A Bit of Speaking: Carolyn Forché's "Elegy"

Carolyn Forché, in the end note to her 1994 book: " The Angel of History is not about experiences. It is for me the opening of a wound...." Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920) For awhile in the late '90s I carried this book around and wrote passionate, deeply personal responses to the poems in it. Although at the time I was attending more to the racking anguish Forché was reporting than to the events at its source, the book gave weight and substance to the idea that the personal and the political are intertwined, an idea that had so far been, for me, largely theoretical. In " Elegy ," Forché places in conjunction two of the book's deeply resonant questions: "To what and to whom does one say yes?/If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?" I said yes to the lyric back then, clung to it as a possibility, a redemption, just what in the end note Forché seems to say it is not. Redemptive or not, they are poems I return to, and not j