Mobile Art Saturday Poetry – In Time of War – Carolyn Forché
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘In Time of War’ by Carolyn Forch. On April 28, 1950, Carolyn Forch was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied at Justin Morrill College, Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from Newcastle University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom.
A poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, Forché’s books of poetry include In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American Book Award; Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), which received the Poetry Society of Americas Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; andGathering theTribes (Yale University Press, 1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press/Penguin Random House, 2019) won the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize in the United Kingdom. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegra, Robert Desnos, Mahmoud Darwish, Fernando Valverde, and Lasse Sderberg, among others. She is also the coeditor, with Duncan Wu, ofPoetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W. W. Norton, 2014) and editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993), praised by Nelson Mandela as itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.
Her honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum; in 1996, she was giventhe Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm; in 2013, she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement. A finalist for the Neustadt Prize in 2015, she became, in 2017, one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In 2020, she received the Lannan Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages. She is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University anda University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In January 2022, Forch was electedto become a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
I have matched artwork by @pause.and.breathe – Susan Latty with this poem. You can view her Instagram feed here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
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via Poets.org
‘In Time of War’ ©Carolyn Forché
And so we stayed, night after night awake
until the moon fell behind the blackened cypress,
and bats returned to their caverns having gorged
on the night air, and all remained still until the hour
of rising, when the headless woman was no longer seen
nor a ghostly drum heard, nor anyone taking
the form of mist or a fiddler, and the box never opened
by itself, nor were there whispers or other sounds, no rustling
dress or pet ape trapped in a secret passage, but there was
labored breathing, and unseen hands leafing through
the pages of a visitors book, and above the ruins a girl
in white lace, and five or more candles floating,
and someone did see a white dog bound into a nearby
wood, but there were neither bagpipes nor smiling skull,
no skeletons piled in the oubliette, and there was,
as it turned out, no yellow monkey, no blood
leaking from a slit throat, and no one saw
a woman carrying the severed head,
but there were children standing on their own
graves and there was the distant rumble of cannon.
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Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
