For Immediate Release

Kathleen Willard
970-481-3864
kathleen.d.willard@gmail.com

March 26, 2024

Award-Winning Poet & Human Rights Advocate Carolyn Forché Reads at the Rialto Theatre to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Carolyn Forché

“It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.” asserts poet Carolyn Forché. The Loveland Poet Laureate Committee is hosting three events with award-winning poet and dedicated human rights activist.  In addition to her five books of poetry, she has written non-fiction and translated poetry. Her memoir  What You Have Heard is True was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Forché will share her ideas about the use of poetry as a tool for social justice and read her poetry to Loveland on Friday April 12^th and Saturday April 13^th at the Rialto Theater in Loveland. Tickets for both events are available at the Rialto Theatre Box Office or RialtoTheaterCenter.org.

Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history and is credited with coining the term the poetry of witness. Forché received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to El Salvador as part of Amnesty International, in time to witness their unfolding civil war.

While in El Salvador, she viewed inadequate health facilities that had never received the foreign aid designated for them; saw young girls who had been sexually mutilated; and learned of torture victims who had been beaten, starved, and otherwise abused. Her experiences found expression in The Country Between Us, which is one of the few poetry bestsellers.

“I tried not to write about El Salvador in poetry, because I thought it might be better to do so in journalistic articles,” she told Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone. “But I couldn’t—the poems just came.”

All of her life, she has advocated for the poetry of witness, which has inspired countless other poets to follow in her footsteps. A dozen years passed between the publication of The Country Between Us and Forché’s editing of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Matthew Rothschild in the Progressive called the poems in the anthology “some of the most dramatic antiwar and anti-torture poetry written in this benighted century.”

“The thought of witness proposes that we consider what is made present to us in certain poetic texts, what is opened up to us, transmitted to us. In this sense, it might resemble the face-to-face encounter and its attendant obligations,” Forché writes.

“If we read a poem as witness (and there are many other ways of reading), we open ourselves to another way of knowing. We read in response to an ethical imperative. We are not bound to read this way, of course, but if we do, we are responding to the poet’s call to the future, to a writing from the past that addresses the reader to come, addresses the one who will lift the corked bottle from the sea waves and read its message.”

On Friday April 12^th at 7PM, the Loveland Poet Laureate committee will host a private reception to thank our many local donors that made her visit to Loveland possible.

On Saturday April 13^th at 1:00 pm, Carolyn Forché will be interviewed by Windsor resident Evan Oakley.  Later in the evening at 7:00 pm, Carolyn Forché read from her books followed by a chance to ask questions and make comments. Her books will be available at all three events. All events will be held at the Rialto Theatre at 226 4^th Street in Loveland.

PHOTOS OF FORCHÉ AVAILABLE HERE:

https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/carolyn-forche