Carolyn Forché’s new book, In the Lateness of the World — her first poetry collection in 17 years — has a timelessness to it. Aren’t we always in the lateness of the world, always on the edge of something new, and possibly an ending? As an American poet, Forché, has uniquely cultivated her craft and sensibilities to remark on this state of being. Since winning the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1975, she has shaped her career and development as a poet, witness, and human rights activist as marked by experiences of awakening, of consciousness-broadening, and most importantly, of a particularly vitalizing ability to render a dynamic humanity on the page.
Invoking the elements and the sea, ancient ruins, fishermen and grandmothers, refuge and violence, art and hope, the poems here would feel appropriate in any version of the world; but as a pandemic ravages through our fragile and susceptible bodies, they offer an especially timely balm. “Such rise and fall, such pitch of the ship!” Forché writes in “The Crossing.” “But some nights on the deck, holding the rails for all her life, / she said she ploughed the sea as she once had the fields, and into the / furrows / of light went the seeds and the black-winged waters fell upon them.”
I spoke with Forché over the phone about this new book, the evolution of American poetry, museums of the future, and the ethos of “poetry as witness.” This interview has been edited for length and concision. — Sarah Neilson
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Sarah Neilson: How do you think American poetry has changed since you won the Yale Younger Poets prize 45 years ago?
Carolyn Forché: I’ve been writing poetry for 61 years. That’s a long time. There’ve been many changes over the years, especially since the time of the Yale prize. When my second book [The Country Between Us, 1981] was published, it was received with mixed reviews because it was accused of being a book of political poetry, and that was used as a pejorative term at the time. Apparently, we were not to write about current political events in our work. I didn’t know that such projects were proscribed for American poets. So I transgressed this proscription without realizing it. I had to come to terms with the reaction in the aftermath of that.
Because there was so much controversy surrounding the book, I found myself invited to participate on a number of panels about the poet’s relation to the state, the poet’s civic responsibility or lack thereof. I listened to the arguments on both sides, and I found them both reductive. There were those who celebrated political poetry by virtue of its subject matter, and those who condemned it for the same reason. So I began to think about why there was this aversion to political poetry in American literary culture. I traced it to the 1930s, to the suppression of poets who were considered socialists. During the Cold War, of course, that terror of the political was amplified. By the time I came of age, there was just an assumption that one wouldn’t reflect political realities in one’s work.
I began to think, where is the space for this? I conceived of a social space between what one might think of as the political in American culture — the institutions of the state and the organizations of electoral politics and so on — and the domestic sphere of the hearth, the intimacies of personal life. I began to read poets of the twentieth century from all over the world who had endured conditions of extremity, who had lived through wars or military occupations, who had been imprisoned and so on. I found that most poets of the twentieth century, unfortunately, had lived through such experiences and had written in their aftermath. Regardless of the subject matter of the poems, their poems were marked by this suffering. The language had passed through the suffering.
It seemed to be the United States that had this unique aversion to the political. I didn’t find it in other countries, but I got fascinated by reading the works of poets from various countries and various languages, and found that they had a lot of qualities in common. I began to develop the thinking of “poetry as witness” — a way of reading work written in the aftermath of extremity. That aversion to politics stayed true throughout the ’80s and probably well into the ’90s. With the attacks of 9/11, something dramatically shifted. The poets of the new millennium, the poets who came of age in the aftermath of 9/11, didn’t get the memo that it was forbidden to write about events in the current world. Also, for the first time in some time, the civilian population of the United States had been traumatized by an attack.
What I find now is that there’s been a great opening in the last 20 years, and poets are almost expected to address contemporary concerns. It’s almost the reverse of what it was before. We have emergent poetics among communities that were suppressed before: African-American poets, Asian-America poets, Indigenous poets of the First Nations, Latinx poets. I find that that’s where much of the most exciting work is being written, and they are quite politically aware in that work, although the work is not always expressive of political views. I would say that for that reason, the situation for poets is radically different than it was when I was younger.
I think poetry has become more inclusive, more expansive, more engaged and more aware. And I would say there’s not a single poetic community but many poetic communities that overlap and are in dialogue with each other.
SN: You brought up this ethos that defines your work, that of bearing witness. How does that ethos of bearing witness shape your life right now, in this moment of global crisis?
CF: I’m not writing at the moment. As many people feel, I feel fatigued, distracted, anxious. The pace of my days is quite altered because I’m in self-isolation with my husband. We’ve had to do that for various health reasons. I’m teaching online at my university. I’m finding that without being able to be present for my students, physically present, the pedagogy has been altered and deprived of presence. I think especially when you’re teaching writing or literary writing, that kind of engagement is vital. So I’m trying to find ways of compensating for that.
I never thought of myself as a poet of witness. I didn’t include myself in my anthology [Against Forgetting, 1993]. But now that I look back on my life, I’ve experienced countries at war, I have been involved in areas of the world that have suffered through conflicts and extremity, more than perhaps many American citizens have. And it had to have affected my work. It shaped me, it shaped my consciousness. I don’t set out to write poetry about these subjects, but it emerges when I’m writing. It comes of its own. At the moment, what I’m witnessing is a global collective experience. Most of humanity has never seen this before. It’s on a scale that is unprecedented for us.
