Carolyn Forche

Of experts and inexperts

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Jules Boykoff

In her last post, Kaia wrote about inexpertise as a possibly positive interventionary poetry stance.

Many of us have a conflicted relationship with experts and expertise. To be sure, in general, contemporary society demands increased reliance on and deference toward experts and expertise. Pay heed to the news any day of the week—whether it be television or radio or a newspaper—and you’ll find a cavalcade of experts expertly asserting expertise. 

On the positive side, experts can provide us with shortcuts, time-savers, insider insights, and thought-provoking analysis. Not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate an expert offering shrewd dissection of a topic I hadn’t quite thought of in that particular way. 

Terrence Des Pres, while writing about the holocaust

'Finish This Or Die'

Al Filreis
Terrence Des Pres circa 1974

Still thinking about the late Terrence Des Pres. When I first knew him (mid-’70s) he was spending time with the political poet Carolyn Forche. He finished The Survivor (a struggle, to say the very, very least) and became well known for that book (deservedly, but there was always much more to Des Pres than that book). Later, through a poem by Forche (and in many other ways, of course), I came to learn more about what kind of struggle it was for him to write The Survivor. In the poem, “Ourselves or Nothing,” Forche tells us of finding notes TDP had written to himself and, after an all-night attempt at writing, left for himself on his desk for the morning. “you will live and die / under the name of someone / who has actually died.” And another message (although not one for which Forche was present): “Finish this or die.” Here is a copy of that poem.

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