Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

So, you see it now as the culmination of an implicit building process, that you were not aware was actually happening. Can you describe how your 1981 work, which was, as a lot of people would say, political … although I think that's an artificial distinction … and I know certainly you feel that all work is political…. Can you see a through line between what you're doing now and what you were doing then? Can you articulate that through line?

Well, you see, the way that I composed my work has changed. I still recognize and accept that work as my own, and the person who composed that work is me in another form in an earlier version of myself. But even though with The Country Between Us I had been radically transformed in writing that work, the form that the work took was very conventional. There was nothing particularly transformative or evolutionary about it.

Despite the fact that there was "The Colonel" and….

But that's a prose poem, and it engages the imagination in a certain way. There's a single voice, and it really is not very interesting. It doesn't do anything. I began to feel that there was a certain kind of poem that I was writing, that my contemporaries were writing, and we were doing it well and less well; some of us were very good at it; some would grow fatigued and write this particular poem less well. And something that was probably very obvious to most people but wasn't obvious to me was that I began to notice that we were doing the same thing all the time. Well,… in other words … you know those little craft shops where you can learn to make figurines out of clay and paint them?…

Well, you get these little molds where you pour the plaster in and you peel the plaster off. And women learn that you paint the eyes a certain blue, you paint them sort of like paint-by-number figurines. And I didn't see much difference between that and what we were doing as poets. In other words, you could do that thing and you might do it very well but it still was that and you're not … there's no correspondence between the consciousness and the language. There's no pushing further; there's no exploration; there's no risk; there's no altering of possibilities; there's no extension. There's always a limit, but there's no extending of the limit. And so I began to realize that I didn't want to write that poem, necessarily. I didn't want to necessarily abandon it forever, but I wanted to see what else might happen.

And you've said that you've had different effects on your audience by performing pieces from this new work.

Well, the new work is very strange for the audience. The audience has to enter a different kind of receptivity for it. In other words, the poems that I used to write, and that many people write, are first person free verse narrative. One knows what to expect. There is a voice. There is a momentum of building of the voice. There is often an epiphany. There is usually a turn. There is a resolution. It is maybe sixteen lines or thirty-two lines or even one hundred lines, but basically the audience is led to the resolution.

And however startling or fresh the imagery, however compelling the resolution, the audience will like or not like the outcome. In other words, you can recognize a poem on the page at quite some distance, if every poem has the same presence on the page, the same arrangement, the same form. And in performing well … in reading the new work … the audience doesn't have the security of knowing how the poem is going to proceed. The audience has to become suspended because the voices intrude on one another, interrupt each other … the audience has to be prepared to make these leaps of interruptions continually … that will loop back. And they begin to get a kind of texture for what is going on … a feeling of the texture of the work, without the usual footholds … without the usual stepping stones.

… guidelines …

So my experience is that for a lot of people … at least they tell me … that they feel "suspended," or they feel like they just floated through something. The work corresponds to my own experience of consciousness at this time, and I have to trust it. It seems to have its own life, and it seems to have its own imperatives, and so I'm just following it.

What kinds of performance choices has it demanded, because I would imagine that you cannot perform it the same way you could perform a conventional poem.

No. In performing the conventional poem, I always felt that one should read expressively and should project and one should at best memorize the poem so that it could be delivered without burying the face in the book. And often readings are helped by the poet telling little anecdotes or stories between the poems, sometimes having to do with the poems. And so much did this become the case that many poets would simply explain each poem before they read it, and then go on to the next one. I still, for certain audiences, such as I will have tonight, do a certain amount of that in the beginning because they are unfamiliar with some of that work, and they do want to hear it, so I will do it. With the new work, I discovered that the less I say the better. The work has to stand on its own. Sometimes I warn the audience that it will not be what they have been accustomed to hearing, and that they will have to be prepared to become lost. And I sometimes say more than that, I elaborate a little, but I found that it's best that it be done without the scaffolding of these comments. And a certain amount of it, I suppose, resembles play rather than poem. So I attempt to provide a slight alteration for the voices so that they're separated for the ear, and without engaging in very much dramatization. And the voices are figures; they're not characters; they don't develop as characters, so I don't establish a character for them in the performance. I simply pause between them and allow certain tonalities to change so that they are distinct.

What is your goal for an audience, with these performances? What would you most like an audience to come away feeling and thinking? Do you want the pieces to be … such as it is sometimes called with post-modern drama … interrogative pieces? Can you talk a little bit about that?

I don't have an objective with regard to how the work is consumed. I don't believe that that is ever in the artist's control anyway. I suppose that at best, I mean it has been a very happy situation for me when people have described how the work has affected them … that they were able within a certain duration to experience another consciousness or another way of being conscious. I'm not sure what happens in an audience when they hear the book. But I don't think I could be aware of that. I know the work too well to be affected the way that people who don't know it would be. So, I can't duplicate it. I can only say that either a shock of recognition that this is how the mind feels at play with the relations between things—this is how the mind receives a speech … that would please me … or someone to say that they find it very fine and strange and not at all resembling something that they would have expected or anticipated. I suppose either response is a happy one for me. But I'm not writing for a particular purpose.

Would you say that you were writing for a purpose before with your poems?

No. I would say that I was completely unaware of that issue. I think I was writing a certain way because it was how I had apprehended poetry. In other words, I grew up in a certain period, and I received a certain education, which included a Master of Fine Arts in poetry, and the particular aesthetic concerns of that institutionalized education became my own, unquestioned. I never thought about moving beyond certain conventions that I had learned. I think that I, during a period of time in my twenties, accepted on faith this idea that my work was to find my voice, and that this voice was somehow within me, that it needed only to mature, that I had to locate it, as if it was lost. And then that I had to perfect it. And then I would speak with it. And I began to see a certain artificiality in that construct, and also it seemed to me to be … there was a falseness to the representation of self. The voice was actually a fictional utterance. Memory was relied upon heavily in this aesthetic, without the realization that memory is fictional. There was very little understanding of what was excluded by this voice. And developing this voice in the unquestioning way that I did, what seemingly distinguished one poet from another had largely to do with either sensibility or subject matter. And slowly I came to realize that poems were not about; they simply were. I began to try other prepositions. Poems were amid, or around, or near, or beyond certain subjects. And I began to understand that language would perhaps have an apparent or initiating subject but that poems were generally "about" something else altogether. And one of the things that began to bother me was this mention of sincerity,… you know, that poems would be judged as good or less good depending on the degree to which this artificial, fictional constructional voice seemed sincere, whatever that means. And the dangers in this particular form were dangers of sentimentality, of memory becoming falsified into nostalgia. And, of course, if the material for one's art was to be one's life, well … I felt that I could not continue to … I did not want to appropriate experience. I was reading George Bataille's Inner Experience, and realizing, of course, that all project[s were] an invasion of inner experience, and I didn't want any longer to have to live in such a way as to produce in material … to experience so as to return to the experience in the work and I believed elitist, too, that one should not endure the experience once in life and a second time in art. In other words, this form that I had been writing on heavily depended on things that were no longer reliable for me. So, I began to see,… well I suppose other people see this very easily and very early in their lives, but I didn't … the idea of what art can do, and that I did not want any longer to make clay figures, even very good ones. I wanted to break the figures. I wanted to go out into territory that was unfamiliar to me. I wanted something that seemed more … that seemed to correspond … not to represent consciousness…. But I was after equivalencies; I was after explorations of language, interrogations of language, understanding, of course, that there will always be limitations. But I wanted to produce something that would move, for me, move me forward out of that reliance upon voice and representation of self in that way. It's hard because I haven't really formulated these ideas, I haven't discussed them.

Would you say that your work in some ways … I don't want to say "resembles" since we're trying to get away from resemblances … but has echoes of the kinds of work of people like … and these are not poets … like Coover and Barthelme and some of the fiction writers who are people experimenting with forms….

Meta-fiction writers?

Right, meta-fiction writers….

Well, you go to … French modernists and you find fictional attempts to work narrative in other ways. I'm very interested in them. I've returned personally to Gertrude Stein and to Joyce, and a whole seventy-year conversation in poetic form that has occurred through certain experimental artists, through American surrealists and through objectivists, and I'm very interested in that evolution. I'm now doing a load of reading of that kind. Mostly, I'm also reading the philosophy of Geary, but not because of the work that I'm doing, but because of my own interests and curiosities. I'm not sure how much influence there is there, but you see, I think it came to be a crisis for me, the crisis for this voice, that I realized that if I could write something I could just as well write its opposite. I didn't want to falsify by use of this voice, by development of this voice and how this voice would exclude any other possibility. And I also became very suspect, well … you know … the role of being a North American witness in a Latin American situation. I was uneasy with my job, my role that Monsignor Romero had wanted me to do, which was … they more or less said, look, an American audience will listen to a North American poet. You resemble them. If we send a Salvadoran, no one will come. And it's true, to a degree, at least it was true then, that it was much easier for me to speak. So much so was this the case, that when I was at the Human Rights Congress in Toronto in 1981, the Amnesty International meeting, I was made chairman of the Latin America and the Caribbean by the writers from the Latin America and the Caribbean because they wanted a North American spokesperson. They believed that they would be listened to, that their concerns would receive more attention, if they were voiced by a North American. I argued with them, and they said, "This is our choice. We have elected you. We have come to this decision by consensus and we would like you to respect it." So I did, but it was very difficult. And I can't tell you, I mean there is a constellation of moving forces, of entities that have influenced this move, this decision that has evolved over a long period of time.

Does the role of metaphor change when you make such a big leap into a different area?

Metaphor for me changes in extremity. For example, I'm now interested in the idea of historical markers, of certain images, of signed languages that are … that signify whether or not there is an interpreter. In other words, for example, a bullet hole in a piece of cloth remains a marker of a bullet regardless of whether the apprehender knows that a bullet passed through the cloth. In other words, its nature as a sign of the bullet does not change just because the apprehender does not realize.

I think that the nature of metaphor became problematic with the historical rupture of the holocaust, because, for example, you see, the ashes of the chimneys of the extermination camps are not figurative, and they can never be. And in a certain constellation of images having to do with rail lines, ashes, chimneys, crematoria, you are not other than in the holocaust, and they have become historical markers. Now, with an historical marker what happens is that I began to perceive things in a kind of web of indeterminacy. In other words, for example, I read "The Colonel" poem, and these severed ears …

"The Colonel" poem which comes from your experience in El Salvador …

Right. I'm using this as an example. I read it and the severed ears, even though there is a little attempt with having the ears actually still be able to hear things, to engage them as figurative, they resist the figurative because they are actual. Now what happens when people hear the poem, if they are affected by it in a way that they enter into and accept this occurrence, they are then responsible for that information; they become witnesses as well; they are marked by the poem. If someone wants to resist the poem and question its authenticity, etc., there is an exertion of resistance, of anger, of whatever, they are also marked by their avoidance of it.

So people become historical markers as well.

Yes. And witnesses create other witnesses, and it's infinite.

And this involves what you've said in the past about the need for a poet, in the twentieth century, to be a poet of witness.

Yes. We are responsible for everything we hear and everything we see, and we in turn can make others responsible, as well. Let me give you another example. A friend of mine is working closely on some scholarship with a man whose parents survived Auschwitz. In Auschwitz it became very important for them to be punctual, to obey orders absolutely promptly. Part of the constellation of reasons why they might have survived had to do with their fear of today. They had to act always in a very quick fashion. As a result, they gave birth to a son, and in the United States, the son rebelled against this severe preoccupation and obsession with punctuality, and he became always a person who procrastinates and delays. Tony has a hard time getting his work done with this person because the person makes a religion of procrastination. When Tony understood where this tendency came from, Tony realized that the parents had been marked by the Nazis in this regard. They had, in turn marked their son, by his aversion to this punctuality. Now Tony is marked by Auschwitz because of the difficulty in their collaboration. So you see, it's an infinite kind of thing. That's one example that's experiential and not literary. But I began to see … for example, people ask me "Does poetry have any effect, politically or otherwise?" Everything has an effect. Everything goes out into this web. It's like a humming web of interrelations, and it would be arrogant of us to try to suppose that we could track its activity through the web, but it will have an activity in the web, as everything does….

Carolyn Forché and Jill Taft-Kaufman, in an interview in Text & Performance Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 61-70.