How to Write Poetry About Conflict

The poet Carolyn Forché has devoted much of her career to writing what she calls the poetry of witness. She coined the term in her introduction to Against Forgetting, a 1993 anthology in which she collected works by 145 “poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century.” Forché herself had not endured such conditions, but she had seen them. From 1978 to 1980, she traveled repeatedly to El Salvador, where she bore witness to the violent repression of Salvadoran citizens by that country’s military dictatorship.

Forché later called her time in El Salvador a “moral and political education—what at times would seem an unbearable immersion, what eventually would become a focused obsession.” In (1981), she offered a set of poems reflecting that immersion and obsession.,” a meal transforms into “the lips of those whose lips / have been removed, mussels / the soft blue of a leg socket.” In “,” a colonel empties a bag of ears “like dried peach halves” on his dinner table as he derides the notion of human rights.