I’m keeping watch, I’m keeping vigil. I’m trying to record within myself what it feels to be in such a time, what I’m observing in myself and in others and in the world. I’m very sympathetic with everyone’s trauma, because it is trauma. The fatigue is caused by trauma, the anxiety, the distraction, the inability to focus. People are sleeping more. They’re finding it difficult to read. On the other hand, you have a very large population of people who find themselves suddenly housebound with school-age children whom they are expected to educate, while working from home, with spouses working from home. Many people report that the demands upon them are much greater than they were when they were actually able to move out and about. I myself find it very challenging to get groceries and supplies.
We also have the problem of anticipatory grief, because we know that while right now we’re in the stage of trying to flatten the curve, we also know that we’re going to lose people. That anticipatory grief is very heavy on the heart. There’s a kind of powerlessness. This is compounded in our country by a failure of leadership, by living under a regime that is incompetent, cruel, and unstable.
SN: Something I noticed a lot of in the book itself was imagery of elements like stone and fire. Why did the invocation of elements feel urgent for you in the poems?
CF: This is an interesting question because these emblematic elements are not necessarily consciously placed in the work. In fact, I have to re-read my work to discover what my preoccupations must have been at the time, because I write in a suspended state that isn’t intentional. I revise intentionally, but in the suspension, I don’t make decisions about what would be good for the poem. I just let the poem compose itself. This book was written over a 17-year period, so it’s reflective of a long period of time. In that time, I made a lot of journeys around the world and was especially moved by ancient ruins, particularly from paleolithic times. I was always interested in stones. I had a rock collection as a kid. I also find the diction, the vocabulary of the names of stones and geological formations, really interesting and musical.
I think this book is more conscious of the animate and inanimate worlds. In other words, the earth that we actually are arising from, the earth itself, its being, and the creatures upon it and their interrelatedness. It’s attentive to human circumstance. Not since I wrote Gathering the Tribes, my first book, have I noticed so much attention to the world beyond the human. So I’ve returned to something. Both formally and in terms of the concerns of the book, I feel like it’s a circling back to my first two books.
I noticed, as I arranged the book and chose which poems were going to be included in it, that there was a kind of symphony of utterance. There was a kind of dialogue. The poems were whispering to each other. I let the ones stay that were whispering.
The book is, I hope, a spiritual book, a book of the contemplative soul, a book of coming to terms. I feel quite at peace in my life now, and when I read the poems, especially toward the end of the book, I feel that reflected there.
This book came into the world just as we were beginning in this country to be crucially aware of our condition in the pandemic. I don’t want to bother people with a poetry book unless it will give something to them in this time, and I hope this one will. I think it might. I’m hoping it does. I’m hoping that this book is a balm for our moment, or at least takes us elsewhere. I’ve had a number of occasions to confront mortality in my life. There’s a lot of survival in this book and resilience.
SN: With the title of the book, In the Lateness of the World, there’s a sense that we’re witnessing, or living in, a late stage of something. There’s also a sense that we’ve been here before. The very first poem invokes a museum, which is a place of memory, of something past, a history to look back on. In what ways do you think we are living the same moments we have always lived, and in what ways are these moments different? What kinds of things from our current moment do you think will be in museums of the future?
CF: I’m really interested in museums of all kinds, and especially in unusual museums, unusual collections and preservations: accidental museums, time capsules. I’m interested in museums of the ordinary world, of unimportant things, of fleeting things, of things that are not treasured or valued.
I think there’s ancestral memory, there’s deep memory in our DNA carried from generation to generation. I think in the depths of our being as a species, we recognize this moment, we recognize the threat.
What will be preserved from now? I mean, if I could make a museum of this time, I don’t know. I’m interested in what forms of consciousness are going to remain with us. How long will it be before we can sustain contemplation again? How long will this unease last? How long will living generations have to feel trepidation about being close to other human beings? How long are we going to feel a kind of biological wariness of each other?
I’m not sure I gave you as much of an answer about the time capsule, but … toilet paper might be in the museum.
SN: Who or what are you reading right now?
CF: I’ve got the galleys of Joy Harjo’s new anthology of poetry, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (Aust, 2020). It is a beautiful anthology. What I’m hearing in this anthology, for the first time, collectively, is the voice of the Americas, the voice of the North American continent.
I’m also reading, because the French and American War in Vietnam has so much shaped my life and my generation, The Mountains Sing, which is a novel by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, which is really lovely. It’s about four generations of the Tran family, that go through the whole period of the war. I’m also reading Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, which is also a new book.
SN: If you could choose one representative poem from In the Lateness of the World, what would it be?
CF: Well, I don’t think there’s a representative poem, because they’re all so different and because they are written over a long period of time. I would say that the one that probably speaks to our moment more than any other poem in the book is Toward the End.
Toward the End
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships unseen
ships, a year
passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing
in the aftermath
who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition,
and then just like that — gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought
you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the
door, death
it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea
the uncertain,
full of ghosts calling out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the
moon above
the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air
where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered
to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and
murk, you could see
everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place
you have been,
without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would
be one person again.
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From In The Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché. Copyright © Carolyn Forché, 2020. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC.