Poetry

Poem as trace, poem as evidence

Political and social circumstances pervade our experience, our work and art, and determine the extent of agency we can exercise. It is difficult if not impossible to separate the personal or private from the social and political. Similarly, it is difficult to create or understand art out of this context.

Carolyn Forché writes and introduces readers to poetry, which emerges from themes and issues that can not be defined as public or private; as political or personal. Her work emerges from a tradition of poetry in which political circumstances pervade. She uses the term poetry of witness that describes the space between the public and the personal.

Α) Carolyn Forché from The Country Between Us

“There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.”

Β) From Carolyn Forché, “Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,” American Poetry Review 22:2 (March-April 1993), 17

‘Poetry of witness presents the reader with an interesting interpretive problem. We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between “personal” and “political” poems – the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive, even when necessary. The distinction between the personal and the political gives the political realm too much and too little scope; at the same time, it renders the personal too important and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of the individual.

We need a third term, one that can describe the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. Let us call this space “the social.” ………………………. ……………… But perhaps we should not consider our social lives as merely the products of our choice: the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.

By situating poetry in this social space, we can avoid some of our residual prejudices. A poem that calls us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confession, by its consequences, not by our ability to verify its truth. In fact, the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence. As such, there is nothing for us to base the poem on, no independent account that will tell us whether or not we can see a given text as being “objectively” true. Poem as trace, poem as evidence’