If you are familiar with the work of Carolyn Forché,
you may already know that she is commonly referred to as a poet
of witness, a term she herself coined.
Reviewers have focused on the political content
of her poetry influenced by her human rights work
for Amnesty International in El Salvador and later as an NPR
correspondent in Beirut.
The formal elements of her work have been just
as riveting and controversial.
Each one of Forché's books mark a departure from the previous.
From her first collection, Gathering The Tribes,
full of voluptuous metaphor and first-person narrative,
she has slowly disintegrated her stories
into long lined fragments that come to make up
the angel of history.
Her most recent book Blue Hour is a return
to her earlier more personal lyric, although the landscape
remains congested with the crimes of humanity
and atrocities of war.
Let me also suggest that in addition to being a poet
of witness, Carolyn Forché is a mystic.
For Forché, the political represents deeply spiritual
concerns.
Words form transitions between this bardo, this letter,
and the next.
It is a mystic who deals in ciphers and alphabets.
Forché's groundbreaking abecedarian On Earth begins not
unpredictably with the article A designating the singular one
and ends with the word zero, the words themselves representing
numbers or the mathematical language of a time to come.
Lines beginning with words like and as
further complicate the equation of images,
and readers are left adding, comparing, and dividing.
Yet can we assume that these things add up?
In arithmetic, to add a zero to the end of a whole number
increases, the value of that figure or series tenfold.
In slang, a zero is a person of no importance or worth.
In war, it indicates to set the sights of a rifle
at known distances.
Forché sets her sights, but it is not through the crucifix
of a rifle sight that we witness the world.
Instead readers are privy to the view the speaker affords
us, panoramic and spare.
There is nonlinearity here.
In the title poem "Blue Hour", the human soul weighs 26 grams.
A cathedral can become a dove coat.
Later on Earth, the 26 gram weight of the human soul
maintains its weight but loses its human link.
The birds do not nest.
They fly.
These lines contradict or mirror each other drawing attention
to the poem as an artifact and questions the reality
of the history it presents.
Numbers are only one of the alphabets within on Earth,
a poem that expands and collapses
as the various letters of the Roman alphabet
are marked out like an abacus.
In The Angel of History, Forché writes, "You see,
one can live without having survived."
In this line, one is presumed into three.
First, the person who can live without being
a witness of atrocities.
Second, the person who lives through such atrocities and not
really surviving or thriving.
Third, the person who survives by dying.
Through this phrase and ones like it,
Forché capitalizes on the way that slang sometimes
trivializes our language and reclaims words so that they
become flip switches to memory presenting alternatives that
create a sense of simultaneity yet our monuments
to a suggested life.
To talk of redemption is a dangerous proposition
the redemption Forché offers is defined by what is illuminated
in contrast to the realm of the living.
Death is not an obstacle to the memory, to insight.
Her words are written often through the act
of negation, which necessarily resists memory.
What's left once all else has been negated as human
without being slaughtered to hope.
She exhumes these words fragment by fragment.
It is a mystic who deals in the other worldliness of war
and reports that bold hearted and breathless.
Please welcome Carolyn Forché.