Green-Eyed Monster

Of all the obstacles I could list that prevent me from writing as often as I’d like (children, fatigue, the need to make money), the one that I haven’t given enough credit to is my own tendency toward envy. To pick up a book and read a poem that astonishes me with its word choice is at the same time exhilarating and harrowing, because I’m simultaneously comparing my own creative abilities. How does she do that quickly turns into—I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. In the years before returning to grad school, while I was raising my children, this made it difficult to read poetry as often as the craft requires. 

One could argue that this problem is rooted in character. Envy, after all, is a function of the persona, a side effect of undue concern for external opinion. It’s the self made aware of the possibility of comparison, a projection of that tendency that robs joy. It’s insecurity’s twin sister. 

So, yes, a good dose of humility might resolve this. Thomas Merton writes in Seeds of Contemplation about the contemplative life in a way that feels relevant to writers overly worried about their own abilities: 

When humility delivers a man from attachment to his own words and his own reputation, he discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. (58) 

Setting aside all the qualms I have about the call to “forget oneself” (because too often, it perpetuates martyrdom, especially if you’re a mom), there is wisdom here that directly pertains to a healthy reading practice. The more I ponder this tendency, the more it seems that the most likely reason for this phenomenon is not necessarily a character flaw, but a problem with my orientation to the text. 

In the past, I have often approached reading with a purpose towards writing, that the act would reveal something about craft that I needed to discover in the act of reading, conflating the experience with its science. (And to be fair, many of the community workshops I’ve attended are set up this way: let’s all read this poem together, and then talk about what it’s doing that we can mimic.) 

I think this is an injustice to the writer and the reader. For one thing, reading with a scalpel, or a screwdriver, shortchanges the experience of the language, as well as the writer’s intent, which is often to defamiliarize, to draw out something from our souls (hopefully empathy). If I’m only reading a poem to figure it out, and I don’t create a space in which I can just experience it, I’m creating the conditions of my own frustration. 

Returning to grad school, as I’ve been required to read poetry more often, I’ve found that I’m able to set this anxiety aside only when I approach the act of reading with a particular mindset of slow mindfulness.  

Annie Dillard, whose book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek it has taken me years to appreciate (many of those which it was kept in my nightstand as an evening soporific), addresses the act of contemplation as it relates to the self in a way that I can relate to as an observer and writer of nature. In her words, the loss of the self is “the spirit’s unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object” (82). Yet it is her glorious illustrations of this process—her descriptions of being utterly present, that convey its power: 

Self consciousness does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say I can scent its leafy breath [. . .] the tree stays the tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities, [. . .] the tree vanishes [. . .]. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at every moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates. (82)

In this way, losing oneself in contemplation is a moment of devotion. For her, it is to utterly forget one’s own ego and be fully present to the essence of whatever is in our presence: Trees? A creek? Mantis egg casings? At the times I can read poetry without thinking, I must read to learn how to write, I’m able to be open to the experience in a much more expansive way, and unlearn my own envy. 

The more often I have come to the experience deciding to just slowly take where the language takes me, being focused on the present, and mindful of each image, setting aside my self-concept as a writer, and opening myself up as just a human who needs beautiful language to feel human–I not only sidestep that envy that can shut down my own creativity, but the eye to my own creative impulse opens, and I’m also able to perceive the poem’s strategies more clearly. If I can’t wholly diagram its success, this is no loss; I have felt and absorbed how it moves, allowed it to pass through me, and it’s this experience that tutors the unconscious mind (body?) to learn. It’s not the analytical brain that just figures it out. (At least– not mine. I’m certain the field of poetry is filled with writers who can do this.) But in the vast majority of the workshops I’ve been in, the most common response after reading a poem together is Wow. Ooo. How does she do that? and silence. The reaction is in the body, not the mind. 

But more than this: a product-orientated stance towards reading sidesteps the point of the experience. Louise Glück writes in Proofs and Theories that the writing life is “a life dignified [. . .] by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.” It’s the pursuit of writing– that inner yearning to express, not the inner yearning to be a writer who has published X number of books, or delivered Y number of readings–that dignifies us. After twenty five years of this writing life, isn’t it my own experience with the creative process–with deep listening, playing, and discovery–that is most valuable to me?  

Weeks ago, pondering this idea, I recorded this in my journal: 

To want to write like someone else is to want to be someone else. You can envy a poem someone else has written and be keenly aware of its beauty and power, and that recognition, or perception that what it took to create it is so far beyond you is like standing cliffside, that falling feeling, can make you conclude that its power came from that writer. Except what you forget is that the power comes through that writer, listening, paying close attention to something else. So to be envious of that person, as if this had never happened to you, is to be like a child saying, I never get cookies! 

I can’t write like anyone else. I can only pay attention, craft, and attend to my observations in my own way. I can take note of things I like, and appreciate the power of their craft, but I need to remember that they worked and listened to something beyond themselves. It’s not something they have that I need to get. It’s like tapping into consciousness–or grace. There’s enough for everyone. 

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia is the author of Resurrected Body, recipient of Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize, and Stunt Double (2016), a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her work has most recently appeared in Allium, About Place Journal, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, and The Florida Review. She is an Assistant Editor for Five Points and mother of three. Read more at elizabethcranfordgarcia.com.