Back to the Backroom: The Extraordinary Carolyn Forché

How great to re-open the Backroom for Carolyn Forché who has sent us not just one video poem but two. A double delight and pleasure. Carolyn is one of the few modern poets who can tackle grand issues without sounding either angry or didactic. Instead she connects the personal to the political to create as she says a poetical language of witness designed to emphasise the poet's role in the "community rather than the individual ego."

The vision and range of her poems is vast- encompassing history, geography and philosophy- but it’s her language and lyrical skill I love, at times majestic, at times surprising but nearly always sublime. Have I called anyone in this series a Great Poet? I do think Carolyn is one of the greatest living writers in English.

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, and has taught at several universities. She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’; and most recently, Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize.

Her previous books include 'Gathering the Tribes'  in 1976 which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz, 'The Country Between Us' in 1981 reissued from Bloodaxe in 2019, which drew on her experiences in El Salvador before and during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: 'The Angel of History' from HarperCollins, USA and Bloodaxe Books in 1994, 'Blue Hour', HarperCollins, USA and  Bloodaxe Books, 2003, and, her latest, 'In the Lateness of the World'  published by Penguin, USA and Bloodaxe Books a few months ago.

Her hugely important anthology 'Against Forgetting' collected the work of 145 poets in 30 different languages who had experienced warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and/or house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square.
Her memoir 'What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance'  in 2019 was published by Penguin.

Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).

Here she is reading 'The Lightkeeper':

Here she is reading 'Museum of Stone':

5 poems in 'World Literature Today':

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/january/five-poems-carolyn-forche

A conversation about her latest book

https://www.ronslate.com/a-conversation-with-carolyn-forche/

Profile and More poems on Poetry Foundation Website:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche

Buy 'In the Lateness of the World' here:

https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/in-the-lateness-of-the-world-1059

The Light Keeper

A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea-wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

Museum of Stones


These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.