Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”

If I were asked to point out a piece of poetry without actually reading it, I would look for the format of the words; I would expect the lines to be broken up in such a way that they are more separate than if they were in a paragraph or an essay. However, we can't rely upon the format of a piece of writing in order to decide if it is poetry. Poems, after all, can take all kinds of shapes and forms. They can be shaped like animals or objects, they can be pushed to one side with each part of the sentence containing only a few words, and they can even be formatted so that all the sentences are right next to each other like in a regular paragraph.

Keeping this in mind, I decided that I could not rely upon the physical format of the poem "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché in order to decide if it was a poem or not. Since poems are so much more than their physical representation, I knew that if this really was a poem, it would be apparent in the words.

First, the choice of words led me to believe that this piece of writing was a poem. I felt that there were numerous parts in the poem that were very poetic. The author included phrases such as, "the moon swung bare on its black cord", "they were like dried peach halves", and "It came alive there". If this were not enough, the last two lines of the poem are undoubtedly signs of poetry. The last two lines are "Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground." While it is possible to skim over these last two lines and accept them as mere descriptions, they hold a much deeper meaning. These last two lines capture the author's feeling that the inanimate ears represented their living (or once living) whole selves, and enforces the idea that the colonel was oppressing the people he was exerting power over. Also, while repeating the start of the sentence as "some of the ears on the floor" would usually be unacceptable in a developed paragraph, it is perfectly at home in the art of poetry where repetition is a common technique.

I also felt that overall the poem was meant to explain a situation/event that meant something to the author and stuck with her. One of the elements of a poem that makes it different from other forms of poetry is that it's meant to express something that has to be expressed through metaphors and abstract statements; it's not enough to say "the crazy colonel cut of the people's ears and I saw them." If the author felt that a mere description would do, then she would have written an essay or developed paragraph. This is an example of poetry because it uses description and metaphorical statements to try and get the reader to understand and feel the emotions that the author felt.

While "The Colonel" may not look like a poem from a distance, the emotion and language used are definitely poetic. Turns out you can't judge a poem by its format. "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché is a poem.