"Please do not ask me to talk about the quake:" More poetry reporting from Haiti

A few weeks ago, PBS aired an interview with Kwame Dawes who has been reporting from Haiti in poetry since the earthquake last year. Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown and Joanne Elgart Jennings follow that up with a broadcast on The PBS NewsHour, paying a visit to a community of young poets at the "street level" who have been sharing work with one another for ten years in a small library and more widely recognized poets Evelyne Trouillot and Frankétienne.

In the days that followed the January 2010 earthquake, Trouillot said she felt paralyzed with despair and could not write, but she eventually succumbed to pressures from outside and within to put her thoughts into words.

In this poem, translated from Creole, Trouillot starts with the line, "Please don't ask me to talk about the earthquake," but then she goes on to describe her feelings about the quake. When we asked her about the poem, she spoke of the overwhelming pressure she felt to express not just her own experience but that of the millions of Haitians whose voices are not usually heard.