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Information, Space & Time: Carolyn Forche

Poet Carolyn Forche

http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/24813_SYMPOSIUM%20FORCHE.mp3

Mika Perrine: Good morning. I'm Mika Perrine, Director of Creative Writing, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to this morning's keynote speaker, the poet, Carolyn Forche. In his opening presentation on Wednesday, President Kimpton discussed the concept of the artist in transition. Moving from the more traditional role of creator to a transitional role as communicator, and interpreter and beyond, to a transformational role as a healer, activist and collaborator. I can think of no one who better exemplifies this transformational role of the artist than the poet, Carolyn Forche. The award winning author of four collections of poetry and editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Against Forgetting. As you can see from the bio in your program, Carolyn is far more than simply a creator. She is a poet of witness, a traveler, a translator, a visionary, a deep listener, a weaver of voices. As the writer, Dana Savage, has put it, "Carolyn Forche shows how people survive in an unbearable world." But I would argue that she goes beyond this, showing us not only how to survive, but how to love, how to praise, how to find words for the unspeakable and compassion for one another even in the midst of darkness and sorrow. Carolyn joins us from Georgetown University where she is the Lannan visiting professor of poetry and professor of English. Her current writing project is a memoir of her years in El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa and France that she is hoping to complete during her stay here at Interlochen. Tonight from 6-8:00 pm, she will be signing books in the Stone Lobby. Feel free to come, purchase a book with your student id and get it signed during dinner this evening. Carolyn will also be taking questions at the end of this morning's session. Please feel free to be tweeting your questions throughout her talk. I'm sure that those of you who attended Carolyn's session in the Writing House yesterday afternoon can already attest to the transformative power of her presence. It is truly an honor to have her here for this Symposium. Please join me in giving a warm, Interlochen welcome to Carolyn Forche.

Carolyn Forche: Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you so much for inviting me to the 50th anniversary of your school and to this symposium. I particularly want to thank President Jeffrey Kimpton for his vision in putting this symposium together. I have seen a lot of symposia and conferences in my life, and this is one of the most exciting that I have ever seen. I'm really honored to be in this company. Thank you and thank your faculty - anyone who invented this. Thank you.

I also want to thank Billy Childs, Sheryl Connelly and Steven Goodman who preceded me here giving keynote addresses. It's a little daunting to follow them. They began with their stories, and I would like to begin with mine.

I am from Michigan. I was born in Detroit. I'm the eldest of seven children. My father was a tool and die maker. When I was growing up, there were no writers living in my neighborhood and no poets either. In fact, I never saw a living poet or writer, and the books in my library were mostly by dead poets and writers as were the books that we were assigned to read in school. All dead. Because I was always writing and scribbling little stories and poems and making up things in notebooks and journals, one day I decided I might be one of the only, if not the only living writer, maybe one of the few living writers, left in the world. That was a weird thing to think, but I suppose when you're seven you can think that.

Because I grew up in a family that wasn't particularly well off I didn't know if it was going to be possible for me to go to college. I wanted to go, but I didn't grow up in a community where anyone went to college. President Johnson, during his administration, created the Great Society program, and in that program, gave grants and inexpensive government student loans for people to go to college. That is how I got there, and I'm very grateful to him for that. When I got to college I knew I wanted to be a writer. You couldn't yet study creative writing in college. So, I moved around in different disciplines and tried to find something. I knew that I had to make a living. I knew that poetry probably wasn't going to be the way that I would do that. I read about the biographies of a few poets who had been physicians, and so I decided perhaps I should become a physician. I always wanted to save people. I started off in pre-med and then I bounced around because I wasn't any good in organic chemistry which is the gate-keeping course for all things in medicine. When I was a little kid my idea of saving people was to become an ambulance driver, and if I couldn't work on them in the hospital, I could get them there in time. I had a lot of really crazy ideas, and I changed my major five times. When you get to the university, don't do that if you can help it. I accidentally majored in international relations. By that I mean it was an interdisciplinary major, and I took enough courses in all of the different disciplines to wind up an international relations major.

