Sam Risak | November 2020

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, memoirist, and human rights activist whose lyrical articulations have been revealed over the past forty years in five poetry collections and a memoir. While Forché’s mastery over language has been apparent since her first poetry book Gathering the Tribes (1976) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, she continued to evolve and experiment with new forms in her following collections: The Country Between Us (1981), The Angel of History (1994), Blue Hour (2003), and most recently, In the Lateness of the World (March 2020). One of the first two poets to accept the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Forché has received numerous awards for her work, including the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a National Book Award nomination for her 2019 memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, which won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

It is in this memoir we get to see Forché as an observer, a role for which her skill has been long demonstrated in the lushness and precision of her poetry. When Leonel Gómez Videz asks Forché to follow him into El Salvador, a country that in the 1970s is on the brink of war, he wants her to write and alert US Americans to the atrocities occurring there. Forché tries to explain what Gómez wants is a journalist, that poets did not hold that sort of authority in the United States. But Gómez remains adamant that this witness is to be a poet. His judgment would prove prescient, as Forché would become known for her ability to engage readers with what she’d describe as “poetry of witness,” or poems written in the aftermath of devastation.

It is this aftermath that serves as the ground of In the Lateness of the World. With the help of boatmen and lightkeepers, the poems in this collection take us across bridges to cities both under siege and submerged, guiding us into ancient museums of stone and contemporary islands of plastic waste. Listed as one of Publishers Weekly’s most anticipated books of 2020, In the Lateness of the World “sifts through history’s aftershocks and repercussions in her first new collection in seventeen years. These poems investigate borders and migration, delivering a lasting record of witness and arguing for the responsibility all humans share toward one another.”

Sam Risak: In the Lateness of the World is your first collection in seventeen years, and it immediately follows your first work of prose, the memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. What was your process like writing these works simultaneously?

Carolyn Forché: Well, you know, it’s difficult to write prose and poetry at the same time, as the demands are quite different. The impulses are different. I began the memoir in 2003, and the poems were written over seventeen years, but not during times of intense focus on the memoir. Eventually, both of these books were interrupted by life. By illness. By disaster. I was taken out of them for periods of time.

In the case of the prose book, I had to learn how to write long-form prose, which involves doing many things for the first time. Long-form prose memoir is not autobiography; it’s not a book that accounts for the whole of the life. It’s a slice of it, either temporally or spatially. In my case, I focused on events principally during two years of my life, and how those experiences carried forward. It took me a while to understand that I had to deeply focus on that and let everything else fall away. I had to establish the structure and arc of disclosure: in what order events occur. I felt my way toward certain decisions, and the one that was most important was the decision to write in such a way that the reader would never know more than I knew at that moment of the narrative. I wanted to take the reader on a journey without the benefit of hindsight or foresight. I wanted the experience to be raw and immediate, to recreate the uncertainties and the work of putting pieces together in the moment of a very complex situation.

My poems were written during months when I was not deeply involved with the memoir—months when I was procrastinating, when I was unwilling to face the next scene, or was hesitant or fearful or didn’t yet know how to write some particular passage. I have always kept little notebooks where I write drafts and notes for poems. Some of them become something, and some of them don’t. But the poetry was always available to me, and when I would veer away from the prose memoir, the poetry would take over.

As it happened, when I finally finished the poetry book, or I thought it was finished, my literary agent, Bill Clegg, thought it best to place both books with the same publisher. So, the poetry book waited in the drawer while the memoir was completed, and then they were acquired together at Penguin Press. The editor there, Christopher Richards, wanted to publish the memoir first, followed a year later by the poetry. This was fortuitous because at least five new poems emerged during that delay that are very important to the book, and I was able to take out poems that I felt were no longer part of it. So, the book was strengthened by the delay, but it was the longest period between books during my publishing life. I’m not a terribly prolific publisher of poetry. I write all the time, but only publish a book every decade or so, and this is now almost two decades, which is a bit long.

Risak: Well, you’ve been busy, otherwise.

Forché: I’ve been busy, yes. And the memoir—especially in recent years—was all-consuming. The published version is actually the fourth version. The other three had to be consigned to the drawer.

Risak: Can I ask which poems you added during this waiting period?

