Carolyn Forché Reading at the Summer Festival of Poetry Touched on Activism and Writing

As part of the Pathways-Featherstone Summer Festival of Poetry, Carolyn Forché shared several poems from her upcoming book on Sunday night. Forché first poetry collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and has received numerous awards for her work ever since. On Sunday evening, she began with a poem about the Hook Lighthouse in Ireland.

Her poems vary in subject and sentiment, but the common thread that holds her books together is her grandmother, Anna. "My grandmother must be in every book," explained Forché. Her grandmother, who died when Forché was 18 was extremely important and influential to Forché. "She was wonderful and I really miss her," she said.

It was her grandmother who taught the poet several life lessons. "She spoke several Central European languages and English wasn’t one of her best languages. So she invented English as she pleased…And that’s how I learned that you could play with language and make things up," explained Forché.

Forché also read poems about the Ukraine, Slovakia, India and El Salvador. Her El Salvardo poem is about an experience in El Salvaor during the time of the death squads in the late 1970s and was perhaps her most emotional piece.

"I had a poem of an event that stayed with me for 30 years. It didn’t come to a page. It didn’t get written. It never appeared for me under my pen and now it has. There’s some harshness in it," Forché explained, The poem has two voices, Forché's and that of her mentor who died in 2009. "It was after he died that I caught the poem," she said.

A significant portion of Forché's life has been spent as an activist. Forché explained that her poetry and activism converged for a time, but "I didn't think there was much relationship between the two. I wasn't using the poetry for anything. But I mean of course I wrote about what concerned me. That was what my life was at the time."

Forché did human rights work primarily in El Salvador, Lebanon and South Africa. She also made trips to Northern Ireland and the West Bank. Today she is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She runs a center that is dedicated to the convergence of literature and social justice and human rights. Of course she is still writing. Her next book will be out soon. "Hopefully in 2013," she said.

The next Pathways-Featherstone Summer Festival of Poetry reading takes place on Tuesday, August 7^th and will feature National Book Award-Winning Poet Terrance Hayes