For poet Rusty Morrison, a state of panic is not necessarily a bad thing.

The James Laughlin Award-winning writer will give this year's poetics lecture, "Poetry, Panic, and the Pan-ic Experience," 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, as part of the Helena Festival of the Book. Morrison's work will also be featured at that night's gala reading.

The idea that poetry can be useful in helping us to break free from tired ways of thinking, of viewing the world, or just from being stuck in our own lives is at the heart of Morrison's upcoming talk.

It all starts with taking a more expansive view of what it means to be frozen in time -- in panic mode, you might say.

Morrison herself came to writing and poetry as a young girl growing up with a mentally unstable mother, a situation she describes as feeling "impossible to impasse."

"Writing, making contact in some way with something bigger and my own experience was some marvelous survival strategy that arrived," she says.

On paper, Morrison was able to approach the precipice of panic -- without falling off the cliff.

"I've found that the poems that I fall most in love with are the ones that frighten me a little bit," says Morrison. "I know that something's happening when the hair on the back of my head lifts a little bit."

By rejecting the traditional use of language, Morrison says that poetry has the opportunity to help us move beyond the basic significance of words to get at a deeper understanding.

"It's the door, in a sense," says Morrison. "The power of literature to move us is not necessarily what's said but what's conveyed."

A former longtime high school English teacher, Morrison committed to life as a poet after realizing that she hadn't followed the advice she was giving her students year after year -- to find what was true for them and stick to it.

"More and more that feeling started to plague me," says Morrison, who calls poetry her "deep-heart love," adding, "I decided to eventually face that I hadn't done that."

As a reader and as a writer, Morrison continues to find poetry as important to her survival these days as she did when she was a little girl.

In the past two years both of her parents died, each death bringing its own emotional glacier to navigate.

"Panic was a place that I was constantly being confronted with in myself," says Morrison. "It's really alive for me right now."

The death of Morrison's father was particularly unexpected, and when he fell ill, he was unable to communicate.

Rather than talk at him, Morrison spent her father's last few days with him in silence.

"I know he loved me and I know he knew I loved him," she says. "My life is language (and yet) our relationship was not so much about words but about presence."

In the wake of her father's death, Morrison penned the series of poems that recently won her the prestigous James Laughlin Award.

The collection, "the true keeps calm biding its story," borrows from the style of old-time telegrams, each line ending in "stop" or "please advise."

Morrison says the poems just came to her, and seemed to reflect her relationship with her father as well as the unique form of panic caused by his death.

"Everything is stopped and yet I must begin again," says Morrison, adding, "In many ways, those poems saved my sense of self."

During her talk, Morrison will talk about contemporary poets whose work she sees as pushing the boundaries of possibility.

She'll also talk about how poetry can make us aware of the tension between what we say and what we mean, and the way we get stuck in patterns and automatic ways of speaking.

"That can be very dangerous, I think," says Morrison. "The way I choose to structure a sentence might trap me in a way of thinking."

By reading and writing poetry, Morrison says we can practice entering those frightening places.

"The poem is an opportunity to practice moving through states of slight discomfort," says Morrison, who sees the potential for poetry to help people move from frozen panic to reawakening.

"I think that poems give us the opportunity to have that experience," Morrison says.