Forché: The three that were written in Indonesia at the beginning of the book, “Water Crisis,” “Report from an Island, and “The Last Puppet.” Also, more recent were “The Boat Man” and “Mourning,” both poems that have to do with Greece and with refugees. And then “Hue: From a Notebook” is newer and comes from a more recent journey to Vietnam. “Souffrance” and “Toward the End” are probably the two most recent poems, and they were gifts from the universe. Each is addressed to a person, or has to do with a person’s individual death, but they are both also elegiac in a larger sense.

Risak: Then I’m very grateful for the delay.

Forché: The delay blessed the book with more work. “Souffrance” is for Daniel Simko, and the mention of “Joseph” in the poem is Joseph Brodsky. This was written to Daniel after his death. And “Toward the End” was a poem for a recent friend, someone with whom I shared the experience of a complicated and textured life, as we both lived in many different places where we’d had deep encounters. It’s a poem that meditates on these disparate experiences, attempting to assemble them into one life.

Risak: I did notice you have a lot of dedications in the collection. Do you think it’s important to name your inspiration?

Forché: I haven’t very much done that in the past. But this is a late book. I’m almost 70 years old, and I wanted to honor certain people, especially the dead, who had inspired these poems. Thinking about certain individuals was the occasion of the work, and I wanted to acknowledge that.

Risak: The environment is also something you seem to be addressing in your poems. In this, and some of your prior collections, you construct these lush lists to depict your surroundings, some of which are even alphabetical. I read them as an attempt to categorize what otherwise would be difficult to comprehend. What was your intent?

Forché: I’m interested in details of world—in active enumeration, in keeping track, in inventory, or taking stock, in acknowledging disparate elements of world. I started this very early as a poet. There’s a poem titled “Photograph of My Room” that enumerates various objects in a room and their histories. There’s a lushness and a richness to this intricate naming, but it’s also an assembly and a calling forth, a kind of invocation or presencing of things. And now that we’re alive during the sixth extinction, it’s also a presencing of that which is vanishing, both in the built and natural worlds. There’s a poem in the new collection—“A Room”—that is a kind of companion poem to that earlier one, and it again has an inventory of the objects in a room and their contexts. Another poem that also has this impulse is “In Time of War”—an elaboration of apparitions, ghosts, things that have been reported to have been seen in castles and other ancient buildings. I began to be intrigued by the human enchantment with apparitions and the fear of ghosts, because humans should actually fear war, which comes about by their own hands. And that’s why “In Time of War,” resolves with children standing on their own graves, but begins with a litany of ghostly apparitions. “The Museum of Stones” is a litany of specimens in a collection, another gathering of world. “Light of Sleep” is also a list poem, but it has to do mostly with physical objects and human inventions no longer in use. We no longer have ice papers to indicate that ice should be delivered to our houses. We no longer have ration papers. So many things have disappeared, and this is an accounting of that, and also a record of human invention. I had another poem, no longer in the book, that was also a record of human invention. So, there were quite a number of poems that are enumerative. And perhaps I’ll let that impulse go. I don’t know.

Risak: Well, I’m a fan. Many of the lists describe scenes of ruin and debris, and yet, the lyricism of your writing makes them almost sound like works of art. When you see these scenes of devastation, do they initially seem beautiful to you, or is that something that comes during the process of writing?

Forché: I don’t want to aestheticize suffering. But remember that anything that’s able to be perceived in the aftermath of warfare has itself survived the damage. If it can be perceived, it is legible and is a marker of survival. To make a record of things that are found in debris is to catalog that which has not yet entered oblivion. There are things I can remember from my own life that I did not write about. I was in Lebanon during the 1983–84 winter, that period in which the Marine barracks was blown up, and we lost 257 US Marines. I went to the barracks after that. The bodies were gone, and much had been taken away, but if you walked around in the ruins, at your feet were packets of chewing gum, cigarette packages, notes, pencils, all the little things the soldiers owned, still telling a story in the wreckage. Some walls were blasted away, but the walls that were still standing had drawings on them, drawings of soldiers. It was ghostly, really. I’m always interested in what’s left behind and what can still be seen. And what kind of stories those things tell: these are specimens or details of world.

Risak: You provide so many of these details, but not always the location for them. For example, I didn’t know where “Museum of Stones” took place.

Forché: “Museum of Stones” was from Ireland—or the person who collected the stones was—but there are different references. The Bamiyan stone is from the destroyed Buddhas in Afghanistan, the earliest map drawn in England is from Belfast. So, there are references in there, but Hugh Sloan, who collected the stones, was Irish. He traveled widely, and instead of buying souvenirs, he would pick up a stone and mark where he got it. I only referred to some of them. When you’re composing this way, you’re always selecting too—you don’t name everything.

