Background
Carolyn Louise Forché was born on April 28, 1950, in Detroit, Michigan, United States. She is a daughter of Michael Joseph and Louise Nada (Blackford) Sidlosky.
1983
Carolyn Forché
2010
Carolyn Forché announcing the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award finalists in poetry.
220 Trowbridge Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States
Carolyn Forché earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972.
Bowling Green, OH 43403, United States
Carolyn Forché earned a Master of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in 1975.
Young Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché with a Pueblo Indian friend in New Mexico in the 1970s.
(The language and images of Carolyn Forché’s poetry are so...)
The language and images of Carolyn Forché’s poetry are so closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body’s functioning, that it is surprising to realize how many of her poems deal with uprootedness - hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, the loss of grandparents and other elders, people leaving and being sent away. But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history - both natural and social - and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché’s poetry, gives it is depth and dimension.
https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Tribes-Yale-Younger-Poets/dp/0300019858/?tag=2022091-20
1976
(The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, ...)
The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.
https://www.amazon.com/Country-Between-Us-Carolyn-Forche/dp/0060909269/?tag=2022091-20
1982
(This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes it ...)
This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes it to impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecht: "In these dark times, will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times." Bearing witness to extremity - whether of war, torture, exile, or repression - the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Forgetting-Twentieth-Century-Poetry-Witness/dp/0393309762/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster...)
Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster - war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb - Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.
https://www.amazon.com/Angel-History-Carolyn-Forche/dp/0060925841/?tag=2022091-20
1995
("Blue Hour is an elusive book because it is ever in pursu...)
"Blue Hour is an elusive book because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted. "The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence." -Robert Boyers
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Hour-Poems-Carolyn-Forche-ebook/dp/B003WJRE0A/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activis...)
The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fire What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life. Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension. Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525560378/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Carolyn Louise Forché was born on April 28, 1950, in Detroit, Michigan, United States. She is a daughter of Michael Joseph and Louise Nada (Blackford) Sidlosky.
Forché earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972, and a Master of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in 1975.
Carolyn Forché taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University, the University of Virginia, Skidmore College, Columbia University, San Diego State University and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. Forché is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.
Forché was a journalist for Amnesty International in El Salvador in 1983 and Beirut correspondent for the National Public Radio program "All Things Considered."
Forché's first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, leading to publication by Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Upon her return, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), was published with the help of Margaret Atwood.
Forché's articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, Boston Review, and others. Forché has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.
Forché's anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (1994), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include the famed poem The Colonel.
After first acquiring both fame and notoriety for her second volume of poems, The Country Between Us, she pointed out that this reputation rested on a limited number of poems describing what she personally had experienced in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic is more one of rendered experience and at times of mysticism rather than one of ideology or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet's use of language. The anthology Against Forgetting was intended to collect the work of poets who had endured the impress of extremity during the 20th century, whether through their engagements or force of circumstance. These experiences included warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Although she was not guided in her selections by the political or ideological persuasions of the poets.
Among Forché's translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Claribel Alegría's Sorrow (1999), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, for the Modern English Poetry Series, 1991).
Forché's fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was released in 2003. Forthcoming books include a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony (2010, Harper Collins), a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins) and a fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World (HarperCollins).
Forché's latest work is A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, 2019, a memoir where she recounts an odd season at the dawn of the civil war in El Salvador.
(The language and images of Carolyn Forché’s poetry are so...)
1976(Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster...)
1995(The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activis...)
2019(The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, ...)
1982(This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes it ...)
1993("Blue Hour is an elusive book because it is ever in pursu...)
2003Forché was raised Roman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work.
Though Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged.
Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this, she was strongly influenced by Terrence des Pres. Forché is also influenced by her Slovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included a woman resistance fighter imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of former Czechoslovakia.
Quotations:
"We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shaping of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work."
"The heart is the toughest part of the body. Tenderness is in the hands."
"Before enduring it we will endure it."
Carolyn Forché lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she married in 1984. Their son is Sean-Christophe Mattison.