Poetry meme

[lolaraincoat]

I've been revising my lecture notes on Central America during the Cold War, and that brought Carolyn Forché to mind. So this is her poem, which I will put behind a cut-tag. You are warned: it's gory and upsetting. Like Central American history, actually.

Comments

[elgoose]

Wow. Just wow.

[lolaraincoat]

Yeah.

[lapsedmodernist]

I used to have this poem hung up on my walls in college, I think for at least 3 or 4 years. Not sure why, as it wasn't my favorite of her poems, but I seemed to feel a need to reread it a lot, something I feel often with her work. Since I opened my gmail account in 2004 my email signature there has been the last last 7 lines of "Ourselves or Nothing" so I reread them multiple times a day, usually.

[lolaraincoat]

There was a point in my life - maybe a couple of months - in those years between college and grad school, when I just carried the book that this poem is in around with me everywhere. Read it on the subway over and over, read it at lunch ... and I think I still have most of "Ourselves or Nothing" by heart. It was one of the most powerful forces that pushed me into being a historian.

[fledgist]

That's a very powerful bit of verse.

[lolaraincoat]

Yeah, it is. She was working for a human rights group in El Salvador - Amnesty, maybe? - when she wrote it. It's also very powerful reporting.

[stillwell]

i remember this. so gut wrenching.

[lolaraincoat]

Yeah, that's the word. Gut wrenching.

[cordelia_v]

God, so brilliant and wrenching. The last line is just a gut punch.

I'm also bemused that we each chose the poems we did.

[lolaraincoat]

It's interesting, yeah. And sure enough I concluded today's lecture on Church-State Tensions in 20th C. Latin America with the death of Romero, and sure enough, I cried. A TA had to hand me a kleenex.