Risak: How do you decide what to select?

Forché: Music. Music and how evocative the different namings are. I’m always interested in specific common names, not Latin names, but common names for different rock and stone because the names are beautiful, and they’re very specific. Gneiss. Chert. Schist. They’re beautiful words, and they gather a music about them. They are all different parts of the world, and only in a rock collection would you see all of them together.

Risak: “The Museum of Stones” is one of many poems where you seem to superimpose the ancient with the contemporary; for instance, in “The Boatman,” the Charon-esque figure also serves as a transporter of refugees.

Forché: I compare the contemporary refugee to Charon because he was saying the same thing: “I’m the taxi driver. I take people at the end of the world.” And I thought: that’s Charon! It leapt at me, that figure. He’s from a different culture, but on some level, he knew it. He saw the irony of being the taxi driver; he’s a refugee, and he’s taking people from one place to another, from peril to safety, from one world to another.

Risak: So “The Boatman” was someone you actually spoke to?

Forché: Yes, an interesting man from Syria. He picked me up all the time in the taxi. I was in Milwaukee for the winter, and I had to use taxis because I had no car. When the weather was brutal, I would take a taxi to work, and somehow this particular man wound up being the one to pick me up more times than seemed even statistically probable. We both noticed that. “Well, well I’ve driven you before,” he’d say. And after he’d driven me several times to the university or back to my hotel, he began telling me about his life and how he wound up in Milwaukee. There are many, many refugee cab drives in certain American cities. If they know how to drive, and can learn the city and have passable English, they can make a living that way. And then refugees help refugees. Other people come, and they say, “well, you can drive.” It’s one of the jobs refugees get. And I think that’s true in other parts of the world too. It’s certainly true in European cities. If you start talking to a cab driver in most of their cities, you will find immigrants or refugees, and they will tell stories.

Risak: We have so much resistance here toward letting refugees into the country, and then they help us get around.

Forché: They do all the service jobs. And except for those indigenous to this continent, we are all immigrants. All of us. So that is a horrific moral failing of ours. It’s a lack of hospitality, a lack of openness, a lack of humane concern for others, a lack of fulfilling our responsibility to the people of countries we’ve damaged irrevocably. If we are going to overcome any of that, we must first acknowledge it.

Risak: This topic of immigration appears several times in the collection, as does climate change.

Forché: They’re related, yes.

Risak: Both comment on our failure to recognize global responsibility?

Forché: Yes.

Risak: And both with fatal consequences. Do you think most people take for granted the earth’s permanence?

Forché: I think up until recently we did. I think more and more people are waking to the fact that that might not be the case. A mourning has begun, which probably is counterproductive to our survival because surrendering to the inevitable is going to make everything worse. It’s very hard to say what will happen. Usually, human attitudes must reach a certain critical mass in order to change, and change can come about very quickly if that critical mass is reached. I don’t think that’s happened, yet. I think Australians have reached it. Australians now know what the rest of us will learn gradually as this fire spreads. I keep in mind that the earth will never be as healthy and as varied and as robust and alive again as it is today. We are in a decline we have not yet begun to reverse, and I have no way of knowing what’s going to happen. There are a number of threats on many fronts, but since humans are the cause of atmospheric death, who knows what’s going to happen? Are we going to suffer a massive pandemic that’s going to decrease our population so rapidly that everything else turns around? I think many people imagine that there are institutions and governments and teams in place that will provide aid during disaster. That is an illusion. That is not going to happen. When there is societal breakdown on a massive scale, help is not forthcoming. I see denial everywhere. We nearly just precipitated World War III with Iran, and most people simply went about their lives. That tells me humans have an immense capacity to deny what’s going on around them.

Risak: That feeds into my next question. You have a poem titled—I know I am not going to pronounce right—but “Charmolypi?”

Forché: “Charmolypi,” yes.

Risak: A Greek word that is said to be untranslatable. This feels appropriate when discussing climate change.

Forché: Charmolypi is a beautiful sadness. It’s a sadness that is to be savored in some way. We don’t have an English word for that because we don’t have a positive term for sadness. We don’t. The complexity of human emotion is not expressed well in English. We use the word love, for example, and there are many, many kinds of love. But we have one word. We love ice cream, and we love our children, and we love our spouses or our partners. So English is a little bit limited in that regard. It’s very good with verbs for work and business, and there’s a lushness to English in its nouns. But not in its abstract nouns, in its concrete nouns. We don’t name our emotions very particularly. I’m interested in the Greek complexity of feeling.

