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If you are familiar with
the work of Carolyn Forché,

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you may already know that she is
commonly referred to as a poet

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of witness, a term
she herself coined.

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Reviewers have focused
on the political content

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of her poetry influenced
by her human rights work

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for Amnesty International in
El Salvador and later as an NPR

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correspondent in Beirut.

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The formal elements of
her work have been just

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as riveting and controversial.

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Each one of Forché's books mark
a departure from the previous.

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From her first collection,
Gathering The Tribes,

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full of voluptuous metaphor
and first-person narrative,

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she has slowly
disintegrated her stories

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into long lined fragments
that come to make up

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the angel of history.

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Her most recent book
Blue Hour is a return

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to her earlier more personal
lyric, although the landscape

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remains congested with
the crimes of humanity

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and atrocities of war.

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Let me also suggest that
in addition to being a poet

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of witness, Carolyn
Forché is a mystic.

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For Forché, the political
represents deeply spiritual

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concerns.

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Words form transitions between
this bardo, this letter,

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and the next.

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It is a mystic who deals
in ciphers and alphabets.

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Forché's groundbreaking
abecedarian On Earth begins not

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unpredictably with the article
A designating the singular one

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and ends with the word zero, the
words themselves representing

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numbers or the mathematical
language of a time to come.

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Lines beginning with
words like and as

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further complicate the
equation of images,

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and readers are left adding,
comparing, and dividing.

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Yet can we assume that
these things add up?

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In arithmetic, to add a zero
to the end of a whole number

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increases, the value of that
figure or series tenfold.

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In slang, a zero is a person
of no importance or worth.

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In war, it indicates to
set the sights of a rifle

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at known distances.

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Forché sets her sights, but
it is not through the crucifix

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of a rifle sight that
we witness the world.

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Instead readers are privy to
the view the speaker affords

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us, panoramic and spare.

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There is nonlinearity here.

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In the title poem "Blue Hour",
the human soul weighs 26 grams.

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A cathedral can
become a dove coat.

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Later on Earth, the 26 gram
weight of the human soul

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maintains its weight but
loses its human link.

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The birds do not nest.

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They fly.

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These lines contradict or mirror
each other drawing attention

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to the poem as an artifact
and questions the reality

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of the history it presents.

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Numbers are only one of the
alphabets within on Earth,

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a poem that expands
and collapses

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as the various letters
of the Roman alphabet

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are marked out like an abacus.

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In The Angel of History,
Forché writes, "You see,

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one can live without
having survived."

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In this line, one is
presumed into three.

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First, the person who
can live without being

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a witness of atrocities.

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Second, the person who lives
through such atrocities and not

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really surviving or thriving.

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Third, the person who
survives by dying.

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Through this phrase
and ones like it,

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Forché capitalizes on the
way that slang sometimes

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trivializes our language and
reclaims words so that they

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become flip switches to memory
presenting alternatives that

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create a sense of
simultaneity yet our monuments

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to a suggested life.

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To talk of redemption is
a dangerous proposition

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the redemption Forché offers is
defined by what is illuminated

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in contrast to the
realm of the living.

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Death is not an obstacle
to the memory, to insight.

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Her words are written
often through the act

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of negation, which
necessarily resists memory.

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What's left once all else
has been negated as human

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without being
slaughtered to hope.

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She exhumes these words
fragment by fragment.

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It is a mystic who deals in
the other worldliness of war

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and reports that bold
hearted and breathless.

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Please welcome Carolyn Forché.

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