Sherry Chandler

Yesterday at the Lexington History Museum, Carolyn Forché told us about the controversy that arose when she first published a group of poems that arose out of her experience in El Salvador, including the (in)famous “The Colonel.” Opinion then was polarized, as it was at the beginning of our current war, between those who thought poetry should be an instrument of radicalization and those who thought it should confine itself to flowers and contemplation. Neither side, she said, had an argument that was very nuanced.

And so she set out on what turned out to be a 13-year quest to find out what poets have actually written when they have been forced to live through the extremes of deprivation. The result was the 800-page anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W W Norton, 1993). The collection begins with the Armenian genocide and ends with Tiananmen Square.

She discovered that, outside the English-speaking world, most poets have been through deprivation of some kind. Here are some of the characteristics she discovered they have in common (I know I missed some; she was going fast and writing is a slow):

-None of them liked roosters, for some reason, whenever a rooster appears, it’s a bad sign
-They announce themselves and appeal to be believed
-They write of the compulsion to bear witness
-They write of fate as arbitrary
-They make an inventory of losses
-They write of the difficulty of forgetting
-They write of the difficulty of remembering
-They experience the self as fragmented; a split between past and present selves
-Early in the century, they wrote prayers
-Later in the century, they cursed or questioned God
-Toward the end of the century, God vanishes from their writing
-They experience time as altered, experience as a dream
-They address the dead
-They address Memory
-They address War
-They write of war’s horrors instead of its glories for the first time in history
-They speak of “the twentieth century” in a way that poets of previous eras did not
-Distinction between combatants and noncombatants is lost for the first time
-They see no bottom to evil
-They experience an internal and permanent exile
-Language is the one thing not lost, though it becomes fragmented in extremity

Carolyn Forché is one of the most vibrant and skilled speakers/readers I’ve ever heard. What she said and read yesterday will resonate for a long time.

An Elegy to Oscar, a Dead Cat

Damn’d be this harsh mechanick age
      that whirls us fast and faster,
And swallows with Sabazian rage
      Nine lives in one disaster.

I take my quill with sadden’d thought,
      Tho’ falt’ringly I do it;
And, having cursed the Juggernaut,
      Inscribe Oscarus fuit!

— Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This post is inspired by Charlie Hughes, though the car is a ‘62 Chevy, not a ‘53 Dodge.

Everybody, I hope, knows a little bit about H. P. Lovecraft, that writer of wordy horror stories. (He got paid by the word.) I am told that he loved cats so much that, if one went to sleep in his lap, he would not move until the cat did, though it meant sitting in a chair all night. That’s another of the “virtues” I once tried to emulate. I failed miserably to be miserable for cat’s sake.

Lovecraft also loved obscure and dangerous gods. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads: “Chthulu for president. Why settle for the lesser of evils?” Sabazius was a Phrygian diety, identified with Dionysus/Bacchus. I’m not sure why he would rage, unless the allusion is to the murderous madness of a Bacchanal.