Risak: Do you think our inability to recognize the consequences of climate change results from the lack of complexity in our language?

Forché: Our language is being distorted in the political sphere, and we’re beginning to mistrust truth claims and what’s in front of our own eyes. There’s got to be a kind of vigilance about euphemisms, about things being left out of accounts, about the ways in which our attention is being distracted and our perceptions distorted. That has to do with climate, too, in the terms we use. We were using global warming for a while, then climate change, then climate death. It’s very difficult to give a name that’s adequate for what is happening to us. And until we can name things and hold that language before us palpably, I don’t know that our consciousness will be able to process it.

Risak: In addition to the mythological allusions, you have several mentions of cathedrals, Buddhas, statues of Saint Dominic. What role do you believe faith has in our response to climate change?

Forché: I’m interested in the realm of the sacred. I’m not interested in doctrinal belief systems or institutional religion for its own sake. The unknowability of the deity interests me, the palpable presence of the sacred. But I embrace doubt. I’m interested in holiness and the mystical. I perceive it. I’ve perceived it all my life. I’ve felt that presence, which is undeniable for me. So, of course, it’s going to be in the work. It has to be. But I’m not interested in what most people mean by faith. Even if I understood what most people mean by it, I’m uncomfortable about faith claims.

Risak: Well, a lot of faith presents as the opposite of your lack of certainty.

Forché: Faith is a state of being, of mind, of dwelling in something. And for me, it’s a dwelling in recognition rather than in certainty. I’m interested in people who dwell in a kind of quietness or awareness of the sacred or spiritual dimension of life. I’m interested in objects humans have invested with meaning over time, especially eons of time, or objects positioned to remind human consciousness of its fleetingness and amazement.

Risak: You’ve been able to write about so many of these dwellings because of your international travels, but now travel is pointed toward as a cause of the world’s demise. Where do you find the balance?

Forché: Guilty as charged. I’ve traveled a great deal in my life. There are countries I haven’t seen but not many. So, I don’t have the answer to that, but I do know that air travel is definitely not going to be able to be sustained as it is, unless they find a way to do it without burning fossil fuels.

Risak: Even if we do invent some new green technology, won’t it just fall back into the same capitalist consumer model? Won’t the new be replaced again?

Forché: Built-in obsolescence is wrong. Consumer waste is wrong. I think that people who are beginning to make severe changes in their lives will have an advantage in the future because they already will know how to live in altered circumstances. And I don’t mean light changes, like recycling. I mean real changes. Like I won’t buy any more new clothes, changes. The people who make severe changes in size of housing, energy use, in lifestyle, those people may be viewed as a bit odd now, but they will have made the adjustment in advance.

Risak: You reference numerous other poets and writers in the collection and even have a poem titled “The Refuge of Art” after a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov. What role do you see for writers in promoting the transition to these new environments?

Forché: Literature is the language of the soul, the language of our consciousness. It embodies human thought over the ages. And there’s probably nothing more important that humans have. If you look at the past, especially the deep past, all the evidence we have of earlier human civilizations is in their architecture, their jewelry, their murals—their art. There is nothing else. And that’s all we’re going to leave behind to bequeath to the future, whatever we’ve written or made, that’s what endures. Nothing else does. And now, humans are making less and less that is built for ages; our architecture is built to last for ten or twenty years. Everything is disposable. Everything is destructible. Everything is fungible. We’re not thinking anymore of posterity and the deep future. Everything is of the moment.

Risak: And yet it still lasts.

Forché: It won’t biodegrade, you mean. I don’t know if that’s the same as lasting. Being flotsam and jetsam in the sea of plastic is not the same as being a monument on a mountain. It lasts as garbage, as debris.

Risak: But it doesn’t disappear as people think. These supposedly disposable objects go toward building things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch you describe in “Report from an Island.” The left-behind objects of this poem are a pretty stark contrast to those in “Museum of Stones.”

Forché: Now we leave behind diapers. Six-pack holders.

Risak: Are writers contemporary writers are leaving anything positive behind?

Forché: Yes! We’re still here. Poets are still here despite the many rumors of our demise and our death and of poetry “not mattering.” It’s very interesting that that which is viewed as not important, as ephemeral, like poetry and short stories, is attacked continually for its lack of importance—because it is important, and there’s a deeper recognition that it is important. And this is unsettling, this recognition.

