A column that celebrates intuition, emotion, and sensitivity as important forms of knowledge.

When I first sat down to write an introduction to my column, “Uncommon Sense,” I became immediately nervous.

Why?

Maybe I was worried about accidentally placing limitations onto a thing I’d been intentionally treating as open and unstructured. The way summary is always, on some level, an amputation of the summarized thing.

Maybe I was worried that, in making sense about the column—about its aboutness—I’d be opening one too many doors through which its common sensical counterparts might start flooding in.

Or maybe I was worried that I really had no idea what the column was or is or wants to be. That I just thought the name was cool, specific without being prescriptive. I’m never quite sure what the thing is when it comes to whatever my writing orbits, nor what I’m doing in relation to it all. How are we supposed to know what our own writing is about? And, much more importantly, why? Who does such knowing serve?

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My baseline is uncertainty, and the truth of contradictions, and the assertive peppering of I don’t knows into daily conversation (“What do you do, Sarah?”). When I’m writing poems, I daydream about being a smart, dedicated essayist. When I’m writing essays, the poet in me grows rowdy and contrarian and foolish. & what about intellectual writing that wants to play at being sweet and sincere? & why aren’t more people suspicious of language’s daily grip? & what the heck even is a prose poem, anyway?

That kind of sense.

“Uncommon” could be a different word—“subversive” or “confusing” or “non”—but it’s true that Butler was not far from my brainheart when the title arrived: but whose common sense?

I wanted a column that could hold—no, highlight—tangents and contradictions while still asserting their intellectual value.

And I wanted a column that portrayed—no, celebrated—intuition and emotion and sensitivity as important forms of knowledge.

And I wanted what I always want, column or otherwise: to take these cute little sense-vehicles we call “words” and communicate ideas & experiences that tend toward being oversized, a little too big for the language cars they’re riding around in. See how their legs are all crunched in the footwell? See how they make big dogs of themselves, their heads and necks hanging out the window?

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The minute our finger hits the keyboard, our pencil lands on the page, we are putting something too big into a too-small space.

As a writerperson, I really like trying to navigate that space. Not least for its daily reminder of the monumental scope of everything that exists around me at all times, beckoning my attention. Reminding me that “common” can also be a construct. & reminding me that “common” doesn’t necessarily mean “unexceptional.”

It’s in that space, the small space of bursting language, where we can do things like genuinely compare the human body to the bug one. Or look for similarities between essays and not-essays. Or distinguish sensitivity from sensitivity (you hear the difference, don’t you? The non-neutral tone that haunts the body whenever that word is assigned from the outside; the threat of accusation and too-much-ness wherever persistent attention is found).

“Uncommon Sense” is a column for texts that use poetic thinking to think about things, including thinking itself, in whatever form the thinking shows up. Here, the poem gets to be exploratory in the largest and most naive sense of the word, aimless and without agenda, yet still full of purpose and enthusiasm. Here, the poems, essays, & prose experiments all circle and tangent and loop back excessively, unless they’re failing to follow through. Here, the connotations of “sense” aren’t arranged hierarchically: reason is no more important than emotion, interpretation no more valuable than sound, touch, or sight.

Here, there is no “common.” There is only common, common, common, common, common.

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Outside my window: a cardinal. I am on vacation in a state warmer than my own, purchasing souvenirs for loved ones and documenting my experiences, which I could not be having if this were where I lived, with my smartphone. (Whose common sense?) Cardinals are as bright in real life as they are in the search results. Their common song is a repetitious, assertive sound, a baseball pitched over and over and over again. Common because ordinary? No, common because everywhere: the sounds, the birds, the oversized nature of it all; the small sentences trying to catch up; the poems at your back or in the Magnolia tree, remarkable and worth noticing.

Photograph of cherry blossom trees by Sarah Cook