![]() In her introduction, Forché located the intellectual origins of witness poetry in the work of European philosophers and poets-Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès-whose lives and writings were marked by the experience of the Holocaust. Twelve years after publishing “The Country Between Us,” Forché edited an impressive anthology, “Against Forgetting” (1993), which argued for the poetry of witness as a coherent tradition in twentieth-century poetry. The opening line of “The Colonel” states, simply, “What you have heard is true.” The poetry that interested her was not political, per se, but was what she called a “poetry of witness.” This was not the work of partisans but of those who, like Amnesty International, stood in solidarity with “the party of humanity.” Witness poetry was testimonial rather than polemical. Forché herself shied away from such claims. While her contemporaries wrote poems of domestic unhappiness and the supermarket sublime (so this story goes), Forché was making engagé poetry out of Reagan-era dirty wars. ![]() ![]() The excitement generated by Forché’s early work-Denise Levertov called her “a poet who’s doing what I want to do,” and Jacobo Timerman suggested that she was the next Neruda-grew out of a sense that she was reinventing the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |