American poet Carolyn Forche is co-editor, with Duncan Wu, of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W.W. Norton, January 2014), an anthology of 300 poems that speak to censorship, war, imprisonment, forced exile, torture, and slavery.
A translator, editor, and human rights advocate, Forche also is the editor of a companion volume, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton, 1993), which includes work by more than 140 poets from five continents. Both collections are indispensable.
During a PBS interview, Forche, who last year was awarded an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, read a number of poems from the anthology, including Emily Dickinson's "They Dropped Like Flakes". Here's the reading:
Carolyn Forche on FaceBook
Carolyn Forche at Academy of American Poets, Blue Flower Arts, Georgetown University, HarperCollins, Modern American Poetry
Roland Flint Talks with Carolyn Forche about Poetry of Witness (Video)
Robyn Creswell, "Poetry in Extremis: Looking at 'The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500-2001', The New Yorker, February 13, 2014 (This is an excellent essay. Creswell is poetry editor of The Paris Review and teaches at Brown University.)
Robyn Creswell, "Poetry in Extremis: Looking at 'The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500-2001', The New Yorker, February 13, 2014 (This is an excellent essay. Creswell is poetry editor of The Paris Review and teaches at Brown University.)
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1 comment:
"They perished in the seamless grass."
Coincidentally, just last week I read Forche's "The Colonel" to a class of students completely untutored poetry, filled with notions of its riddle-like complexity or flowery sentiment. The poetry of witness was something they weren't prepared for, which, of course, was why I read it. "Very disturbing" said the first student who spoke.
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