“’Yes, every man is Noah, but on closer inspection, he is Noah in a strange way, and his mission consists less in saving everything from the flood than,
on the contrary, in plunging all things into a deeper flood where they disappear…’ I came across this sentence while reading an essay by Maurice Blanchot. It startled me, its meaning seeming provocatively just beyond my typical means of apprehension, yet just near enough to teasingly, even tauntingly, demand I follow its trajectories. When I feel this kind of disquieting provocation I know that it can be the beginning of a new dimension, a new direction for my writing. Sometimes, my mind rushes past it—maybe because of tiredness, or perhaps fear of what the provocation might ask of me. It needn’t be a passage from what I’m reading. Sometimes the provocation is an inkling—from an interaction with someone, or an event I watch unfold. Though the experiences can be quite different, they each have at their core a sensation that lifts the hackles of my inner attention, and I feel a particular nerve twitch—I call it the ‘provocation nerve.’ If I take the time to jot a few notes, and then, later, write into them, then a provocation can become an invocation. The Blanchot quote invoked a series of poems that spiraled farther and farther. I now have a book of interlinked poems, which I’m in the process of finishing. But it’s important to admit that I still feel a disquieting provocation.”
—Rusty Morrison, author of Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014)
Photo credit: William Bagnell