Interview: Poet Carolyn Forché, who will read at the Dublin Writers Festival, tells Rosita Boland that US civil liberties are under threat and that poets must fill the gap left by a compliant media
Poets won't do much for their egos if they go looking for online readers' reviews of their books on amazon.com, the biggest virtual bookshop in the world. Maeve Binchy's latest novel, Quentin's, gets a whopping 67 online reader reviews, while Seamus Heaney gets just seven for his most recent collection of poems, Electric Light.
Given that comparison with a Nobel winner, Carolyn Forché, one of the US's best-known contemporary poets, who will read at next month's Dublin Writers Festival, need not feel at all bad about her three online reviews for her most recent book, Blue Hour. Poetry has always had, and always will have, a comparatively tiny readership, even for practitioners as famous as Heaney and Forché.
And by poetry standards, Forché's name is up there in small but shining lights, as poet, translator and anthologist. She has received several prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a Poetry Society of America award. She is currently teaching at the George Mason University of Virginia and next year will be at Skidmore College, New York.
"I write a book a decade," Forché says down the phone from her temporary residence in Washington DC. It is temporary because her Maryland home vanished under 27 million gallons of water from an extravagance of burst pipes on a bitterly cold night earlier this year. For the short time before they were forced to abandon the house, the family opened doors and windows so that the water had somewhere to go other than building up between the walls "and literally bursting the house open".
"But you know what?" she says. "The flood was terrible, but it was also interesting, dealing with it."
This comment could equally well apply to the topics that have compelled Forché as a poet over four decades. She has focused on some terrible subjects, in the true sense of the word, and created something interesting and urgent out of them. The Country Between Us, which sold close to an astonishing 100,000 copies, examined the US-backed military regime in El Salvador. Her anthology, Against Forgetting; Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, gathers together work from 140 poets who have written of war, lack of civil liberties, and human rights abuses. The Angel of History is a meditation on war, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and what happens to those damaged spaces afterwards. Of the mass graves of war, Forché writes:
And the fields? Aren't the fields changed by what happened?
The dead aren't like us.
How can the fields continue as simple fields?
She draws a clear distinction between her own work, in which the subject- matter is human conflict and suffering, and the work of the writers she anthologised in Against Forgetting, who have personally experienced such conflict. Experience of suffering thus becomes watermarked into their work.
"I think extremities of experience, like war and imprisonment, are indelible," she says. "That's what makes it a poetry of witness."
As a poet who has always been concerned with politics, Forché believes that Americans are more challenged now than they have ever been, with restrictive legislation introduced after September 11th. "We're under significant pressures here," she says. "The government is stripping away our civil liberties. People can be arrested and held without charges under Patriot Act 1. I don't think writers always have much choice about what they write about, but writers are choosing to go to demonstrations and sign petitions."
Political protest by writers in such an uncritical media environment as the US is, Forché thinks, essential.
In her latest book, Blue Hour, there is a 45-page poem, 'On Earth', which is an ambitious stream-of-consciousness meditation on "the twilight between life and death", as Forché puts it. It is written in the form of a gnostic abecedarian hymn - which translates roughly as a long incantatory poem, with the first word of each line proceeding in alphabetical order, thus running through from A to Z.
So which came first, the idea for the poem, or the form?
"The poem is a litany of experience," Forché says. "A mind passing through a particular region, and reviewing its life experience. The form gave me a way to do it. The poem is a methodical obsession of the mind; it wants life to add up to something."
She considers it to be her best work so far.
'On Earth' mines abstract depths, in the way that some of Jorie Graham's work does, and it is demanding of the reader. You also notice the alphabetical form to the lines quite early on, which does give the rest of the poem a certain predictability. It's not surprising to hear it was originally twice the length; the chosen form acts as a type of trellis against which you could potentially plant many climbing images.
As a reader, ultimately you either like the effect or prefer something more minimalist; either way, some lines just hop out like flowers, with the potency of haiku, such as "a bit of polished quiet from a locked church".
Carolyn Forché reads at the Dublin Writers Festival on June 15th at 4 p.m. in the New Theatre. Blue Hour is published by Bloodaxe Books