carolyn forche what you have heard is true

She learned that he was a cousin of Claribel Alegria, a Salvadoran whose poems Forché had translated, whose daughter Maya was a close friend. In late 1976 Forché, then twenty-six years old, was teaching in Southern California when a man she had never seen before, with two young daughters in tow, knocked on her apartment door and announced, the chain lock not yet released, that his name was Leonel Gómez Vides and that they had work to do. On parting, the future saint missioned Forché to return to the U.S.to witness to the horrendous repression then taking place, in the years leading up to the civil war that claimed at least 70,000 lives, the overwhelming majority at the hands of the U.S.-trained and -funded Salvadoran military.

She had left El Salvador at his insistence, for her safety, even as she had insisted, to no avail, that he do the same. Archbishop Óscar Romero had been assassinated on March 24, just days after she had conducted his last interview. The most famous, 'The Colonel,' provides the title of her memoir of her time in Central America, intermittently from January, 1977, to March, 1980. The most arresting poems were about El Salvador, from where she had just returned. None of us could have known what we would hear that evening. Two were already well established, but our third poet, Carolyn Forché, had only recently received a prestigious prize for a first book of poems. My writing group received a grant to host three nationally known poets. But in the spring of 1980, I heard a poetry reading that made things happen in my life. 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' So wrote W.

Carolyn forche what you have heard is true