Tag: carolyn forche

“The Lost and Unlost Poetry and the irrevocable past”; CAROLYN FORCHE INTERVIEWED BY THE EDITORS of Poetry Magazine

Can the poetry of witness be a purely spiritual phenomenon? That is, can the dynamic that you’re describing in this essay, the permanent wounding of consciousness and language, occur from metaphysical, as well as physical, trauma?

If we think of the spiritual as a way of knowing, one can be wounded spiritually. Jean-François Lyotard would argue that the language of the Torah is permanently wounded by the experience of the divine. Jacob endures wrestling with the stranger, his angel. The slightest shock or event can send you from one thinking to another; trauma is said to occur when this shock is sufficiently strong as to overwhelm. If the experience of God is traumatic, it is because we meet with the incommensurate.

Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one (l’autrui). It is not to be mistaken for politicized confessionalism. The confessional is the mode of the subjective, and the representational that of the objective… In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.

Carolyn Forché, “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art” (via ecrituria)