Carolyn Forché at the Rialto Theater – Poetry Event
“It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.” asserts poet Carolyn Forché. The Loveland Poet Laureate Committee is hosting three events with the award-winning poet and dedicated human rights activist. In addition to her five books of poetry, she has written non-fiction and translated poetry. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Forché will share her ideas about the use of poetry as a tool for social justice and read her poetry to Loveland on Saturday April 13th at the Rialto Theater in Loveland. Tickets are available at the Rialto Theater Box Office or RialtoTheaterCenter.org.
Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history and is credited with coining the term the poetry of witness. Forché spent two years in El Salvador working as a journalist and reporting on human rights violations as part of Amnesty International and witnessed their unfolding civil war.
While in El Salvador, she viewed inadequate health facilities that had never received the foreign aid designated for them; saw young girls who had been sexually mutilated; and learned of torture victims who had been beaten, starved, and otherwise abused. Her experiences found expression in The Country Between Us.
“I tried not to write about El Salvador in poetry, because I thought it might be better to do so in journalistic articles,” she told Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone. “But I couldn’t—the poems just came.”
Her outpouring of poetry became The Country Between Us which is one of the few poetry bestsellers.
All of her life, she has advocated for the poetry of witness, which has inspired countless other poets to follow in her footsteps. A dozen years passed between the publication of The Country Between Us and Forché’s editing of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Matthew Rothschild in the Progressive called the poems in the anthology “some of the most dramatic antiwar and anti-torture poetry written in this benighted century.”
“The thought of witness proposes that we consider what is made present to us in certain poetic texts, what is opened up to us, transmitted to us. In this sense, it might resemble the face-to-face encounter and its attendant obligations.” Forché writes.
“If we read a poem as witness (and there are many other ways of reading), we open ourselves to another way of knowing. We read in response to an ethical imperative. We are not bound to read this way, of course, but if we do, we are responding to the poet’s call to the future, to a writing from the past that addresses the reader to come, addresses the one who will lift the corked bottle from the sea waves and read its message.”
On Saturday April 13th at 1:00 pm, Carolyn Forché will be interviewed by Evan Oakley, Professor, Chair of English, Communications and Literature, Aims Community College. Later in the evening at 7:00 pm, Carolyn Forché will read from her books followed by a chance to ask questions and make comments. Her books will be available at all three events. Both events will be held at the Rialto Theater at 228 E. 4th Street in Loveland.
