The Colonel

Carolyn Forché published “The Colonel” as a part of her second collection of poetry, The Country Between Us (1981). This collection consisted of poems Forché wrote while traveling through the Republic of El Salvador, a country on the brink of a bloody civil war. The book helped launch what would become Forché’s primary literary focus, namely, blending the personal and political into what she called a “poetry of witness.” “The Colonel,” while somewhat atypical of Forché’s work stylistically in its minimalist, almost journalistic prose, was and still is one of her most famous and influential poems.

Poet Biography

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. Forché earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in creative writing. When the poet was 24, her first book, Gathering the Tribes, won perhaps the most prestigious of all first-book awards in poetry in the United States, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Forché has worked as a translator in multiple languages, working with the texts of a wide range of poets, including Claribel Alegría, Georg Trakl, and Mahmoud Darwish.

After traveling through El Salvador on the funding of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Forché began to blend journalism with literature in her poetry.