As you can see, I'm still working this through.
The poem of witness:
This poem describes a historical situation, usually a crisis, that the writer has directly seen and been involved in. Similar to the investigative poem but requiring that the writer was actually part of the situation in question. I’m borrowing this concept from the anthology Against Forgetting: A Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Isn't it a unique privilege of narrative that its author is relieved of the existential requirements of "witness"? I am reviving a class I taught (featuring Sarajevo Blues, among others) on "Literatures of Witness." The "best" such literatures make some play on this privilege--such as Mehmedinovic's rich yoking journalistic prose with lyric verse. Or so I thought.
Post a Comment