Carolyn Forche on PBS NewsHour Yesterday!

Carolyn Forche who visits us today appeared yesterday on the PBS NewHour, January 29, 2014:

Poet Carolyn Forché gathers 500 years of suffering in new anthology....

The poets featured in Carolyn Forché’s anthology “Poetry of Witness” have endured extreme conditions: warfare, censorship, forced exile. The Georgetown professor and poet herself calls the collection an “outcry of the soul.” Jeffrey Brown sat down with Forché to discuss this style of writing and its enduring power.

Website:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poet-carolyn-forche-gathers-500-years-of-suffering-in-new-anthology/

She also reads two poems:  Major John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Field," and Emily Dickinson's poem "They Dropped Like Flakes."  Watch and listen here:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/carolyn-forche-explores-writing-as-an-outcry-of-the-soul-in-poetry-of-witness/

More on Forche's visit to UAlbany here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/forche_carolyn14.html

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Where Spontaneity Is Almost Impossible

Adam Johnson, who visits 2/14, talked about his new novel of North Korea on the PBS NewsHour, Monday 1/30.

"It seemed, as a writer, that this was perhaps the most difficult place on Earth to be fully human, a place where spontaneity is almost impossible, where confessing your heart and your wants and desires run counter to the state and could get you in trouble, and because I found very few works from North Korean writers themselves that they weren't allowed to tell their own stories, that I thought this was something that literacy fiction could do, could fill in this void." More.

Picture: Performers at the Children's Palace in Pyongyang.

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