Titles redux (5.31.21)

A poem is only as good as its title?

Not so.  Surely there are great poems by great poets with so-so titles that add little to the work.

But whether you write a poem from a title or apply the title as a finishing touch, a kind of coup de grace, it says something about your poem, your art, and you.

This is why poems titled "Untitled" are so lame: no commitment.  

Titles are as subject to convention as any other part of a poem.  They can be trendy.  "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump," "Diving Into the Wreck," started a trend in titles beginning with present participles: "Doing this . . . doing that."  They can be over-cooked, sentimental, cliched, self-regarding, too clever.

For a while many years ago, it was de rigeur, it seemed, to write titles as long as the poem, that folded over into a second, even a third line of text.  And then it was fashionable to make the title the first line of the poem, that is, a non-title title.

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We're trying an experiment this week at Wednesdays@One.  Everyone is submitting a poem without title or with the title removed.  We'll read each other's work and then make up titles for the poems.

This exercise has a couple of benefits.  One is that letting others title your work may give you deeper insight into how your poem strikes readers.  It might also suggest to you meanings or effects in your poem that escaped you.  Another benefit, though, is for the reader, and this for me is the value of this project . . . to help readers think a little more artfully about what they read, to be a little more active as readers.

What I'm banking on then, is that we'll all approach each other's work this week (and forever after?) as readers with some skin in the game, as more engaged and interested.  How each of us titles the poems we read might say something about how each of us reads, the attention we pay to each poem we read, our interpretive capabilities, our creative bent.  It might give us new appreciation for how poems work, how our own process unfolds.

As a part of this project, you might want to go back to "The Flag You Fly," my post of May 26, 2019.