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.
[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!
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