you don’t need to understand

writing together and the year of the clown

A few weekends ago, we decided to host a writing session at my apartment. In the past, these looked like a group of half a dozen writers squinting and tapping away at their laptops mostly in silence, occasionally punctuated by the sounds of water being poured or clementines being peeled. This time, however, we decided to only allow for analog writing. Laptops were not permitted, and to fill the void, we would have a variety of craft supplies to work with, along with a stack of old New Yorker magazines to scrounge for scraps.

I had never attempted to do any sort of collaging or decoration of my notebooks as a creative exercise. My notebooks for years had been walls of text, only occasionally interrupted by shoddy sketches of easy-to-draw things in my environment (lamps, water bottles, rectangular facades). It was the easiest approach, even as my moodboards and Instagram saves were filled with images of beautifully decorated pages, modern-day illuminated manuscripts. Finally, surrounded by all of the materials, there was an opportunity to do something different: to let ideas be represented outside of text, or for my inspiration to appear through visuals.

As I flipped through a New Yorker looking for images to cut out, I was struck by how often their silly cartoons were interspersed throughout the glossy pages. Within long, thoughtful pieces, you’d see crudely drawn characters accompanied by an occasionally funny caption. In the room, you’d hear someone exhale sharply every now and then, and wait for them to show you a cartoon that was almost funny. I was tickled by it, the balance of levity with seriousness, and I pondered how I could write something inspired by this dance of approaches.

I decided to do some blackout poetry, looking at different articles to see which ones had words interesting enough to try and convert into something punchy and fun. I skimmed an article about DNA testing, skipped over the diary of a centenarian, before finding the perfect piece — a review of Tartuffe, a theatrical comedy that had returned to the stage in New York. I felt like a prospector, searching for shiny words in a large pile of them, underlining interesting ones and seeking to make something that held some amount of meaning.

I wrote a poem (if you could still call it writing). It didn’t sound like any of my other poems, because they weren’t my words. Yet, as I linked these phrases together, they felt like a new voice of my own — something unlocked. It felt like a loose form of painting or dance, where I could be carried by feeling rather than being wholly focused on finding ideas. It felt light. It felt collaborative, for once, possible only through the resources of the people in the room with me. It was wonderful.

Surprisingly, the phrases came easily, feeling more relevant than I expected. I came up with the following:

New York has chosen god after a decade of neglect. 

it’s the year of the clown 

a man of virtue depends on him 

and so 

You don’t need to understand 

we can pick up some pointers

At first, it felt like these were random phrases strung together, but they started to feel like a moment from my life. A discovery of meaning after being adrift, a declaration of an answer, and an openness to what it might hold. Aren’t there a million stories like this? I thought I knew something, I discovered I was wrong, I think I’ve found the truth.

This time, the truth came on a warm Saturday at a wooden table covered in notebooks, scissors, gluesticks, magazines, and stickers. Music from the speakers intermingled with the sounds from the window of cars driving by. The blueberries were sweet. I had sat down at the table with nothing in mind, hoping to maybe make some pretty pictures. I made some pictures, had some fun, wrote in ways I had never written before.

We end the poem with “You don’t need to understand / we can pick up some pointers.” It’s how any new learning, new direction, new day should go. It’s something like permission to be confused, something like we don’t know what’s ahead, but we know we can figure it out. And we can, and we will.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - U by Underscores - hyperpop! yay!

• POEM - “you’ve got green pennies for eyes” by Maria Giesbrecht - “when copper kisses oxygen, it turns / into malachite”