Monday Poetry Post: I'm Scared, Too
You know, this newsletter was originally called "poetry for cowards"
Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Hey, are you scared of poetry? You are not alone. For a very, very, very, very long time, I was extremely afraid and ashamed and embarrassed and scared of/about poetry. I was scared to write it, even though a deep, primal pulse in my psyche wouldn’t allow me to resist. I was scared of other people reading it, or simply finding out I’d written it in the first place. I’m not alone, and neither are you. One of my close friends is an accomplished, widely-published poet, but he has never been published under his own name; few people even know he writes under a pseudonym. At least once a month, someone tells me they read my newsletter, and like it, even if they’re “scared” to write poetry. I get it. Originally, this newsletter had the working title “Poetry for Cowards,” which is also what I titled the one-off crash-course workshop I teach.
Over the weekend, I saw Asteroid City, the newest Wes Anderson movie. I won’t spoil the film for you, but I will mention a brief scene (the scene that made me Really Cry). One of the characters breaks down in a moment of creative, existentialist panic, which I myself have felt literally hundreds of times, but never seen rendered so exactly on screen. The scene ends, and the movie continues. When I left the theater, I was thinking about Wes Anderson. He’s been making movies since I was a baby, and still, he feels this pang of fear. He feels it enough to put it in a movie, at least. Not impostor syndrome. Not nervousness. Fear.
You don’t need to be particularly brave to write poetry. You don’t need courage, you don’t need guts. Think of it like this: when the pool is cold, or the ocean. You know it’s cold, but you’ve been cold before. You know exactly how it will feel to jump in – the shock to your system, the brief, bright unpleasantness – so why are you scared? There’s no real, smart, justifiable reason; fear is a feeling that runs parallel to rationalization, and at a greater speed. Eventually, at the pool or the beach, the ocean or the lake, something snaps. You make an irreversible decision, then, you are in the water. And yeah, it’s just as unbearably ice-cold as you thought it would be, but after a few minutes, you’re used to it. If you consider yourself scared of poetry, then that moment on the edge, before you get in the pool, that’s where you are right now. And me, I’m in the pool, adjusted to the water temperature, lecturing you and maybe splashing a little bit, because I want you in here with me! You’ll LIKE IT, dammit.
There’s a moment when you’re in the air, and you can’t turn back. You aren’t on the edge and you aren’t in the water. That is the place that poetry comes from.
We’re going to try and get there today.
Exercise: I Award You No Points And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
Pick a prompt. I don’t care which one. It can be one you saw online, it can be one from a prior Monday Poetry Post in my archives (you have around 30 options!), it can be one you make up. Or, skip this step.
Go to Squibler’s online app, The Most Dangerous Writing App. It’s free. You don’t download anything. Here’s how this works. The app is like any other word processor, but with a caveat: if you stop writing before the timer is up, the words on the screen will fade away and then disappear. You will have lost all your progress. Usually, this is a bad thing, but today, we’re going to use Squibler to destroy our writing on purpose.
Set the website’s built-in timer for 10 minutes. If you didn’t come up with a prompt in step one, you may use the “generate a writing prompt” button that is conveniently located on the Squibler app’s page.
For ten minutes, write a poem. Do not stop until you’re done. You might not take up the entire ten minutes, and that’s fine. The important thing is you do not allow the words on-screen to fade away until after you have completed a poem.
The nature of this exercise means you might get into a poem, then get stuck, stop writing, and accidentally destroy it. If that happens, start over. Work from memory if you can, or, if you want, start totally anew. Again, do not stop until you have written a full, complete poem, on any topic, of any length, in any form and meeting the compositional metrics of your choosing.
When you finish the poem, let it fade away forever.
If you want, repeat this process.
Think of this exercise as, sort of, exposure therapy. You are writing a poem and then never, ever looking at it again. This is why they invented SnapChat. If you are scared of poetry because it may dredge up all sorts of unpleasant, uncomfortable emotions, let this free you from lingering on them. If you are scared of poetry because you are a perfectionist, and you know you’ll hate a poem as soon as you’ve written it, allow yourself to get in the practice of writing, with these pop-up guides to keep you from the gutters of self-loathing. And if you’re scared of poetry because you worry about “getting it right,” if you think you don’t know what you’re doing – hey. Me neither. Me too. Everybody else is getting it wrong alongside you. You don’t need to publish anything. You don’t need to show it to anyone. But write today, because you want to, for a few minutes, and give yourself access to the place between the water and the shore, where you have relinquished control and made anything possible.