Georgetown Independent

Issue date: 10/29/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Carolyn Forché Carolyn Forché [Click to enlarge]

Her office in New North may look unsettled now, home to only a couple of  wooden chairs, some lingering cardboard boxes and a few rows of books lining the walls, but Carolyn Forché has high hopes for it.

“This right here is an ottoman,” she said, resting her hand gently on a large cardboard box, as if her touch could spring the furniture free, unfolding a fully furnished room. She hopes to transform the office into a sort of “literary salon,” where students can gather to relax and talk or read.

This effort to involve students, ensure their comfort and encourage their success, is very much reflected in Forché’s nurturing teaching style, making her a welcome addition to Georgetown’s Department of English.

Not to mention the fact that she is an award-winning poet.

Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry—”Gathering the Tribes” (1976), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award; “The Country Between Us” (1982), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; “The Angel of History” (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and “Blue Hour” (2004).

She has also published an anthology, “Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness” (1993), and translations of the poetry of Claribel Alegria, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish.

Forché has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. She taught at a number of prestigious universities before being invited to be a Visiting Professor with Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetry and Social Practice. She was then offered a permanent position teaching at Georgetown.

“We are very blessed to have Carolyn Forché as a permanent member of the English Department,” said Jason Rosenblatt, Professor and Chair of Georgetown’s Department of English, in an email. “As a poet, translator, editor, memoirist, critic, and essayist, she bridges the gap between the poetry of personal experience and the discursive poetry associated with the public and political.”

Forché’s strong interest in social justice has in fact been the focus of her poetry, causing some people to label her a “political poet,” a term that she was not entirely comfortable with.

Instead, she endeavored to “open a space for discussing certain poets in the context of their experience of radical suffering,”she said.

What resulted was the study of “poetry of witness,” which she describes as poetry “written out of conditions of extremity, or in the aftermath of war, exile, imprisonment, and other sufferings collectively borne.”

Her anthology, “Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,” embodies that mission. Filled with poems  from the Holocaust, the world wars, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, various civil wars and periods of repression throughout the world, the book is an exploration of the process of bearing witness, the power of language, and the indelible mark branded onto people and poetry by conditions of extremity.

Forché’s “school of social justice,” as she calls it, was her time spent as a Guggenheim fellow in El Salvador, in the years leading up to the country’s bloody 12-year civil war.
“That was the beginning of my education as a human rights activist,” she said. “It happened on the ground, in situ, learning... It was the most formative experience of my life,” she said. “[It] informed my poetry; it couldn’t help but do so. I wrote out of my heart and soul in those years.”

Afterward, she continued to work with social justice campaigns, traveling all over the country reading her poetry and talking to people about what she had seen. Though she did work with specific advocacy groups, she maintained her independence throughout.

“I believed that poets’ and writers’ voices should be independent and they should be courageous and should speak out of their own conviction and sensibilities and take what comes,” she said.

What came, in addition to the books and the awards, was a passion for teaching.

“The other love of my life, you see, is teaching,” she said. She mentioned that the first classes she taught, the ones that got her “hooked,” were remedial freshman composition classes. “I just floated out of those classrooms,”?she said. “I felt so engaged and compelled by the art of teaching. It really mattered to me what each person in the class was doing, what they were understanding, how much progress they were making, and what it meant to them and how they were feeling about it.”

Her time at the Georgetown so far has continued to fuel her love for academia.

“My first class of Georgetown students is really a wonderful experience; the students actually read what I ask them to read!” she said. “And I feel there are so many students I’ve met who share my interests, my intellectual interests and my interest in social justice, in various ways. So I think that it is really remarkable how right this is for me.”

Her students are equally impressed. Sarah Holzschuh (COL ‘10), a student in her “Poetry of Witness” seminar, said, “The way that Professor Forché approaches her subject is beyond passionate, and engages us in a way that is wholly sincere and completely infectious. Her overwhelming devotion to and knowledge of the writing that she speaks about is so apparent and truly remarkable.”

If all goes as planned, Forché will have plenty of time to impress many other students.

“I will be here for the rest of my teaching life,” she said. “Coming to Georgetown has really been I think the capstone for me.”

And from her new office, slightly sparse but full of promise, her window looks out on the roof of Dahlgren Chapel, where she got married in 1984.

“I feel like I’ve come home,” she said.

Weiner is News Editor and an English senior.

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