Lannan Readings & Conversations
Carolyn Forché
with James LongenbachWednesday May 21 2003
No one has worked harder to bring the brutal extremities of political life in the 20th century into the orbit of American poetry than Carolyn Forché, poet, translator, anthologist, and human rights activist.
Her 1982 volume, The Country Between Us, commemorates two years spent working with human rights advocates in El Salvador; it contains some of the most powerful poems of political violence and political commitment ever written in the United States.
James Longenbach is the author of several works of literary scholarship, including Modernist Poetics of History; Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism; and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. He is also the author of Threshold, a collection of poetry. Longenbach is a professor of English at Rochester University.
