Sometimes we need to return to the books that most inspire us, the books that most challenged us, the books that stick with us like a parasite. Sometimes we need that returning to remind us that writing is a returning, it’s always new and fresh and revived. Sometimes we need our reading to be a returning because our writing needs a redesign, a remodel. Sometimes we need a reminder of the familiar so that it can again become new and foreign, so that the reading of the familiar reshapes itself into something recognizable, but fresh.

Today I decided to start rereading Donald Revell’s The Art of Attention. My faculty mentor and I spent a lot of time last semester focusing on what it means to attend to poetry, and this book is simply packed to brim with examples and lectures on how poets attend to their work, and how the poetry that attends is the poetry that lasts. This is one book in a series of books that discuss the different arts of writing. I also read Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, I’ve read it twice and I’m already itching to read it again because it, too, is simply packed full of incredible knowledge and insights into poetry. I have put several of these books on my reading list and can’t wait to dive into them.

But now I’m returning to something I’ve already read. The idea that reading a book once is all you need is a load of bull. I don’t reread every book I read, but I do pay attention to the books that make me feel certain things, the books that lead me to my pen, the books that capture my attention, even if I don’t know why. I return to those books because it means there’s something there for me to glean besides the words themselves. Sometimes I need to read a book a second time. Sometimes I need to read a book a dozen times (Wuthering Heights seems to be such a book for me). Regardless of why, paying attention as a reader is just as important as paying attention as a writer.

To become a poet who attends to my work I must also be a reader who attends to the work of others. I’ve known students who read as though their very lives depended on it, consumed books almost as fast as they consumed cups of tea, and their writing suffered from it. It isn’t always how much we read, but rather how closely we read. Studying the ins and outs of a book for a month, and reading nothing else in that time, may not lead to reading more than 100 books in a year, but I guarantee the reader will have a firmer grasp of the forms of craft the writer used and, as a result, their writing will improve dramatically.

Understanding the craft of writing is a time consuming practice. There’s a reason all creative writing programs have a critical analysis component. To be clear, I’m not discouraging anyone from reading. By all means, read as much as you want as fast as you want. It will improve your writing in the broad strokes. It will expand your vocabulary, it will grow your imagination, it will improve your use of sentence length and structure.

But to understand the impact of the poetic line, one must study individual lines of poetry, look at where the line breaks occur (if there are line breaks), look at how the poem is structured, look at the word choices and the images and the use of metaphor and simile and the length of the poem, etc. These things can’t be absorbed in their fullness just by reading the poem.

I’ve also known students who read slowly and with intention, but with minds partly closed. Students who complained about what they were reading before asking themselves if, perhaps, they were missing something. If a professor assigns a book, there’s a reason, and it’s usually not because they think you’ll like it. It’s because they think you might learn something, and you do not have to enjoy a book to learn from it.

Last semester, my faculty mentor suggested I read the book I Remember by Joe Brainard. It’s a collection of prose poems that all begin with the words “I remember.” I did not enjoy this book. I got somewhat bored of it about halfway through. However, I continued reading because I was drawn to one thing: the form. His book is a collection of memories written as poems, memories not told chronologically; it’s a fragmented memoir that touches on his identity as a gay man, as well as explores issues of childhood trauma and shame and marginalization and the marginalization of people he knew. He could have written this book as a memoir. He could have written in from the beginning and documented each memory in the order they happened to him, and there would have been nothing wrong with that choice.

But he chose that form on purpose. He attended to his poetry as well as to his content, saw the form these poems needed to be written in, saw the structure these memories needed to be given, and wrote them that way.

I could have focused on the fact that I was bored and ignored the book. I could have skimmed through it. I could have written a single paragraph about it in my letter and then moved on to what I thought was more relevant to my work. But that’s the problem with ego: it makes absolutely everything about us. And this isn’t meant to sound my own horn or anything because I have also gotten irritated with the assignments given to me by professors. I’ve wondered at their purpose. I’ve been frustrated because they weren’t what I wanted to work on.

Sometimes what we want to work on isn’t what we need to work on. Sometimes what we want to work on is really just a way to keep us in a comfortable place. Sometimes we need to be pushed into an unfamiliar place, given creative work that doesn’t really inspire us but might show us a new form that resonates with us, or maybe it’ll introduce us to a new way of seeing our writing or a new way of working through out writing.

I said in a previous post that procrastination is an enemy to creativity. Well, so is ego. None of us knows all there is to know about writing. And if we’re not interested in really learning how to expand and better our craft, what’s the point in writing at all? Because there’s more to writing than identifying one’s “place” in the literary world; there’s more to it than finding one’s “voice.” The craft of writing is multifaceted. If the writing we’re doing isn’t making us wildly uncomfortable at times, then we’re not growing.

Let yourself exist in a space of discomfort. Give the mentors in your life a chance to really challenge you. Maybe go back to that book you didn’t think was helpful and reread it with a more open mind. And don’t forget to love yourself, always.