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.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
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
Joanne Carter is a British photography journalist, editor, curator, and the founder of *TheAppWhisperer.com*, one of the world’s leading platforms dedicated to mobile photography and art. Since its launch in 2009, TheAppWhisperer has become an international hub for artists of all levels to discover, learn, exhibit, and engage with contemporary photographic practice.Built on principles of inclusivity, accessibility, and artistic excellence, Joanne has spent almost two decades championing mobile photography as a serious artistic medium. Through interviews, critical essays, exhibitions, competitions, and education, she has helped shape and document the evolution of mobile art on a global scale.Her work has taken her internationally, lecturing on photography and mobile art at institutions and events including the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, alongside appearances in the UK and Europe. She has served as a juror for international photography and mobile art awards across Portugal, Canada, the United States, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.Joanne is also the founder of *TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com*, one of the first online galleries dedicated exclusively to collectible mobile art, connecting artists with collectors across Europe, the United States, and Asia.Before founding TheAppWhisperer, Joanne worked extensively in print journalism and photographic publishing, including roles at a paparazzi photo agency and as deputy editor of a leading photography magazine. Her freelance journalism, criticism, and commentary have been published widely in both the UK and the US, with bylines in *The Times*, *The Sunday Times*, *The Guardian*, *Popular Photography*, *NikonPro*, *DPReview*, *Which?*, *Vogue Italia*, *LensCulture*, the *BBC*, and more recently, the *Financial Times*, where her published letters on photography continue to contribute to wider conversations around the medium.Alongside her editorial and curatorial work, Joanne’s own photographic practice has been exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, South Korea, and the United States. Her work increasingly explores themes of grief, loss, death, memory, and the body.Her current research interests centre on grief, death, and poverty, with forthcoming postgraduate study leading towards doctoral research in these areas.Joanne is currently developing new long-form writing and photographic projects and is available for commissions, editorial projects, speaking engagements, and collaborations.Contact: joannetheappwhisperer@gmail.com)
