TRYING TOO HARD

By Bonnie Stanard 

Any one of my poems has been through hundreds of changes and revisions. Sometimes I’ll change one word, sometimes an entire verse. Am I trying too hard to find the exact words or expressions to put forward a thought or feeling? Probably.

When submitting to journals, I have spotted sentences written by editors trying too hard.

— We want poems that press and push and ache and recede.

— I will be looking for verse that sets my skin on fire.

— send cutting, strange, and daring work

With guidelines such as these, it’s no wonder writers get the idea they should produce heart-stopping poems. Here are more guidelines to give writers a reason to either try too hard or quit.

— We want stunning and unusual imagery and language that compels.

— We seek to publish the innovative works of the greatest minds writing poetry today.

— We want dark and disquieting, fanciful and funny, surreal and surprising.

Let me see... what can I write that is dark, disquieting, fanciful, funny, surreal and/or surprising? Mmmm. It was a lonely, moonlit night with buzzards flying over the pizza kitchen where an ogre sprinkled parmesan on a poisonous crust. Does that fit the bill?

One submissions requirement reads like this: “We don’t want your problematic/hateful garbage.” So they only want unproblematic/loving garbage? Or they want problematic/hateful pearls of wisdom? Obviously the editors of this publication have read some really crappy poems and I’d better not add to their crap pile. Avoiding crap can spiral into trying too hard.

We hope to attract publishers with our work, but trying too hard to figure out what they’re looking for is a dead-end street. I have enough trouble figuring out what I want to say. This may be a leap into a taboo subject, but I fear that life is meaningless. In some weird way, I suppose I can prevent meaninglessness (is that a word?) by writing. The greater the fear, the harder I try. When I convince myself I’ve found meaning, I excel in doggerel.

Okay, so I Googled “meaning of life.” Julian Baggini wrote in an article in The Guardian: “the only sense we can make of the idea that life has meaning is that there are some reasons to live rather than to die, and those reasons are to be found in the living of life itself.”

However, in our search for meaning, some of us are trying too hard at “the living of life itself.” It’s a vicious cycle. I tell myself that I’m not going to figure it out, but that doesn’t stop the questions. Either my life means something or it doesn’t. The moment that I’m writing this is momentous to me. I think it has meaning. But does it?

Poetry tells us life is a mystery with no solution. It tells us to stop trying to find one. It tells us to settle for moments, for feelings, for epiphanies. I’m trying to do that, but I’ll have to try harder.

Good poems can scratch the surface and reveal substance. I scratch for substance and too often end on the surface. I hope some day to be able to write a poem like this one by Dan Collins.

LEAVING WEST TEXAS

Water may bless
this desert someday. Trees may spring
from this dusty soil; birds
may shelter in the branches—
and they will sing sweetly, maybe,
of terrible choices
they have made. But right now,
the only thing that matters
is this stop light
and this yellow line in the road.