Contributor’s Marginalia: Emily Cinguemani on “Trying” by Sarah Burke

I love the way poetry insists on using words to communicate the ineffable. It is in this risky and paradoxical space that language feels its most stunning. Issue 16.1 of 32 Poems arrived in my mailbox as I was approaching not only my first year of teaching, but also my first semester leading a poetry workshop of twelve introductory-level students ready to write towards the messy and the unknown. Like any new experience of writing, this particular challenge has asked me to constantly reassess the basics. I find myself asking my students (and, in turn, myself), “Why does this poet choose this image?” or “Why this structure?” But, more importantly, I also find myself asking, “Why poetry?” It seems increasingly easy and dangerous to become swept up in the busyness of everything surrounding writing and to lose track of the craft itself. To refocus, I turn to poems that remind me of my initial love for the art and of the wild leap it makes towards what can’t easily be put into words. “Trying” by Sarah Burke has become a poem I turn to for this reminder.

I brought “Trying” into my workshop for several reasons. In this poem, Burke tackles a distinct kind of grief. From the very first line, “Now, childless, I understand,” this poem has a quiet, intrepid voice. Immediately upon reading, I saw a familiar narrative; many women in my life have experienced wanting and not being able to have a child. This story is common one, but it is often untold, and this poem commits to telling it.

This poem is also a study in voice. I tell my students that voice is the difficult and critical magic of any poem—the point where every smaller element converges to make something larger than itself. I keep revisiting the lines “Like a madwoman, the uterus / paints and strips its one small room.” The body itself is something fraught with tension and out of the speaker’s control. But even when it doesn’t use metaphor, this poem demonstrates a keen focus and a strong use of detail—we see bloody teeth saved in teacups, a broken vase wrapped in tissue paper, the little pieces of what we are afraid to lose. Through this careful imagery, the speaker’s inner world transforms everything it touches.

I also taught this poem for its smart and subtle use of repetition—a poetic device that my students love. We are just starting to look at some of the obsessive forms in class, and each of the repeated phrases in “Trying” feel so essential—particularly the phrases “Now, childless, I understand” and “Why she kept.” The repetition also varies as we keep reading. For example, “Still winter. / The branches creak” becomes “Winter still. The creek branches.” This varied repetition imitates the changed perspective of the speaker. The world reappears, but if we look closely, even the smallest details have shifted. Something as formless as grief has taken shape in the natural world.

“Everything we’re talking about is easier said than done,” I remind my students during our workshops, as a kind of acknowledgment and affirmation. It is difficult to find the right image or the right word and to create something that is more than a sum of its parts. And yet, Sarah Burke’s “Trying,” like so many other great poems, reminds us that it can be done. This poem brought extra beauty and enjoyment into our class. It continues to show us the distance we must travel as writers, and it reminds us that a poem can lend new eyes to a scene as ordinary as “the ice, the river, the road.”