Against Forgetting

In an interview on Violence

What about your final book, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness which is edited by Carolyn Forché.

This is a completely different book. It is an edited collection of poetry of those who witnessed violence. It starts with the Armenian genocide and goes to the end of the 20th century and it covers poetry of witness from every major known and often obscure conflict that has happened around the world.

Carolyn Forché is a well-known poet who has had to drink very deeply from the well of sorrow and I respect that greatly because I do that too and I know how hard it is! What I think is very powerful about her book is that her selections are very morally surefooted. There are so many poems, and so much sadness, one can feel overwhelmed when one starts a project like this. But Forché takes to heart the idea that in Hades there is very little light except that which comes from your own story. If you don’t know your own story you get lost in the dark. The poems bring together people who are about to go to their death, but who aren’t willing to give up their story and who leave behind testimony, whether it is Lorca’s last poem before they arrested him in the Spanish Civil War or Akhmatova’s wonderful four-line poem about the Stalin era, where she affirms how she is a witness to the common lot of those times and that place. For people who are not familiar with the range of the poetry of witness, this is incredibly powerful reading, so powerful I read just a few pages each night. The book shows that even in the darkest moments, imagination remains alive. When I read this book, as someone who also writes poetry, I find in it a great cure for misanthropy because it focuses my attention on the grace of the living moment, no matter where it happens, and the thoughtfulness of a human being’s story. Even the people who have no hope of living have the power of witness and they know this.