The Panic Poems

Yesterday, I was sitting in traffic in Queens, dreading what I had to look forward to as I approached the George Washington Bridge at rush hour, and I  found myself trying to write a limerick in my head about stress. (This was long after I had blasphemed “O, Tannenbaum”.) Something about having to figure out two other words that rhyme with “furious kindergartener” was fun.

I’m a terrible poet. The fact that I would even use that word ironically to describe myself is a crime against poetry. I’m sorry to Homer and everyone who came after him for saying that. This is not me kicking myself, this is an honest assessment of my skills. I have a lot of skills, but poetry is not one of them. It helps my ego that I don’t particularly like poetry, or feel like I “get” it–it’s only those rare poets who make their way past my artistic side-eye–so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

That said, while I was sitting there, surrounded by giant trucks, creeping along, I started to think that a little structure might be good for me, so this morning I wrote a sonnet about stress. I never could quite get a solid grip on the whole iambic pentameter thing in high school and was glad to be rid of it, so I’m not sure I did it right, but I got the rhyme scheme down okay.

The thing is, I’m not nearly as wound up as I make myself out to be, it’s just that in the last week I’ve become painfully aware of the ways my mind can spin off like a top. No, I’ve known that for a while, but I see its little seeds sprouting much earlier. I’m already sick of thinking about it, but it’s there a lot of the time, so I might as well sit down with it and look it in the eye, and we might as well have a little fun while we’re stuck with each other.

You’re thinking I’m about to post the poem here, aren’t you? Nope. Just know it exists. I’m not that brave. Besides, it’s an exercise. A way to break something down into meaningless parts and rearrange them into something else. That in itself is kind of a revelation–just play with the thing, work at it. It feels more like a machine than an expression of something. It needs to operate properly before anything bigger can rise up out of it. I can’t get all worked up about whether it’s any good or not when I’m just trying to follow instructions. And believe me, when I back away and just read it, I can see it’s clunky and I blush right here at my computer all by myself. But then I remind myself I’m not doing it for “art” or to be praised for it. I’m doing it to practice. I’m not even sure what I’m practicing. Vocabulary? Meter? Simple math? Or is it something else, like humility, or detachment, or the ability to see how one practice feeds into the other? Is it about how the work is the thing, how the simple act of fitting a bunch of words into a structure can get me out of my own way? The point isn’t to singlehandedly revive the form, to become a Poet (God help us if it is), the point is to relieve myself of the dread that comes over me when I start asking myself how I’m doing all the other times I sit here and start typing.

So, the Panic Poems. It’s a No Free Verse Zone, full of sestinas and sonnets and haiku. Who knows what might happen in there? Or what might happen beyond its orderly little borders.