I went back home to my father in southeast Michigan and he said, "what are you going to do with that," apprehensively. I really didn't have any idea and in this I am connecting to Sheryl. I didn't know what I was going to do or be. I thought maybe I would like to go into the Peace Corps or Vista, which was a program like the Peace Corps in the United States at that time. Even that I thought would require some resources and some money, and that seemed a little bit hopeless. My college teacher then told me about a Master of Fine Arts programs in creative writing, in poetry and fiction, and she guided me into one of them. I spent two years as a graduate student writing my first book of poems in the basement of an English department building. It was the most incandescent two years. I was for the first time with my cohort as you are already. I was with friends my own age who loved what I loved and did what I did and cared about poetry and writing. I finished the manuscript and it was called Gathering the Tribes, and there were poems about my grandmother, Anna, from former Czechoslovakia. I talked a bit about her yesterday. I wrote poems about the wilderness and nature.

I finished the book and I got maybe the last teaching job in the United States given to a poet who hasn't published a book yet. This was at San Diego State University. I drove across the country and started teaching at San Diego State University, and I discovered that I loved teaching. I loved it. I never knew that I would because I was taught by very strict nuns who were pretty mean some of the time, and I didn't want to be a mean, strict nun when I grew up. So, I didn't think that I wanted to teach.

There I was teaching at San Diego State University, and I got a phone call that my first book had been chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. I couldn't believe it. I danced around my office. I ran out into the parking lot all by myself. I didn't know anyone there yet. There was this sea of cars because it was a commuter school, and I announced to the parking lot, and the cars, and the clouds above the cars, that I had won the Yale prize. I said this outloud. There was a man in the parking lot. I didn't know he was there, and he heard me. He came up and introduced himself and said he was married to a woman whose mother was a poet, and I must be Carolyn Forche, and he was my new colleague in the English department. Well, I'm making a long story short. I went to his house because he said that he wanted to introduce me to his wife and we would have champagne and celebrate. I met her and she and I became friends. She would tell me, "my mother's a poet, my mother writes poetry", and I would let this all go because I was afraid that if I read her mother's poems and didn't think they were any good what would I say.

So, one day it was pouring rain and I didn't want to get wet, and not wanting to get wet in this pouring rain storm changed my life. It's not the big decisions that you are going to make, it's the very tiny ones. Little things that you don't think are going to matter at all are going to make huge differences. That is why you have to be careful with all of the thousand little decisions you make everyday instead of worrying about the big ones. I wound up inside Mya's house for much longer than I thought and she took out all of her mother's poetry books published in languages, many languages, and none in English. I stared at the pile of books and I opened one and looked through the Spanish versions and I said, "My god, Mya, your mother is a poet." And she said, "well, that's what I have been telling you." I said, "Why aren't there any in English?" She said, "well, no one has ever translated her into English."

I was having trouble with my writing. I had finished my book and I was a little blank. I didn't know what to do next or where my work was going to go. Poems weren't coming. I would set down and try, but they weren't coming. So, I thought, I'll translate. I'll translate Mya's mother's poetry and that will help me.

I went to Spain for the summer with Mya and stayed with her mother. I learned so much that summer at her mother's side. She taught me about the conditions out of which her poetry arose. Out of 50 years of military dictatorship in El Salvador. Out of military dictatorship in the Somoza, family dictatorship in Nicaragua. Military dictatorship in Guatemala. She wrote about the disappeared, the imprisoned. She wrote about the brutalities of military regimes, and in translating her poems I had to learn something about what she meant by everything in them. I finished the book and came back to the United States a little depressed because suddenly I thought that I need to do something. I need to do something, but I don't know what it is. There was something more that I felt that I had to do, and it was something that I wanted to do about the things that I had learned about. One day an unexpected visitor came to my house. A relative of Claude Bellelichtea who still lived in El Salvador. He was there to visit me for a few days with his daughters and to make an urgent appeal for me to come during my Guggenheim Fellowship which I had just received. He wanted me to come to El Salvador because he said, war is coming and I think it would be a good idea for a poet to come to El Salvador and learn as much as she can about the country so that when the war comes the poet from the United States could return to the United States and tell the American people what is happening, what caused it, what's needed, etc. I asked why he would want a poet to do this, and he responded, "Well yes. Poets, you know, they are very important." I had to explain to him a little bit about why I thought he needed a journalist or a television personality or someone who actually could talk to the American people. I said, "we poets are a little bit of a fringe element in our societies. We're Bohemian. We go to mental hospitals. We have problems. Some of us kill ourselves. You don't really want a poet, and Americans don't take us very seriously." He responded, "They don't? Well we take our poets seriously. We either send them to diplomatic posts or we put them in jail. We take them seriously." I responded, "I don't think Americans do," and he said, "Well, we'll just have to change that."

