In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
This three-part interview with Carolyn Forché took place over the course of the past year and a half and was recorded at three different locations: Carolyn’s house in Bethesda, Maryland; in the bistro of the Washington Square Hotel in New York City; and in her office at Georgetown University. (With regard to the addendum that appears at the end of the interview, I emailed Carolyn following the recent election to ask her if she would like to comment on the results. She responded the next day with a timely paragraph.) I had originally hoped that Carolyn and I could complete this interview in one sitting, but we agreed at the conclusion of our first conversation that we needed more time than a single afternoon to do justice to the arc of both her poetry and her career. Consequently, our subsequent interview sessions focused with greater probity on the “main things” of Carolyn’s multifaceted vocation and avocation as a poet, witness, and scholar. Although we didn’t conclude with any sense of final closure, I felt our conversations reached increasingly higher levels of clarity in their exploration of the ideas, poems, essays, books, vicissitudes, failures, and hard-won successes that have distinguished Carolyn’s eminent career.
Chard deNiord: I’m curious about what Stanley Kunitz might have said to you about your turn away from the lyrical narrative.
Carolyn Forché: You mean after Gathering the Tribes?
deNiord: Yes.
Forché: Because of Stanley’s historical experience and his wariness of ideological, doctrinaire leftist politics and what happened in the thirties: the Hitler/Stalin pact and Stalin’s imposition of a command economy, collectivization, and the Gulag, he was justifiably skeptical and wary. He did not perceive a path that didn’t run straight through that doctrinaire leftism. He liked The Country Between Us, but he also said, “But that’s enough of that now.”
deNiord: He respected your move away from your early first-person aesthetic of lyricized experience and a subjective first-person speaker to a newfound ambition of witnessing disinterestedly to the atrocities in El Salvador? What did he say to you about this?
Forché: He said something like, “You know you cannot be an activist and stay engaged overseas. This is not the life of a poet. And your work must make a turn away from this because it’s a trap, it will destroy you, and it will destroy your work.” I think he was worried that I would become subject-driven and message-driven and that my engagement in human rights and social justice issues would overtake my freedom as an artist. I think he thought that. And that’s certainly fair enough. I understood what he was trying to tell me. I just didn’t follow the advice, partly because I knew at the time that I was still writing as I always had, without preconceptions, without, as Keats would have it, “designs upon the reader.” But Stanley was patient and kind toward me always.
Curfew
The curfew was as long as anyone could remember
Certainty’s tent was pulled from its little stakes
It was better not to speak any language
There was a man cloaked in doves, there was chandelier music
The city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear
At the hour between the no longer and the still to come
The child asked if the bones in the wall
Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven
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Why do you feel “most vulnerable.” Where,
In Damascus, were you born. To whom do you
Pray. What does it mean to have winged
Brows. Have you ever spoken through
A mesh. Was it dark speech that you made.
Is it hot inside your burqa. Who
Was Frank Sinatra. Why was our war
Called “Civil” and who won.
Can you keep a bright gaze. How tall
Was Allah. What once was Palestine.
What most displaces you. Have you visited
Somalia. Have you ever crossed a border
In a boat, by night, to another land.
Sir, in all how many died.
Is your wife considered meek.
Point to Mecca from right here.
Why is our court Supreme.
What does “The Sound and the Fury”
Mean to you. Who was Huckleberry Finn.
Has your husband ever travelled to Afghanistan.
In Sharia, when a woman’s hair is loose,
Is she a prostitute or slave.
Do you understand what “Red State” means.
Do you speak American. Here,
Read that aloud.
Do you have tattoos. What does
Paranoia mean. In what season
Do we vote for President. How much freedom
Does the First Amendment cost.
Which is the tallest tree. You were once
A doctor; how is it, as you say, you’ve
Come to selling vegetables.
How tall was Jesus in bare feet;
Do you consider him a refugee.
Have you a disease that is contagious.
What are “The Hunger Games.”
Who sang “Moon River” best.
Do you have friends or relatives
Who are barbarians.
What is the Blues.
What is a Second Sleep. What
Most once made you weep.
When was Lincoln. Who is Stephen King.
Explain what “obfuscation” means.
Have you been lashed.
Who were our pilgrims; why did they come.
Have you ever eaten eel.
Why do you bring just one small son.
Where are the other ones.
Photograph by Marion Ettinger
Birdie
I am Birdie now I don’t know why.
I squat at the edge of the top
of our rowhouse & I’m without wings I think.
Philadelphia isn’t gentle now. Bad things echo up
& down our neighborhood at night.
I think we wound the people of our street.
I am hurting myself.
I can’t tell time you know.
