what you have heard is true carolyn forche

Helena de Groot: He spent three days telling her about his country. And you know, he was quite mysterious and brilliant.

Some people thought he worked for the CIA. His name was Leonel.Ĭarolyn Forché: Some people thought that he was with the guerrillas. It all started at her house, in Encinitas, California, when a man she didn’t know came to visit. In this memoir, Carolyn takes us back to El Salvador in the late 70s, when the country was on the brink of civil war, and she tells us how she even ended up there. This week, What You Have Heard Is True, the new memoir by Carolyn Forché. I’m the new producer of the podcast, Helena de Groot. Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. By what Pablo Neruda calls “the fires of our time.” We don’t write in an hermetically sealed chamber, we write out of a consciousness that’s formed by our time. And the art of close reading is a wonderful practice. He spilled many human ears on the table … He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass.Ĭarolyn Forché: Many people-many poets were very upset that I would write about such things and-Ĭarolyn Forché: Because poetry shouldn’t be political.Ĭarolyn Forché: We were always taught to close read and nothing mattered but what was on the page, and that’s all well and good.

The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table … The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night … The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.

(Recording of Carolyn Forché reading “The Colonel” plays) When she came back to the United States, Carolyn Forché published the poem that made her famous, “The Colonel,” about her visit to the home of one of these military leaders. Union workers, priests and nuns, farmers-anyone the military dictatorship saw as a danger. Others were found by the side of the road, with their bellies cut open and limbs hacked off. Helena de Groot: When Carolyn Forché was 27, she went to El Salvador.

What you have heard is true carolyn forche