I got an email from my MFA pal Gary the other day. He was over the moon about his latest accomplishment. His poem, “Father, Child, Water,” had been selected for publication in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry. This is a big deal. Ted Kooser was the national Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. He started this newspaper project as a way of getting poetry back into people’s daily – or rather, weekly – lives. Our local paper doesn’t carry it, which is puzzling (after all, it’s free), but you can read it online, and I do.

I always assumed that Kooser read widely, constantly on the lookout for another poem to put in his column. I didn’t know that a poet might just send him a verse and hope he would grab it. Of course, I knew that Gary was personally acquainted with Kooser, because he’d been his first mentor in our MFA program, back when we were new and Kooser was taking students. Gary and I joked about arm wrestling each other for Ted; we both wanted to study with the Great Man. But I think I was more interested in his poetry, and Gary, well, he was more ambitious, and admitted that he wanted to be able to say on his résumé that he’d studied with the guy. (It’s a poet thing. Even our mentors were always talking about their mentors.) I soon found out, to my dismay, that Kooser and I had violently differing opinions on just about everything, especially on what one could and should talk about in a poem, so I was happy to list him last and graciously allow Gary to win the prize of Ted Kooser as his first mentor.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that he’d finagled his way into the column. What did surprise me was my reaction to Gary’s excitement. I was jealous, plain and simple. Even worse, I felt competitive, and that’s a feeling I really don’t like to have. I’ve never been an athlete, and part of my reluctance, aside from my general wimpiness and lack of coordination, is my distaste for any kind of competition.

This led to some interesting games. When I was a kid, we played baseball in my backyard with a plastic bat and ball, and had a rule that until the ball was retrieved down the alley and thrown back to home plate, the batter could keep circling the bases, racking up point after point. My family played Monopoly so that nobody got mad, which meant we put the collected rents in a pile and whoever landed on Go got to claim it all. (It happened frequently enough to ensure everybody got to win at least once during each game.) To this day, even on the highway, if I think someone is trying to outrace me, I’ll slow down and let them pass. That’s my way of “winning.”

It’s not that I don’t experience feelings of competition. It’s just that they make me uncomfortable. I want to succeed as much as the next person; I just wish it didn’t mean someone else has to fail. This year especially, the naiveté of such a win-win notion is brought home again and again, whether we’re watching the Olympics or listening to another campaign speech. I heard Vladimir Putin quoted on NPR the other day: “The only way I can win is for you to lose.” Charming. But sometimes it’s true. Just ask Des Moines gymnast Shawn Johnson, who took three silvers before she finally got her gold.

But I still don’t like it. A long time ago, I went looking for an upright piano for my daughter and found just the one I wanted at a used furniture store. Someone else wanted it badly, too, and even though I knew clerk was letting me buy it, my hand shook so badly as I wrote my check, it was hardly legible.

Of course I should be happy for Gary. It’s not like someone else from my class couldn’t also get into that column (though not me, since my antipathy toward Ted Kooser is, I’m afraid, a mutual thing). And it’s not like I haven’t had my own successes in publishing, which I’ve dutifully announced to the program so they can tout their students’ success. But I want all of us to do well. I would love more than anything to have a poem in a highly respected journal at the same time as my friend Jennifer. That would be cause for celebration, and neither of us would have to feel competitive or jealous or falsely modest. That would be cool.

Isn’t it funny? You’d think that poetry, of all things, would be about as uncompetitive as you can get. Images of two poets scribbling away at opposing sonnets while perched on balance beams come to mind. I heard an interview with the funny, talented writer Anne Lamott in which she admitted to seething with rage any time she heard about one of her friends getting a book contract or a good review. Competition raises its head in the strangest places, and it’s not a pretty sight. Well, I guess it’s pretty when it’s expected – in sports, on debate teams, on the second Tuesday of November every four years.

But not when it comes to a friend, which is what Gary has always been to me. Soon after we met, at the first residency of our program, he turned and said to me, a woman old enough to be his mother but just as snarky as him, “I’m really enjoying being in the program with you.” It blew me away. So how in the world could I begrudge him this win? He’s ambitious, more so than I. After all, he’s young, he wants to make his career before he gets old, and he will surely have his first book out long before I even get a manuscript together.

And did I mention that it’s a wonderful poem? Please, go ahead and read it. It’s at www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. It’s column number 178. Tell Ted Kooser I sent you.

Pam Kress-Dunn

pam2617@yahoo.com