Spring Days
I live by myself in Beijing’s Tiantongyuan East Section 3
apartment complex on the first floor in a unit with a large lanai
the apartment belongs to my girlfriend, Ms. “Chrysanthemum” Wang
she used to share the place with me, but now
she doesn’t. She moved further into town, just two stops from Xidan
but still comes round on weekends to gripe and clean
until the middle of the night, when she’ll suddenly recall our sex life
Ah, love in the Nuclear Age! Spring days grow long, and the foliage is lush . . .
I admit that at first I liked giving oral sex
but lately I just like getting it: oral sex had its day but now it’s dead and gone
I’ve squirreled it away in far off Tehran
where there’s oil underground, the women veil their faces
and an entire nation is scrambling to build the bomb
recycling Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII"
We live. We are not sure our land is under us.
Ten feet away, no one hears us.
But wherever there’s even a half-conversation,
we remember the Kremlin’s mountaineer.
His thick fingers are fat as worms,
his words reliable as ten-pound weights.
His boot tops shine,
his cockroach mustache is laughing.
About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors.
He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him.
They make touching and funny animal sounds.
He alone talks Russian.
One after another, his sentences hit like horseshoes! He
pounds them out. He always hits the nail, the balls.
After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman,
putting a raspberry in his mouth
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Above the federal buildings' yellow gown
A hazy flurry circles far and wide
Within the sled the coachman sits down
And with broad gesture hides his coat inside.
Ships fall asleep. And in the evening, rocking,
Thick cabin windows fill to brim with light.
And monstrously — just like a fortress docking —
Russia is breathing heavily at night.
On the Nieva stand hundred embassies;
Admiralty, the sun, and silence glare.
The state's tight porphyry upon us sits,
Poor like an uncouth bodice made of hair.
Hard is the journey of the Northern snob —
Eugene Onegin's well-cliche'ed despair;
On Senate square are mounds of fallen snow
A bonfire's smoke, and chill of steel made bare.
The ducks are sipping water, and the gulls
In waving folds of sea are gently lurking
Where, selling lumps of beef or tender rolls,
Like opera singers peasant men are walking.
Into the fog a row of birds is flying:
Self-loving, modest march can't wait.
That goof Onegin, poverty decrying
Is breathing gasoline and cursing fate.
The shrillness of the English language
and Oliver’s dejected look
have merged: I see the youngster languish
among a pile of office books.
Charles Dickens — ask him; he will tell you
what was in London long ago:
the City, Dombey, assets’ value,
the River Thames’s rusty flow.
‘Mid rain and tears and counted money,
Paul Dombey’s curly-haired son
cannot believe that clerks are funny
and laughs at neither joke nor pun.
The office chairs are sorry splinters;
each broken farthing put to use,
and numbers swarm in springs and winters,
like bees perniciously let loose.
Attorneys study every letter;
in smoke and stench they hone their stings,
and, from a noose, the luckless debtor —
a piece of bast — in silence swings.
His foes enjoy their lawful robbing,
lost are for him all earthly boons,
and lo! His only daughter, sobbing,
X I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents
|
dear white america
i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree. we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo. sorcery you claim not to practice, hand my cousin a pistol to do your work. i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls! because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live. because it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time . . . how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin
this, if only this one, is ours.
When Barcelona fell, the darkened glass
turned in the world and immense ruinous gaze,
mirror of prophecy in a series of mirrors.
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
Decisions of history the radios reverse;
Storm over continents, black rays around the chief,
Finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
Inverted year with one prophetic day,
high wind, forgetful cities, and the war,
the terrible time when everyone writes “hope.”
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
When Barcelona fell, the cry on the roads
assembled horizons, and the circle of eyes
looked with a lifetime look upon that image,
defeat among us, and war, and prophecy,
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
When Barcelona fell, the darkened glass
turned in the world and immense ruinous gaze,
mirror of prophecy in a series of mirrors.
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
Decisions of history the radios reverse;
Storm over continents, black rays around the chief,
Finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
Inverted year with one prophetic day,
high wind, forgetful cities, and the war,
the terrible time when everyone writes “hope.”
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
When Barcelona fell, the cry on the roads
assembled horizons, and the circle of eyes
looked with a lifetime look upon that image,
defeat among us, and war, and prophecy,
I meet it in all the faces that I see.
The Lynching
His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
Enslaved
Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West;
And in the Black Land disinherited,
Robbed in the ancient country of its birth,
My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead,
For this my race that has no home on earth.
Then from the dark depths of my soul I cry
To the avenging angel to consume
The white man’s world of wonders utterly:
Let it be swallowed up in earth’s vast womb,
Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke
To liberate my people from its yoke!
Of Late
“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card”
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen.
In your office you were informed.
Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle.
So far nothing turns up.Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed.
No tip-off. No release.
Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes.
Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists.
Pity the press photographers, not called.Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said
all that there is to say in that language.
Twice what is said in yours.
It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try
the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, - but the rest is lost.
The answer quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Photograph by Carl. Van Vechten, 1933.
our hands, and our hot blood.
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
