[Taft-Kaufman is an educator. In the following interview, Forché discusses her aims as a poet, her works-in-progress, and her experiences as a public speaker and political activist.]

[Taft-Kaufman]: Carolyn, you described your original experience in El Salvador as having created a "focused obsession" for you. Can you speak a little bit about that?

[Forché]: Well, I've discussed elsewhere at great length the conditions under which I went to El Salvador and what happened to me there. But to address the concern about the singular focus that emerged from that experience, I think it was highly personal for me, my response to the sense of obligation that I felt toward people that I had left behind there, people who had educated me and who were in very grave danger themselves. And because of the intricate complicity of my own government in those conditions, I felt a moral obligation to respond when I returned home. And I feel that there was a period in which I believed that American public opinion influenced foreign policy decision making. And as long as I believed that there was a direct relationship between American public opinion and foreign policy decision making, I continued to believe in the validity of speaking in this country of conditions in El Salvador. So I spoke for five years in universities, and churches, and synagogues, and Kiwanis Clubs, and community centers. And finally I realized … it was a slow realization … that I had said what I could say, that I had done what I could do, and I was very tired. I reached a point where I was unable to resuscitate myself, and this coincided with the period at which I met my husband again. We had met in El Salvador earlier in a refugee camp, but we met in New York when we collaborated on photographs and text for a book, El Salvador: work of thirty photographers, which was a collection of photographic work of 30 journalists from Europe, Latin America, and North America, and I was engaged to do the text for the work and became very interested in the relationship between text and photographs. I believed that poetry was the wrong form for the text, and I also came to realize that discursive prose was also wrong. I was not interested in writing an extended caption for the works nor did I want the photographic work to merely illustrate what the text was talking about, so I developed for my own use a form which I felt contributed something to the work without weakening the photographic intelligence of the work. Well, not weakening, but detracting from it. It was a series of prose vignettes in various voices. Those voices were actually retrieved from memory but transformed literarily. In other words, the text was going to be written and not spoken; and so, of course, as written language differs from spoken language, it was not going to be an attempt to imitate speech. But I wanted to create a kind of symphony of voices that in juxtaposition would somehow approach for me the complexity of the situation in El Salvador at that time. Various of them were arranged sequentially within the work, with photographs appearing between these different pieces. And I did that. And I understand that the kind of work that I do as a poet, as a writer, requires a measure of tranquillity and solitude or the work simply is not done. And living on the road such as I did and speaking in public participates in another kind of life entirely, what's been called the life of applause. And I wasn't interested in public performance at that time. I began to also understand something of the nature of the function of my speaking in public. It was an unfortunate disempowerment that would occur. I would be before the audience speaking as a voice of some authority on the region, and the members of the audience would listen to this, and I watched the process by which they would internalize a kind of … they would internalize a feeling of general despair of sorts, an idea that there was nothing that they themselves could do. And the distance between myself and the audience and my experience of their experience maintained this, and I began to see it as a disempowering activity that I didn't want to participate in any longer. I also did not want to participate in creating the illusion that if one, say, goes to an auditorium on a Thursday evening and hears someone speak about conditions in one country or another, and then has wine and cheese afterward with the person who is speaking and goes home to the life and the life does not change at all, that there is a kind of illusion-that one has done their part. And I began to question the value of informing people, or educating them, when the experience was a kind of commodification of that … that the education began to be something that certain people wanted to acquire. For example, I was lecturing at a preparatory school in the East, a very good preparatory school, and this school had recruited black South African students to come and had gone to some effort to bring them to the school and to provide them with a tuition-free American education of the highest quality. One of these black South African students, in particular, had been, over the Christmas break, detained and tortured. Because of the intervention of the school, he was subsequently released and permitted to return to school. The privileged students who gathered around him when they came to hear me … we were having a little coffee or something with the students then … one of the teachers mentioned to me, introducing me to the student, that he had been detained and this and that had happened, and the white students turned to him and then said, "Oh, tell us what happened to you. We want to know everything that happened to you." The black student became very shy and very afraid and ashamed, in a way, to be singled out, and didn't want to talk. And one of the white students said, "It's important for us to know." And I thought within myself, why? for what? So that this can be part of your educational experience, as much as the privilege of your very high quality education, as much as lacrosse is? In other words, that this boy's experience was viewed by the other students in a very innocent way as material for them to absorb and possess. Information that they would then have. It was a crisis for me to observe this … an internal crisis … and I began to enter a period of withdrawal, not in a sense from my own commitments, but a withdrawal into a more secluded time. I married; I became pregnant; I worked abroad. But I was very interested in entering fully into literary work again, and I had experienced a fragmentation within myself that had to do with what I believed about the authority of voice. I began reading some critical theory…. And I became interested in European deconstructivists. I was particularly interested in their work on holocaust testimony. That interest was life-long for me, but was heightened by my twelve year friendship with Terrence Des Pres who died a year ago. He had written a book called The Survivor, Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. And I found myself meditating on the holocaust and reading on the holocaust a great deal. I was profoundly influenced by Claude Lanzmann's work on Shoah. Yet when I approached the page, I found that the form that I had been writing in, which, for want of something better, I can call first-person lyric free verse narrative, was not sufficient to what I wanted to do on the page. And I had experienced something that was rather more fragmentary and something that, in a sense, was engaged constantly in an attempt to expose its own artifice and to interrogate itself. And so began the work on The Angel of History. And I've been working now for two years. The work is profoundly exhilarating. I'm trying to make a form which would push my work further, breaking open the forms I had been writing on before. So this work is visually very different on the page. And I've read it a few times at readings…. I've performed it a few times, and I find that its effect on the audience is also very different.

Can you be more specific about the visuals and the effect?

The work is in long lines, but not even lines. The breaks or pauses are between sections of it; the breaks and pauses are horizontal; the lines are not broken. This poetry establishes a rhythmic pattern, highly varied or otherwise or not, but these lines go all the way to the margin, and certain thoughts are completed and certain are not. There are intruding voices and interrupting voices and interrogating voices, and the work seems to float on the page. It's nonlinear.

No one authoritative voice, in other words.

Right. No one authoritative voice.

… that guides the reader.

That's correct.

No beginning, middle, and end.

No.

No closure.

It's very experimental. No closure. It began in me with a break with this idea of resolution, of closure. And I didn't know where it was going and I didn't know what it was becoming, but eventually it seemed to me that it had something to do with the 20th century and I was very influenced by Walter Benjamin, so the work begins with a Walter Benjamin quote from Illuminations. And that is the work from which the title derives, The Angel of History. So it's an exploration for me and an extension of concerns that I've probably had for a long time. I think the break, the silence…. I had written many, many notebooks during this silence, but I didn't want to publish poetry, and I didn't publish poetry. I haven't published a book since 1981.