This Sunday night’s poet is Carolyn Forché, whose most famous book, The Country Between Us, is based on her experiences in war-torn El Salvador. It’s hard to write political poems that succeed as poems, and hard to write prose poems that are not simply prose masquerading as poetry. Forché succeeds at both in “The Colonel” (CW: gore and violence):
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them- selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Carolyn Forché.
- Internet Archive:
- The Country Between Us, by Carolyn Forché.
- Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché. An anthology of poets writing about the horrors of the twentieth century.
- Bookshop.org:
- The Country Between Us, by Carolyn Forché.
- The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché. Forché’s next book of poetry after The Country Between Us, it extends Forché’s political poetry to address other wars and genocides.
- What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché. A prose account of Forché’s experiences in El Salvador.
- Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché.