For 35 years, I've taught Carolyn Forché's work in poetry
workshops across the country, considering her,
along with Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Adrienne Rich, Linda Hogan, and Naomi Shihab Nye to be among
the most memorable and brilliant poets of our times.
I did not meet her or her work in a classroom.
My husband, Bill Root, gave me her first book,
Gathering the Tribes, winner of a Yale Younger Award.
I read it as we traveled up Big Sur, the female power
of huge Pacific breakers echoing the power of her words.
I was electrified by her language, her bold imagery,
her sensuality.
That small book made a big impression.
So when I actually met her in Port Townsend in 1980,
in the Seagull Inn bar overlooking Puget sound,
I was thrilled.
I was also in awe.
Here was a poet my age, born and raised a hundred miles
from where I grew up in Michigan.
Our fathers were blue collar workers.
Carolyn also had a Czech grandmother named Anna.
I felt kinship.
We had to talk.
After that warm initial meeting, I became a fan for life.
And I mean for life.
When Carolyn's collection, The Country Between Us, came out,
I immediately bought it.
Devouring poem after poem, I could barely speak.
I was galvanized.
I would never consider poetry in the same way again.
As it undoubtedly did for poets across the country,
Poetry of Witness set me afire.
In my case, it validated the political poetry
I'd written for years.
The Country Between Us was a 1981 Lannon Poetry Selection.
I thought it deserved a Pulitzer.
A Ms. magazine reviewer called the book,
"a poetry of dissent from a poet outraged."
The book opened readers' eyes to our government's
obscene support of a destructive and murderous
military dictatorship.
At the time, this was not the kind of poetry
that was being studied in poetry workshops.
Who can repeat without shivering,
"There is nothing that one man will not do to another."
It was 12 years between the publication of The Country
Between Us and Carolyn Forché's editing of Against Forgetting,
Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness,
a keystone anthology of 140 world poets,
witnessing genocides from Armenia to Tiananmen Square,
that Matthew Rothschild called some of the most dramatic
anti-war and anti-torture poetry written in this benighted
country.
Forché has said, "The poetry of witness reclaims the social
from the political, in so doing, defends the individual against
illegitimate forms of coercion."
Whether she is writing about crimes against humanity
committed at Terezin during the Holocaust or during the Soviet
occupation of Prague, as she does in her brilliant Angel
of History, or creating surreal visionary imagery of 20th
century terrors, referencing Buber and Heidegger,
or taking us on a spirit journey to the end of life and beyond,
Carolyn Forché's oracular imagery gives us poetic meat
that is visceral, powerful, unforgettable.
Now we are blessed by her moving and illuminating memoir,
What You Have Heard Is True.
Carolyn told me that, two weeks ago, this book won the Juan E.
Méndez Human Rights Book Award for Latin America.
They never give it to memoirs.
[APPLAUSE]
This memoir takes us to the source
of so many of her powerful poems in The Country
Between Us, to those devastating times in El Salvador,
illustrating our country's responsibility
for hideous atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military
regime, similar to the ongoing atrocities committed today,
even as I speak.
In March, her new collection of poems,
In The Lateness of The World, will
be released by Random House.
After the presidential election in 2016 and early 2017,
Bill and I conceived of an anthology called,
Truth to Power, Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate
and Fear.
Carolyn Forché was one of the first poets I thought
to solicit.
For decades, Forché has made us confront genocide around
the world.
In this time, when daily human rights atrocities
are rife in our national headlines,
hers is the poetry we need.
As Bertolt Brecht wrote, "In these dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times."
Carolyn Forché's preeminence as a poet, translator, editor,
and memoirist cannot be overstated.
Without her necessary voice, her courage as a witness,
empowered by her exquisite command of craft,
political poetry might have remained, in our country,
the invisible cousin of academic verse.
Her work has awakened in readers, conscience.
It is a call to resist.
Carolyn, I thank you in the language
of our Czech grandmothers, [Speaking Czech]
Thank you for your poetry, thank you for your truth.
Please welcome Carolyn Forché.
[APPLAUSE]