I thought the man was a little quixotic. A little Don Quixote perhaps. I didn't change my mind about that as I got to know him. I have to tell you - no one thought I should go to El Salvador for my Guggenheim Fellowship. No friend. No member of my family. In fact, everyone tried to talk me out of it. They thought it was the worst idea in the world. I was going to get malaria. I was going to get killed. It wasn't a good idea. Besides, where is El Salvador? It was a dusty country down in Central America. No one could even locate it on a map, and it wasn't in the newspapers. Why are you going there? I didn't know why. Many people on this stage have talked about following their heart and their passion, and I had a feeling that something in the universe was opening a door and saying do you want to come? Do you want to see? You, in your heart and mind for all of your life have wanted to know about the world, and suffering, and to do something. As you have often said in your mind that you want to do something. Come. And everyone said, no don't. Don't go. So I went. Because, I said, if I don't go through this door, I will never be able to tell myself that I would have done something if I had an opportunity. I had not had an opportunity, but here was one.

I was 27 years old. I didn't know what I was getting into. My Spanish wasn't very good. I was terrified of what was to come, but I wanted to learn. So I went and arrived on January 4, 1978. The war got ahead of my friend and guide, Leonel Gomes Vitas. It came earlier than he thought. Events speeded up. Many people were being killed, and it was a really terrible situation.

I came home for the last time on March 16, 1980 - just one week before the assassination of Archbishop Romero. He was killed while saying Mass in El Salvador. He had asked me to leave the country the week before when we were having supper in the Convent kitchen. I protested that I didn't want to leave and I thought he should leave too, etc. I was now home and I wrote my second book of poems and published it. It was received as a terrible mixture of poetry and politics by some people. They criticized the whole role of poetry and criticized me that I shouldn't be out and about writing about these contemporary issues, especially political events. Politics has no place in poetry and so on and so forth. So people started to think about the role of poet in society.

I am now going to tell you about something much more recent, and I wrote something for you for this particular occasion. These are things I have never said to anyone or an audience before. I want to say that this past year I travelled farther and more often than ever before in my life of travel since the age of 27. The journey took me to a country that very deeply marked my own generation, and then to a country digging out of the ruins and the rubble of an uprising. Next I went to an island country celebrating it's 60th anniversary of independence from Britain and then to a country on the verge of economic collapse. Poetry took me to all of these places distinct in space, but also in many ways, distinct in time.

I would like to begin this morning by sharing with you what happened, what I learned and why despite everything I feel a measure of hope. This past April I went to Libya - a country emerging from an uprising that overthrew the brutal 42 year dictatorship of Omar Kadafi. The ruins left by NATO airstrikes on Tripoli had not yet been cleared. Vast swaths of the city lay in rubble and this is because vast swaths of the city were occupied by Omar Kadafi's residences, compounds and military installations which are what NATO hit. At that time there was no police force in Tripoli. No garbage pick up. No postal service. No government except a provisional government whose task it was to prepare for elections in Tripoli. There was a provisional ministry of culture in that government, and they made a decision, which I have never seen made before, in the war's aftermath to hold their first public, civic event in Tripoli after the war - an open air, international poetry reading. I was among 22 poets invited. Most were from Arabic speaking countries. Most were in Libya for the first time. Among our Libyan hosts were poets and writers who had been at one time or another imprisoned by Omar Kadafi. The first thing I noticed was that posters of our readings had been slapped on the bullet ridden walls all over town. They covered up the rubble. They were on the stones. They were everywhere. They covered up the bullet holes. The next thing I noticed was that there were spent shell casings from bullets all over the ground. In the streets and the market and everywhere one looked. In the days that followed, one of our poets even picked up from the earth a box of live ammunition.

