Provocations (in progress)

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Divinity School Address (CW I: 80)

“There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Spiritual Laws” “Every gesture any human being makes is loaded, is a confession, is a revelation: nothing can be hidden, but there is so much that we do not want to see, do not dare to see.” –James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

Novelists, poets, philosophers, activists, and painters from across the centuries...

“Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers – and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.” —Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures”

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all loses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through.” —Paul Celan, Bremen Prize acceptance speech

“Let us then examine anew the basic thesis of democracy. It does not really mean to say that all men are equal; but it does assert that every individual who is a part of the state must have his experience and his necessities regarded by that state if the state survive; that the best and only ultimate authority on an individual’s hurt and desire is that individual himself no matter how inarticulate his inner soul may be; that life, as any man has lived it, is part of that great national reservoir of knowledge without use of which no government can do justice.” -- W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned”

“I call ‘poet’ any writing being who sets out on this path [around the world], in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know. I call ‘poet’ any writer, philosopher, author of plays, dreamer, producer of dreams, who uses life as a time of ‘approaching.'" -Hélène Cixous, “The Last Painting or the Portrait of God"

"And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing thins too well" —Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

“The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language— that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre.”