The Flag You Fly: Giving Your Poems Titles (5.26.19)

Last week, I brought up the subject of titling poems, why we do it, when we do it, and the effect this writing step has on our writing.

Indeed, creating titles is writing, just as much as creating couplets or metaphors or visual images or lines or word order.  Some famous poets are famous for not writing titles to their poems.  Emily Dickinson used no titles.  It might be argued that Walt Whitman dispensed with titles, too, in Leaves of Grass, which is constructed as a sequence of poems or “yawps” of various length.  The creators of the West’s great sonnet sequences—Dante, Petrarch, Sidney, Shakespeare—in fact, the creators of most poem sequences (Robert Lowell, for another instance) write without using titles.

But when you look around your own bookshelves and then the internet, you find that going title-less is the exception, not the rule.  Yet titles are merely a convention, just as rhyme and meter are conventions: an accepted but not a necessary practice.  So why does it persist?  Selecting a title for a poem might have something to do with a sense of completion.  Or it might suggest a poet’s desire to “direct” readers into the poem.  Or it is a comment on the poem, a kind of Uber-statement.[1]

One thing I’ve learned over a lifetime of writing poems is that titles bear meaning.  So much so that I’ve found them a) hard to write, b) revelatory even to me (I didn’t know what my poem meant until I found the title for it!), and c) aids to the writing process.  By and large, titles are either suggestive or descriptive.  As descriptors, they might tell the reader “what the poem is about” (e.g., an event recounted or an emotion experienced), and thus they are aids to understanding, helping to clarify a poem’s meaning or a poet’s intent.[2]  When they are suggestive, titles can be deployed to clarify a poem’s meaning or to obfuscate it.  Titles can be used like sleight of hand, to get readers looking one way while the poem develops some other way, and in this sense, titles can introduce surprise (and delight) to the poem.  Or they might be gentle reminders that poems present limits: of meaning, of interpretation.

Titles are like the flag of a poem, hoisted to show its colors, an emblem of the poem as a work of art.  This emblematic function might make for an interesting study for someone’s dissertation.  What is an emblem?  How does it come to be?  What is its function?  How is it perceived?  How is it interpreted?

This last question—how an emblem is interpreted—has meaning for the practice of giving titles to your poems.  For making a title is part of the creative process, the process of making meaning in a poem, which is why settling for “Untitled” feels lame, like a letdown, like an incompletion—like settling.  Since titles are emblematic, they carry more weight (more front-loaded weight, you might say) than most other parts of our poems; often, they “stand for” the poems to which they are attached:

The Wasteland

my father moved through dooms of love

Landscape with Rutabaga and Farm Implements

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra

The Man Under the Bed

They Flee from Me

My Last Duchess

Not Waving But Drowning

Lady Lazarus

Death & Co.

Daddy

Titles sometimes are provisional.  We start out with a title but as the poem develops we change it.  Often, titles change even after publication.  The acknowledgements page of Megan O’Rourke’s new book of poems states that the poem “Expecting” was originally published in Tin House as “Nightdream”.  We want the title to “fit” the poem as we understand it today.

Titles function variously in the writing process.  At times, I’ve written the title first.  In fact, I’ve written several book length manuscripts entirely from titles, literally beginning with a table of contents.  I rarely get very far into a draft of a poem without thinking of a title for it.  I need a title—at least a working title—to help me organize my thoughts and feelings, to help me put a limit on what the poem is to be, where it is to go, how it is to move.  Often, my first version of a title is not my last, and sometimes I struggle to write the title that seems best to “represent” (emblematize) the poem I’ve written.  At other times, less often for sure, the title opens a door into the poem for me, and without it I wouldn’t be able to write the poem.  The title sets a mood or a place or a feeling, it creates a kind of thumbnail outline to which I can append the words of a poem.

Titles are important.  They're worth the thinking about.

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[1] Even the rather lazy, antiseptic “Untitled” is a title!

[2] Seen differently, you might say that such titles are a poet’s way of asserting rights—I meant for the poem to mean this, and this is how you shall understand it, too.  Not every reader appreciates being told how to interpret a poem, even by the poet!

Who Wrote This Poem?

Have you ever stumbled upon a poem among your notes or files that you don't remember writing?  That you so don't remember writing that it's possible you didn't write it?  But for which there is no evidence--among your notes or files--that it was written by someone else?

Like most writers of poems, I am meticulous about dating poems and even drafts of poems that I write.   I use a simple system, a small notation of month and year, that tells me all I need to know.  Usually I start writing a poem long-hand, in notes and fragments or streams of thought in a notebook, which I then transfer to the screen of my laptop where it can be edited and stored.  As drafts approach what I think will be a finished version, I make a note of the month and year at the bottom.  Rarely, and I mean rarely do I neglect to do this.  

If I record somebody else's work in my notebook or in an electronic file, I always take care to document it, give enough attribution so I'll recognize the piece's provenance years on.

Just tonight I found this poem in a file on my laptop's hard drive:

Variations on a Question

. . . the dailiness of the sea . . .