The Libyans welcomed us warmly in the hotel and the streets and the cafes and especially that night at that reading. Hundreds came to the arch to sit on folding chairs, and on each chair they had placed a booklet with our poems translated into Arabic. There were not enough chairs for the people that gathered. Children lined up on the walls around this particular arched plaza. Men and women, women veiled and unveiled, young and old, crowded around the arch, into the adjacent streets, as far as the eye could see there were people. They had put up large speakers, like rock concert speakers for us near the podium. The Libyan television crews came and set up their cameras. Al Jazeera came and set up its cameras and a dozen microphones were placed on the podium for the readers of poetry. I had never seen any of that happen before. Armed militia wearing camouflage and various armed uniforms were everywhere, and we were assured that they were there to provide our security and had volunteered to do that. They smiled at us and gave us thumbs-up signs and peace signs. On the walls were graffiti having to do with victory over the dictatorship. One read in English, "hold your heads up - you are free Libyans." Several English speaking Libyans approached and expressed their gratitude to the United States and to NATO for helping them to defeat Kadafi.

I had given only a few open-air readings in my life and never near a lighted Roman arch to an audience who might not understand my language. "You will be fine," the poet Zakaria Mohammed said to me. He assured me that it would be good, and I was asked to begin my reading with the poem, The Colonel. It was written 34 years ago. A poem written out of that experience that I had in El Salvador as a human rights activist. I protested that that poem was too old, but they insisted and assured me that the poem translated into Arabic rather well. All right then I thought, but the poem includes an obscenity, a four-letter word. I didn't know if it was all right to use this word in public here in Libya. "We have our own version of this word," they said, "so don't worry."

I will read it to you now as I read it under the stars that night, and I ask your forgiveness for the obscenity, but I'm quoting someone else.

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

San Salvador
May 1978

When I finished the poem there was a murmur through the crowd and I heard automatic weapons fire into the air. The crowd seemed to react to the poem in a way I had not expected, with an enthusiasm and interest. It was only later that I was told that they heard the poem about the El Salvadoran Colonel as a poem about the former Colonel Kadafi. They translated the sense of the poem, not only into Arabic from English, but into their time and their place.

I read several more poems and took my seat. During the rest of the readings I heard more automatic gunfire and I must have been looking around a bit anxiously, because the Libyan man seated next to me finally leaned over and said they are firing into the air because they liked the poem. Another first for me. I had never heard AK rifle fire as a form of applause.

After the readings, the audience members crowded around us, shaking our hands, hugging us, some of them with tears in their eyes. "This means we are a normal country," one woman said to me. "That we can have a poetry reading like this and you will come means that we are finally a normal country." Another first. I had never heard it claimed that poetry readings conferred normalcy in human communities. That hosting a poetry reading confirmed the possibility of a future for the city of Tripoli.

Months later and recently, our ambassador to Libya was murdered in Benghazi, another Libyan city, along with his bodyguards. This was an act that horrified the people of Libya as it horrified us. An act all too frequently committed in the ruins of war's aftermath and in the political labors of a country giving birth to itself for the first time as a parliamentary democracy. In a strange way I feel that, at least in Tripoli, they will succeed. I feel this because of that night when the city gathered to hear poetry in the open air.

Last March I travelled to Hanoi and Tuy Hoa, Vietnam with a group of American veterans of that war to be welcomed by a group of Vietnamese veterans of the same war who fought on the other side. These soldiers 20 years ago together built the first bridge between their countries in the war's aftermath, quietly making contact with each other through the poetry and stories they were writing about their war experience on both sides. The US government had proposed an embargo on trade with Vietnam after the war and cut off all formal diplomatic relations. Contact between our countries was officially cut off. At the same time the new government of the United Vietnam was deeply suspicious of the United States. Kevin Bowen, a poet and director of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and it's Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston led this effort. First to provide artificial arms and legs to those who had been maimed in Vietnam during the war, and then to have poetry and stories written by Vietnamese veterans translated into English.

