the quay and look for a black iron gate and a white stairwell.''' He would not tell her beforehand what she'd find. Dragging her huge suitcase down the shadowy steps, she found herself in ``the memorial to the 200,000 people who were deported from France during the shoah. There were white rooms with stone walls, poetry carved into the walls, different poets who had been in the camps. And there was a tunnel with 200,000 tiny beads of light embedded in its walls, one for each of the lives.... And you could hear the river rushing past the windows. I stayed there for a long time.''
Forche copied down some of the poems in her journal, but later in Spain, the notebook was accidentally left out in the rain. The lines of poetry remained but the author's name was washed away. A decade of searching never turned up the poet's identity.
Forche spent three months working with Alegria, dazzled by the international coterie of artists and writers who would congregate daily at her house. The experience reinforced in her the desire to do something, to make a difference with her work.
