Literary Birthday – 28 April – Carolyn Forché

Happy Birthday, Carolyn Forché, born on 28 April 1950.

Carolyn Forché Quotes

1. One can live without having survived.
2. A thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
3. Poetry begins in a not-knowing rather than a moral impulse.
4. Some writers whom I admire very much say that facts often have little to do with the truth. What I was trying to do with this piece, as I finally allowed it to be in The Country Between Us, was to acknowledge that something important had actually occurred. But the poem also contains a truth about the brutality of that situation which seems to reach deeply into people.
5. The heart is the toughest part of the body. Tenderness is in the hands.
6. We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shaping of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work.
7. Poetry is the voice of the soul, whispering, celebrating, singing, even.

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Country Between Us and In the Lateness of the World, winner of the American Book Award and finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. She edited the anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True, a devastating, lyrical, and visionary book about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. The book was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. In 2013, Forché won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Source for Image: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson

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