He invited a few of his former combat enemies to come to the United States and give readings. The two governments quietly looked the other way. Kevin Bowen, Bruce Weigl, Yusef Komunyakaa and others, combat veterans all, then made what they called a full circle journey back to Vietnam to walk the hills and fields and rice paddies of their violent youth. It was then discovered that the United States possessed in an archive in Washington papers and small notebooks confiscated from the corpses of dead Vietnamese soldiers during the war. It was thought that such papers were supposed to be removed from anything you found in a corpses pocket because they might have military importance. They might have logistical information or battle plans. They were all sent to Washington to be processed. The documents were in Vietnamese so none of the soldiers who confiscated them knew for sure what was important and what wasn't. All were sent to Washington for analysis and eventually they were all warehoused in an archive. Kevin Bowen and the other veteran poets had these boxes opened and when the captured documents, as they were called, were translated it was discovered that most of them contained poetry written by Vietnamese soldiers - love poems to their sweethearts, poems of longing and despair, poems about nature, life and death. The American veteran poets persuaded the United States Government to sent these documents back to Vietnam as a gesture of goodwill. They were received with gratitude and conferred as an unexpected benefit. The documents helped the Vietnamese to solve their own missing in action problem, their own MIA problem. Soldiers missing in action and never accounted for. Soldiers who could not technically be pronounced dead on the field of battle. The documents were returned to those soldiers' families who could now know the truth about their loved ones.

Many more exchanges were arranged between the writers and poets. I had been working with veterans at the Joiner Center during the summers, and I remember one night especially when the Vietnamese writers cooked their specialties in Kevin's kitchen while the American veterans grilled chicken, steak and hamburgers on the grill in the backyard. After, they all played basketball on Kevin's half-court which he had set up in the backyard, and Kevin later titled his first poetry book, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong.

The bridge between the two countries was sturdier now and had been crossed many times by these poets and writers. Later, official relations and trade began to be normalized, but it was the poets who went first - who crossed when the bridge was still invisible and made of words.

This year was the 20th anniversary of those tentative steps. The Vietnamese Writers Association invited us back because they wanted to honor Kevin Bowen and his fellow poets and writers formally to reach across the horrors of that war, the years of that war and celebrate the peace that had been achieved through the strength of the poets' bridge.

I had never been to Vietnam. It was for me a place where my first husband and my childhood friends fought, were wounded, and died in a war I opposed as a young woman - marching in the streets with my fellow students, carrying our signs, intellectually uncertain of the war's political dimensions, but feeling in our hearts that it was wrong and realizing to our horror that our government was not telling us the truth as has now been substantially revealed.

During our visit, we read our poems to many Vietnamese audiences, visited Buddhist temples and cemeteries of the war dead. Cemeteries of the 10,000 graves of which there are many. A sea of gravestones all the same size like our Arlington National Cemetery, but grey rather than white stones, with incense sticks burning and many pots of chrysanthemums. We walked in the now peaceful fields of the former American bases and battlefields - Khe Sanh, Thon Khe Tri and the former demilitarized zone. We traveled all the way to the Laotian border. The poets relived their experiences again and were comforted by their Vietnamese counterparts who gave them endless cups of tea, pots of rice, fish and delicacies, bowls of pho - a scented broth over rice noodles.

Standing in one place or another, a seemingly innocuous place near a tree or a stone, one or another of the poets would suddenly grow quiet or burst into tears. It wasn't over and it will never be over. We don't live after such experiences as war, but rather in their aftermath wherein the past is always present, always with us, but we go on toward our future and it goes with us. That sense of past and present converging happens in many poems. In a sense poems can be ghosted language imprinted by extremity, carrying within it in resonant images, darker human suffering.

