Five Titles, Five Poems (10.29.22)

We've talked about titles before at Wednesdays@One. They're important and they should be more than just afterthoughts, even if you write the title before writing the poem! New project: 5 titles, 5 poems. See the project description at the end of this blog post, especially the important caveat at the very end.

The last time we put any effort into this titling business was in 2019 (see the blog post for 5.26.19), when I compared titles to the flags we fly above our poems.

Sometimes, titles are the first line of a poem. In some cases - there seems to be a whole sub-sub genre of this type of title - the first line of the poem IS the title and the first line of text is therefore the second line of the poem. That's one way to do it, for in that case, the title takes on slightly more meaning: it's more than a flag announcing the poem; it's actually participating in the body of the poem, as another unit of meaning connecting to the following line.

But usually we make titles separate from the body or text of the poem, as something that "flags" or announces the poem. A title in this sense suggests context for the reader. It says, "the poem you are about to read is about this . . ." It says, "what follows will explain me." Sometimes titles are so slant in relation to the poem, so suggestive, that it's like reading a riddle or a joke. You have to read the poem carefully, imaginatively, perceptively, to get what the title "means," and vice versa.  Sometimes titles are just descriptors, telling you the poem's theme or subject matter: "The Sick Rose," "Dawn," "The Pisan Cantos." 

My favorite kind of title evokes a mood or frame of thought, grabs your attention: "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump," or one of my favorites of all time, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World."  Some titles repurpose a genre or cast an old trope in new light: "Elegy for the Monastery Barn." This title, by Thomas Merton, applies the notion of elegy not to a person but a thing, and a very homely thing at that, the barn at his Kentucky monastery burned to the ground. Here are the opening lines:

As though an aged person were to wear 

Too gay a dress

And walk about the neighborhood

Announcing the hour of her death,

So now, one summer day's end,

At suppertime, when wheels are still,

The long barn suddenly puts on the traitor, beauty,

And hails us with a dangerous cry,

For: "Look!" she calls to the country,

"Look how fast I dress myself in fire!"

Perhaps this title wasn't all that hard to come by. Merton felt something profound for this barn, a warm, human compassion, so the leap to "elegy" would not have been that great for him.

But he made the leap nevertheless, as did all the other writers of the titles I just listed above. And just as many of you at W@1 do each week. You put some thought into it, trying to gather up the material, movement and meaning of your poem into a single or just a few words.

But what if you have only the title and no poem? What if you reverse your usual process (most of you, anyway), and write the title first, then try to build a poem from there? In this case, you'll try to intuit the Material, Movement, and Meaning from the hint of a title so as to write the poem.

I have done just this with two entire manuscripts over the past 25 years (with a twist of this process in a third manuscript). I once wrote "found lines" for a 150 line poem that never worked. Not until I converted the "lines" into titles for poems to be. I worked on these titles for 10 years, and finished with 150 poems! I can't say they were good poems, but the experience was eye-opening: what can be "read into" or "imagined out of" a few words that will serve as the flag flying above the poem?

A few years ago, I outlined an entire book of poems with a "table of contents" of titles, then created the poems from the outline. The titles were arranged alphabetically, "My Absence," "My Barbentane," all the way through to "My Zero."  Here was an odd twist: throughout the year it took me to write this book, I had no idea what to title IT! But as I approached the x, y and z portion of the manuscript, it came to me: I titled the book "Selfiedom."

More recently, I wrote an entire book over six months (getting a pattern here? book writing sped up for me!) using the following formula: Write Poem Number One. Select a line or a phrase from Poem Number One as the title for Poem Number Two and then write Poem Number Two. Choose (almost at random) a line or a phrase from Poem Number Two as the title for Poem Number Three, and write the poem. And so on until I felt I'd exhausted the formula. (Of course, this could have gone on indefinitely, though I certainly couldn't have.) I quit when I got to about 80 poems. But I did come up with the title before finishing Poem Number Two: "Weave." And from that book title I concocted an entire book.

My point, and your next assignment, should you choose to accept the challenge, is that there can be a lot to learn from reversing the normal process of putting titles to poems. Start with the title. Think about its implications, sounds, syntactical suggestiveness, potential for imagery and metaphor, for figures of speech, points of view, voicings, moods and so on. Then follow those implications through to a completed poem. 

The follow-through might turn out to be an exploration of all that the title implies. That's fine, and could be rewarding, too. 

Create five titles. Try to write a poem for one of the titles in time for next Wednesday's salon (and that means, in time to submit to me by Tuesday around 4 pm). Share all your titles with me as well so we can all get an advance look into the problem (challenge!) you've created for yourself. That will create some anticipation for everybody.  Then write a poem for one of the remaining four titles for the following week, one for the remaining three titles for the week after that, and so on, until we get through all five titles.

Note: in this project, do not simply make your title the first line of the poem. The title should stand apart from the poem itself.