. . . returns are my only itinerary . . .

                                            ─Neruda

Birds from fish, yellow

From roses, the sea from rivers.

Do you hear the yellow

Detonations of September?

If all rivers are sweet,

Where does the sea get its salt?

Are those fishes or birds or, perhaps

In the nets of the moon, roses?

What is rarer in this life

Than to be Pablo Neruda?

I found it in a file labeled "Cubist Poems" as part of a W@1 project titled "Ways of Looking: Poems That See the World Through Multiple Perspectives." (See this blog's entry for August 1, 2018.)  Was this my contribution to that project?  Or was it an example by some other writer that I meant to share with my colleagues at W@1?  Or was it a contribution by one of them?  The draft has no date.  I can't find a proto-version of it in my notebook for that period.

At first glance, it's not my style.  When I look at small pieces of evidence--syntax, sentence construction, image generation--it doesn't strike me at all as something I even could write.  Yet, the entry has no other attribution.

How odd!  Still, there is one detail that suggests the poem is mine: line endings and breaks.  The line endings here are grammatically balanced and regular; nouns in almost every instance.  I am partial to that.

But I don't remember writing it.  Which is really too bad because I like the poem very much.  It's quite Cubist in its multi-faceted perspective and apparent disjointedness.  I wish I could say with certainty that I wrote it.

Why They Tell You Not to Use Adjectives in Your Poems (5.16.19)

At this week's W@1 session, talk wandered into a technical issue about use of modifiers in poems, especially in descriptive passages.  Inevitably, one writer quoted a former creative writing instructor's admonishment to get the adjectives out of your poems and to use language that's "concrete" and "active."  And everybody nodding in agreement around the table--all those who almost weekly deploy weak verbs and noun modifiers with abandon!--seemed to accept this prohibition without much reflection.

That got me to thinking about why teachers of writing of all kinds dismiss the lowly adjective and adverb.  I remember my own writing teachers saying the same thing, like they were delivering a commandment for the tablet.  I also remember thinking that if I can't qualify this noun with some adjective or other, or that verb with some kind of adverb, how am I supposed to convey what I'm describing?  

Nobody ever explained why I shouldn't drop modifiers in front of the nouns and verbs of my poems.  They just implied that it's not good writing.  If anybody ever called them out about their implications about what "good writing" is and why it doesn't make room for modifiers, most arguments I've heard just fall back on (or into) a kind of speechless, "Well, one simply knows good writing when one sees it, and it avoids adjectives."  Like pornography, I guess.

Enough rant.  I've been thinking about why adjectives preceding nouns and adverbs preceding verbs make for weak poems.  Injudicious use of certain modifiers is a little like trying to make somebody understand you by speaking louder.  Or like following up a punch line with "Get it?"  It reveals a fear that your reader won't get it, so you either raise your voice or you "spell it out" for them.  

Either way, what you're doing when you overuse modifiers is demonstrating your distrust of readers.  More importantly, you're trying to control outcomes.  In other words, you don't trust your reader to see what you saw or feel what you felt in exactly the way that you saw or felt it.  So you pile in the adjectives and adverbs.  

There's some justification for this fear.  A person's experience is . . . personal, to some extent even unique.  Writers, poets especially, work to recapture that uniqueness.  It's only natural that a writer will strive to share the uniqueness of her vision.  It follows that modifiers, when deployed as figurative language, will aid in the recapture, bringing memory closer to the remembered event.  So why is the opposite true?  

An inexperienced writer may assume that his experience, what he has chosen to write about, is personal to the point of complete uniqueness: no one has ever seen the sea the way that I see it now.  An inexperienced writer assumes that the point of a poem is to convey this unique vision for all to see exactly as he has seen it.  And the goal is to prevent readers from seeing it any other way--no, no, that's not what I meant!  That's not how I saw the sea!

But a more experienced writer, who also assumes the uniqueness of her experience, understands (perhaps through the reflection that writing permits) that conveying the unique experience is impossible.  Language can only approximate; it's a very imprecise tool for capturing reality.  Words mean more and less than we want or need them to.  An experienced writer knows that every poem is a failure in this sense, and that piling on modifiers, for instance, merely compounds the failure.  Doing so actually impedes conveyance.  Less is not more, it is liberating.

So what's to be conveyed through a poem, if not your original experience, perception or insight?  If as your reader I'm paying close enough attention, I get to experience your experience of trying to recreate an experience.  What?  What I mean is this: every good poem is the record of its own writing.  The proper reading of every good poem is the experience of or insight into the struggle to create that record.  The original experience--whatever that may have been--is secondary at best, and at an eternal remove from the reader's understanding.

I don't care to see the sea exactly the way you saw it.  Even if I did, I know that I never shall.  Even if I had stood next to you upon that precipice, I couldn't have seen that sea in quite the way you saw it.  I do care to see (i.e., experience through reading) how you've struggled to articulate what you (think) you saw.  The more you try to influence my seeing what you saw in the way that you saw it, the less visible your vision becomes to me.  More modification won't help.  Less is liberating.