I am often asked about the role of the writer and poet in the United States, his or her relation with the public world, and what is the responsibility of the poet. I think that this has been changing somewhat. It began with the fatwa, I think, issued against Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses. The writers were asked to rally around and announce that we are all Salman Rushdie, and wore buttons on our lapels that said we are all Salman Rushdie. We stand with Salman Rushdie. You can't kill him just for writing a book. Not everyone wanted to put that pin on their lapel. Some people were afraid to do it. They didn't want to have fatwas issued against them.

Later, the same year, the pro-democracy movement was crushed at Tiananmen Square in China, and the poet, Bei Dao, who was in Berlin at the time was blamed for the uprising because some of his poems were carried on banners at Tiananmen Square. In former Czechoslovakia, the playwright Vaclav Havel, who was three times imprisoned for criticizing totalitarian regimes, there ended the momentous year with sleigh bells and candlelight in Wenceslas Square and the poet, Vaclav Havel, being carried on the shoulders of his countrymen toward the castle to become the president of their new republic. Bei Dao began teaching first in Sweden and then Denmark and Germany. Salman Rushdie was offered the protection of Scotland Yard. Vaclav Havel was invited to address a joint session of the United States Congress. He said some interesting things there and people kept commenting after his speech of how peculiar and strange it was to hear that sort of language in the US Congress. I thought about it. Why did they think this was so strange? Vaclav Havel is a writer. He wrote the speech himself. A committee didn't write it. Managers didn't tell him what to put in it. There were no focus groups. Nobody's finger was in the wind telling him maybe you should say this, maybe you shouldn't say that. So, he said what he really believed. He said we are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us and it's environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous mega-machinery that we have created for ourselves no longer serves us, but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all of our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country and so on. Responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged. This is why, Vaclav said, "I ultimately decided after resisting for a long time to accept the burden of political responsibility. I am not the first, nor will I be the last intellectual to do this. On the contrary, my feeling is that there will be more and more of them all the time. If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness than it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics under an alleged need to be independent." He then praised the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. In closing he had this to say, "History has accelerated. I believe that it will once again be the human spirit that will notice this acceleration. Give it a name and transform those words into deeds."

This brings me to the question of space, and time, and information which hinges on the acceleration of the velocity of human experience. We know that technological developments are double-edged. In the sense that they enable and disable certain human possibilities. The speed of communicative technology, the speed at which we are bombarded with information and imagery, the speed with which we are expected to process it has eroded our ability to sustain the contemplation so necessary to the creative act. We experience a certain skittishness flitting from website to website, link to link through the labyrinth of social media at twittering speed. We are grateful that we can look up any fact, translate any word at cyberspeed. We enter this luminous web of interconnection and gain information at a keystroke. We live in the path of a tsunami of such information - data, statistics, but does this grant us knowledge and wisdom which require assimilation and judgment?

I think of writing creatively as a means of retrieving knowledge, irretrievable by other means. Composing poems and writing stories is a meditative, spiritual act. It requires a capacity to sustain contemplation, to be attentive to all that is about us and to hold within ourselves an awareness that we are here in our living moment between unknown realms before our births and after our deaths. We are a flickering blaze of light between those two unknowns. We speak through art to the millennial of artists who came before us, and the art we make will send its messages to the human future. Human curiosity about our predecessors and care for our descendents is a collective accomplishment. Art is what has been left behind and art is what we will leave to the world to come. We study the past almost exclusively through art.

Painters remember this: you study the same moon as the painters of Shoval. Poets: the wine dark seas of Homer are still your seas. If we retain our capacity for meditative awareness, languages of art which allow us to speak through time will not be lost. The abilities of which I speak might be under threat in our time and might wither without practice. The slow solitaire engagement with music and word, paint and light, with our bodies in space and time that is the precondition of making art might not only preserve our capacities as artists but as humans possessed with intuitive intelligence and an inner life.

Advances in technology have already revolutionized our collaborative capacities - our abilities to simulate, combine and juxtapose. We can render objects musically visible and interact with holograms of the dead. Publication and distribution is now instantaneous and within our means. Film making is within a video camera's handheld reach. Disciplines will translate to other disciplines and the arts may coalesce into a branching form of human expressivity in an area of global conversation and collective art making. Artists may, thus, contribute their visions to the most pressing need of the epic, that of saving the biosphere of earth.

