Note: The eighth annual Gregory Stockmal Reading with poet Carolyn Forche has been canceled. The reading had been scheduled for Nov. 10 at the College of the Holy Cross; the Worcester County Poetry Association is working to reschedule the event.

WORCESTER - In a phone conversation last week, poet Carolyn Forche said she was looking forward to returning to Worcester. She’s not been here since 1979, when she did a reading at the Worcester Public Library, but remembers it as a “vibrant poetry center.”

“I enjoy giving readings,” she says. “There’s something that happens with the audience in a live reading that can’t happen with the book by itself … There’s something effervescent about the performance, how it’s there and then it’s over.”

Perhaps oddly, though, Forche says she doesn’t enjoy the process of publishing, which is odd for a renowned, award-winning poet, editor and translator, which she admits might explain why she publishes so infrequently. Her first poetry collection, “Gathering the Tribes,” was published in 1976. She’s getting ready to release her fifth collection, “In the Lateness of the World,” and a memoir of her time in El Salvador, tentatively titled “What You Have Heard is True.”

That latter book is of particular interest to fans of what’s arguably Forche’s most famous book, “The Country Between Us,” a book that was heavily influenced by what Forche saw during the Salvadoran Civil War, and which contains arguably her two most famous poems, “The Colonel” and “The Visitor.” She says the memoir will focus on a span of five years which transformed her professional life.

Before traveling to El Salvador, Forche had won the Yale Younger Poets competition and had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded her journey. She had been in Spain, translating the work of poet Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría, when a member of Alegría’s family invited her to visit.

“I wasn’t sophisticated about it,” she says of her decision to visit El Salvador, made before the war had begun. “I thought I was going to improve my Spanish, work with women physicians in rural hospitals … Kind of a Peace Corps experience, of sorts. I thought I would write poetry, perhaps translate more poetry. Do something as a volunteer, that is somewhat what did transpire. I didn’t believe that war was coming, and if it was coming, I didn’t believe the U.S. would get involved. That’s how young and naïve I was.

“I underestimated the extent of the oppression and the violence and the danger in that country at that time. I had only met writers and read books, I didn’t expect anything like that would happen.”

Forche says she was surprised by the reaction to “The Country Between Us,” and hadn’t anticipated either the excitement or criticism it engendered, with many telling her that “politics” was “not the province of poetry.”

“Poems about warfare are considered political in the United States,” she says, “I’m always confused by what the people mean by the word ‘political.’ Poems that take into account the experience of racial oppression, the experience of soldiers, anyone who writes from imprisonment … it’s strange. It really seems like if you are not normative in some way, whatever you write is political. Environmental poetry is political. The thought (poetry not being political) was not intellectually very defensible. I understand that it’s very threatening to fuse the power of poetry to social awareness. That’s a very dangerous thing for some people.”

The uproar didn’t deter Forche, who has in the time since written the poetry collections “The Angel of History” and “The Blue Hour” and edited the anthology, “Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness,” the latter of which proved to her how prevalent the sort of poetry considered “political” in the U.S. was in the rest of the world.

“Poetry of witness isn’t an identity,” says Forche. “It’s a way of reading work deeply within the circumstances in which it occurred, to account for the experiences of a soldier, or a person who was burned in the Holocaust.” She says that it’s a way of giving voice to those experiences, and giving them an outlet they might not have otherwise. “There’s no such thing as sitting down and saying, ‘I’m writing a poem of witness,' ” she says. “You can’t just sit down and do that. You don’t know what will happen when you sit down to write.”

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.