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A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel"
A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel"
A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel"
Ebook32 pages21 minutes

A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 28, 2016
ISBN9781535835862
A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel"

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    A Study Guide for Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel" - Gale

    13

    The Colonel

    Carolyn Forché

    1981

    Introduction

    The Colonel is a prose poem by American poet Carolyn Forcheé. It was published in her second collection, The Country Between Us, in 1981. The Colonel consists of one paragraph made up of thirty-one short sentences, taking up twenty-five lines of printed text. The poem is based on a real incident involving the poet that took place during her trip to El Salvador in 1978, in which she worked as a human rights monitor at a time when the country was torn by violence and gradually sliding into civil war. She was invited to dinner at the home of a colonel in the El Salvadoran army. The domestic scene the poem describes is quite normal until a dramatic action by the colonel reveals a ghastly atrocity.

    Forché later realized that the colonel may have believed that, as she was one of the few Americans in El Salvador, she was likely working for the US government. Some El Salvadoran military officers thought that the US government might pay them for information and intelligence about the struggle of the right-wing military dictatorship to put down the leftist insurgency. So the colonel probably saw some possible advantage to himself in inviting Forché to dinner.

    At the time she wrote The Colonel, Forché did not think of it as a poem. She wrote it to help herself remember the incident it records, and she considered it part of some future memoir. But others persuaded her that although it is written in prose, it can also be considered as a poem, and a very good one, too, so she allowed it to appear in her collection. Forché's poetry is noted for its strong political component, including her commitment to social justice and human rights. As

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