This is the challenge of your generation. You bear it as no other generation has before you. You may be the most important generation that has ever lived on earth. I want to make the usual joke of saying, "no pressure," but I don't mean it. The sooner you come to embrace the work to be done, the more possible the future will be.

I would like to say a few parting words to put one more something into the rock sack you have been packing all of your lives, especially during your years at Interlochen. This rock sack holds all the books you have ever read and all the films you have ever seen, all the conversations you have had, the languages you have learned, the arts you have mastered - everything. It holds everything. Everything you need. It might seem like a hodgepodge to you. You might dump it out and say "who am I, why do I know disparate things?" I thought the same things. Why did I study Spanish? Why did I work in hospitals after school? I used everything in El Salvador. Everything I had ever learned I needed there. When I was learning them some of them didn't make sense. Sometimes I wasn't paying attention. I didn't understand that it was all going to be important in the end.

In the beginning of my talk I mentioned two other countries, one on the verge of economic collapse and the other celebrating an anniversary. The first country was Greece which I visited last year. I spent time in Syntagma Square where students and workers were camping and holding teach-ins about the economic collapse. The next night we were taken to meet with the students of the best university in the town in a rooftop restaurant. Everyone was beautifully dressed. They were lovely, lovely students. I thought I would hear something a bit different from them about the crisis and about the people in Syntagma Square. So, I confronted them after we talked about poetry. "What do you think about Syntagma Square in all of this"? And they said, "Oh, we are there every night. That is our future. We are with the people of Syntagma Square. We go every night." I wasn't expecting that, to hear that answer, and it gave me a lot of hope.

Finally I went to Jamaica for a literary festival called Calabash. It is held every other year and is organized by the wonderful poet, Kwame Dawes, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Jamaica. Kwame brings poets to Jamaica from all over the world. The family of Perry Henzell who directed the film, The Harder They Come, about the great reggae singer, Jimmy Cliff, hosts the festival and funds it. They put up the largest white tent you have ever seen. The kind they use for wedding receptions. It overlooks the Caribbean Sea. People come from all over the Island and a thousand people attend readings. You wouldn't believe this, but when you begin to read it is utterly quiet. When my turn came to read, I thought I need to tell them something. I told them about the reading in Libya. I told them about the people of Libya under the stars, and the rifle fire in the air, and I told them about the students on the roof and I told them about Vietnam, and I told them about everything I had seen that year. They stood up and gave an ovation for the people of Libya, and the people of Vietnam and they felt all connected to them through the holding of poetry readings in the open air.

I leave you with this. It is not the big decisions that will make the difference in your life. The smallest decisions will be the important ones. You will bump into a stranger in the street and he or she will become your partner. You will meet someone at an event you almost didn't attend and she will send you on the path that will lead you to your life's work. Looking back it will all seem accidental and marvelous as if it had been perfectly planned, and it was. It was planned by your heart's desire. By saying yes, by following your passion with courage and love. Remember that you, and I have to say this, you are not consumers. You are citizens of the republic and citizens of the world. You will be alright. I have faith in you.

I will close with a couple of lines of poetry that close off a poem called The Ghost of Heaven.
All who come
All who come into the world
All who come into the world are sent.
Open your curtain of spirit.

Happy anniversary Interlochen.

Ms. Perrine: Thank you Carolyn. This is a question that I think will be relevant to a lot of you. How can we as arts students in many disciplines be politically meaningful like you are?

Ms. Forche: Don't go to dangerous countries, please. You already are what you represent in your daily life, the witness you bear, when you challenge people about their views, when you go home and talk to your parents, when you talk to neighbors. And you will talk to many people in your lives. You have to keep pushing on all that opposes everything that we would like to stand for. You don't have to worry about putting political messages into your work. It is not necessary. Your work with be suffused with your deep sensibility. Sensibility is politically aware, is environmentally aware, is mentally aware, is aware of social justice. It will be in your work automatically. You don't have to worry about this, and it will speak to other people. You have to work with your heart. Someone said this on the stage during this symposium, you have to reach the heart. I think it may have been Andrea. If you reach the heart, you reach the mind.