Risak: When it came to your writings on El Salvador, you didn’t think anyone would take a poet seriously. But people certainly took you seriously.

Forché: No, I didn’t. In fact, I was used to how Americans view poets. I didn’t want to admit that I was a poet. But in El Salvador and other Latin American countries, that’s not the case. As they do in Greece, as they do in Ireland, as they do in Spain, there are cultures that deeply value poetry. And there are cultures that apparently don’t. And one of the few countries that doesn’t value poetry is the United States. The US has distinguished itself in that way. That’s not something we should be proud of, but yes.

Risak: Do you think writers have political responsibility in what they create?

Forché: Everyone has responsibilities that are civic and political. Writers have a deep responsibility to language and to their writing. I don’t really take things apart so that there’s this political sphere and then there’s this nonpolitical sphere. Everything for me is connected. I don’t think in those terms. I don’t think that anyone escapes political realities. And so why should writers escape? Everything is connected to the environment, and the environment is connected to the political decisions that are being made that are determining our future. There is nothing that escapes. A little frog in the grass doesn’t escape.

Risak: That lack of escape is certainly felt by some populations and regions more than others.

Forché: Are you talking about the poor countries in the world? Well, Australia is not a particularly poor country, and that is a continent that is just burned. Unfortunately, we imagine that the richer countries will cope, but that’s not the case. We do tend to treat poor countries horribly and use them as dumping grounds for our waste. And it does seem to be true that the closer one is to the equator or to the poles, the more rapid climate change affects things. But that’s temporary. Eventually, the damage will be at every latitude. If we think we’re escaping because we’re in this country or that country, that’s an illusion.

Risak: Should we make it a priority to write and learn about what those regions are already facing?

Forché: The areas like the melting Arctic, and the melting Antarctic, have much to teach us. We can bask in our stupidity and refuse to look at it, but anybody who wants to be awake and understand what’s happening should learn. I’m just thinking in terms of more consciousness or less, more awareness or less, more knowledge or less.

Risak: When it comes to a writer’s role in increasing that consciousness, there is debate over whether writers should speak about experiences that are not their own.

Forché: You’re talking about the policing of subject matter and who has the right to write about what.

Risak: Yes. If people don’t have the platform to be heard about what’s going on in their own environment, should writers try to gain visibility for that perspective?

Forché: You don’t have to stay inside your own skin, your own country, your own county, your own little subdivision. The human imagination is large. The question to ask when you’re going to write something, anything, is why? And who are you to write about it? If you’re a scientist, and you’re interested in the plight of a certain species of fish and you know a great deal about it, then there’s something you can bring to the rest of the world. The real test is in the work itself.

I don’t like to make general statements about who can write what until I see what they’ve done. And then you can see whether the work has succeeded or not, or whether it’s false consciousness, whether it’s disrespectful or somehow a distortion. I don’t think you can make sweeping rules about who gets to do what. Because works of the imagination are works of the imagination. We wouldn’t have most of the great works of literature in all cultures without the human imagination. If you’ve deeply assimilated something, internalized it, lived in it, immersed yourself in it enough that you can write about it, then see what you produce.

I understand wanting to protect cultural spaces. And I understand the quest for truth. You don’t want someone who’s outside of a particular culture to write about that culture falsely because they don’t know enough about it and they’re representing it erroneously. That’s wrong. But you don’t have to have that identity necessarily to be able to write truly from within. You just have to be who you really are, to own your subject position.

I’m uneasy with these rules that are supposed to apply to works of art that aren’t in front of us, that we can’t see yet, that haven’t been made yet. I can discuss this question with a given work in front of me, but not in general terms. And sure, there’s failed art everywhere. I think there can be false impulses, people wanting to write about something for the wrong reason. But other than that, it’s hard to discuss something absent an actual work.

Risak: What would you like readers to take from your work? Any perspectives on the world you would like them to walk away with?

Forché: I don’t have a design on the reader. I don’t have that desire. I’m hoping that readers enter these poems and somehow experience them. That’s all.

Sam Risak is a Creative Writing MFA and English MA student at Chapman University. She writes across genres with works published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Anastamos, and others forthcoming in Lit Hub, Terrain.org, and the Crab Orchard Review.

Excerpt

from In The Lateness Of The World

The Light Keeper

A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea-wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

 

Excerpted from IN THE LATENESS OF THE WORLD by Carolyn Forché. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Carolyn Forché, 2020.