I remember when I was talking about El Salvador with audiences, I never really took a side explicitly. I just described what I saw and what I felt about it, and people in the audience then could feel that thing and be moved and then they start to think on their own. I don't think you need to worry about how you will be active because, you see, your path is going to be revealed to each of you. You are already on it. You are already getting ready for it. It's going to come. You have to stay open, be courageous and say yes when someone opens the door. Go. Even if everyone tells you not to. Even if I tell you not to if you email me and tell me what crazy thing you are going to do and I say no. Go.

Ms. Perrine: Why do you think poetry isn't as bold in America as it is in other countries?

Ms. Forche: You know I have wondered that for a long time, but I do think that it is now changing. There is Andrea's poetry. There is slam poetry. There are all kinds of new performance poetry and new engagement with audiences happening. I think it is actually affecting the poets who write for the page. I have noticed a change in the last ten years. I don't get criticized anymore for being political. No one even says anything about it anymore. A lot of people are writing poems against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are taking all kinds of positions that they didn't do before. I think it is changing. I don't know if it is apparent yet, but I think so. If you follow poetry, I think you will see this. If you go to poetry events and readings, you will begin to see what I think I am seeing. I think, I don't want to quote Bob Dylan, but yes, I think "the times are changing". Yes, they are. They have to or else we won't survive.

Your generation is very interesting to me. It is engaged and concerned and awake and clear. I have been teaching for 35 years. I have seen lots and lots of waves of young people and they have all been really wonderful to teach. But there is something different now. I thought, oh, they are here. They are here just in time. What kept them so long. We need them right now. No, the earth needs them. This is you.

Ms. Perrine: How can we do something to end the banning of books and literature worldwide?

Ms. Forche: This is a real problem in our country with the Texas control of school books and textbooks in particular. It is not a new thing. Emperor Chin of China burned books many thousands of years ago. This has been going on since there were books or anything that could be distributed to people. I don't know how to oppose it except to continually distribute books, expose the lie of censorship. This is done in lots of small actions. Not a big action. It is done in all of you doing something about it every day. What you do is that you kill it by a thousand nips and bites. You take it down the way the lilliputians take things down. We take it down collectively. We can do anything collectively. I don't have a strategy for getting rid of censorship. I have thought about it a lot, and I don't know how to eliminate it except to make it illegal. Maybe that's a start. We could make it illegal to ban books. It is supposed to be illegal. We are supposed to have freedom of speech and expression in the United States. I think we have to begin by defending the rights we already have that have been eroded over the last decade or two. In the interest of security, which is the most pernicious of lusts. There is no such thing as achieving security by controlling people. This is not how you achieve security.

Ms. Perrine: One final question. How should art change laws? For in order to alter a law we must go about it in a way that appeases politicians.

Ms. Forche: Art doesn't directly change the law. Art changes the heart which changes the mind which changes the law. What happens with artists, like the butterfly that creates the hurricane. You all know chaos theory. Art affects the world in very strange ways. It has a great power and force which we can't measure or even perceive as artists making art. You can't perceive it. I was walking through the trees last night right after dinner and I heard a violinist. I heard it in the trees. It was beautiful. It gave me a great moment just when I needed it. I don't know who you are, violinist, but you affected me and you made it more possible for me to do a good job this morning. So, one of you was playing. Whoever was practicing last night, thank you. It is indiscernible. You can't tell. You can't measure. You will never know the effect. You won't live to see it. None of us will live to see it. What you do is you make art, you give to the world, you give out, you stand for the truth, and it will have an effect.

If you want to get involved in community organizing and working to push legislation on your representative or congressman, that is fine. There are people who do that, and if you think you would be good at it, that would be a good idea. Art making is very powerful, and there is nothing that any public attention or approval can confer on it that it doesn't already have.

Thank you. I really love this place.