Your Poem Title Helps Make Your Poem
The titles and first few lines of your poem represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader.
–Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual
A few weeks ago, someone dared me on Facebook to prove a person could find poetry in something as unpoetic as roadkill. Now, Tweetspeak Poetry may have begun on Twitter, but I owe my own poetry beginnings to challenges issued on Facebook that pride demanded I answer. So, I thought back to the day the raccoon stood firm against the onslaught of my little gold Malibu and found the poetry:
Come to think of it, there was
something strangely poetic
about the raccoon standing
in front of the Chevy
on two iambic feet, enjambed
across the glowing center line—
his eyes frozen blank
like a verse in headlights
pooled on the pavement
eager to receive his fresh offering.
A defiant thought flashed
across black-masked eyes
at the sound of the tires’ screech,
I’m not about to be a
jail-striped elegy.
The editor picked up the untitled poem on Facebook, and assigned a title to it: Roadkill. She read the poem and saw the raccoon’s defiant, hands-on-hips, I’m-not-taking-this-lying-down stand in the middle of the road, and felt the simplicity of Roadkill let the raccoon’s fierce bravado speak for itself.
As has been known to happen, the editor saw something in my poem I had not yet recognized, and meanwhile, I had asked that it be called Poetry Slam, a mischievous title more in line with other poetic wordplays in the poem, from enjambment to free verse to a long-stretch onomatopoeia (ten points if you figure that one out). Titling the poem Poetry Slam or Roadkill produces a change in tone significant enough that, though both are brilliant (I think), it could be argued you have two different poems. (We used “Poetry Slam.”)
Kooser says that a poem’s title is the “first exposure [a reader] has, and you want to make a good impression.” Titles tell a reader what a poem is about, and often times can be used to relay information that might be disruptive or clumsy (or boring) to include in the poem itself or even can be used as the poem’s first line. But he cautions the poet: “titles build expectations. Use a title like ‘A Snowy Night in Oshkosh’ and you’ll be expected to follow through with real snow and a real Oshkosh.”
Here are nine more poems with make-or-break titles. Consider what function the title fulfills: Does the poet use it to set the tone, as exposition or background, or to accomplish some other purpose? In the case of “And I Raised My Hand in Return, ” notice how poet Joseph Stroud ingeniously uses the title as the ending. Or in L.L. Barkat’s “Meet Me in a Minimalist Poem, ” the title is . . . well, I’ll let you decide what the title is.
2.
Want Me
moth’s wings, enormous, celadon, trembling.
— Melissa Stein
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3.
Leda
hung from the morning like a pearl pendant.
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4.
I love the drape of the red towel.”
5.
St. Eve in Exile
Here amid a field of light
You say my name.
And I am not she
the girl You called Your own.
My mouth a cavern.
My chest an empty cave.
I am dry and dusty.
I am not wet or well.
Not the riverbed of love
You shaped me to be,
wide as a delta,
deep as any mine-
ful of diamonds,
not this common coal,
my birthstone, my rock
of heavy longing.
I am black with it
where You would have me white.
Ever a disappointment,
I grew breasts
where you shaped me straight and smooth,
spoke when you asked for a song,
agreed where you hoped
I would exceed,
climb out of the hole
You dug for me,
place where You planted
me in the dark
among creatures
who never knew my name.
You cut me in two.
I take half the blame.
— Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
6.
And I Raised My Hand in Return
the skin off with a pair of pliers which he waved to me in greeting.
—Joseph Stroud
7.
Meet me in a minimalist poem, where we can wear
( )
—L.L. Barkat
8.
COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPTEMBER 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and the temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
— William Wordsworth
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9.
Communion
No one spoke
The host, the guest,
The white chrysanthemums
—Ryota (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
10.
To the Engraver of My Skin
I understand the pact is mortal,
agree to bear this permanence.
I contract with limitation; I say
no and no then yes to you, and sign
—here, on the dotted line—
for whatever comes, I do: our time,
our outline, the filling-in of our details
(it’s density that hurts, always,
not the original scheme); I’m here
for revision, discoloration her to fade
and last, ineradicable, blue. Write me!
This ink lasts longer than I do.
—Mark Doty
Photo by Jenny Downing, Creative Commons license via Flickr.
__________________
How to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.
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Monica Sharman says
Kooser’s Manual was one of the best poetry things that ever happened to me. He’s the one who introduced me to that Joseph Stroud poem, which was startling to me—a slow, sinking-in sort of startling. And I even tried writing a poem like that myself (using the title as the last line). It was even more fun than using the title as the first line.
This was a fun read. I think I’ll look around at famous poems and see what the title does.
Oh, and I’ll take my 10 points for the onomatopoeia. 🙂
Will Willingham says
Using the title as the last line was fascinating to me — I like how you say a slow startling. It took me a few go-rounds too, and then realized what was happening.
Donna says
I am printing this out and saving it in my resources file because I frequently twist and turn about titles – I never know if a title I am trying to use gives too much away, or is too leading, or is redundant. Wondering if I am overthinking it I sometimes just give up and grab a line because I need something to go at the TOP of the page… it doesn’t feel good but I do it anyway. I really like this post because it gives me some tools, and it tells me that maybe I am not over-thinking it at all and by giving up I am losing an opportunity.
Will Willingham says
Definitely worth thinking through, Donna. The title can really make-or-break. Sometime, if you haven’t, check out Kooser’s book. His discussion on titles is really good. I’d sort of forgotten about it until this post, but I remember thinking it was one of the best parts of the book for me.
L.L. Barkat says
*So* hard to find poems with must-have titles. Once you start thinking this way, you become surprised at how few really do an important job for the poem. Makes me think that “Untitled” should be used more frequently 🙂
Will Willingham says
As you know, I don’t often put titles on my poems. 😉 I think I recognize how important they are, and just usually just don’t have a title that seems worth its words.
But then, sometimes another eye looks at it and sees the title. 🙂
Megan Willome says
Love Ted Kooser’s how-to poetry book!
And although I write titles for a living for magazine articles, I am lousy at titling poems. They require something different.
Nancy Franson says
Wait til the Swede finds out he accidentally contributed to the advancement in poetry education 🙂
Larry Bole says
I don’t think the title “Roadkill” makes it a different poem. That title merely makes it a poorly-titled poem.
“Poetry Slam” is a more appropriate title because it matches the frivolous tone of the poem.
What do I mean by frivolous? The raccoon is being used in this poem like a cardboard cutout, a mere prop allowing for a display of poetic cleverness.
If this is not an imagined scene, one hopes the raccoon managed to escape being hit, or the driver stopped or swerved in time to avoid the raccoon.
If not, if the poem comes out of a real event and the raccoon was really hit and killed, then what a diminution in feeling this poem represents, feeling being replaced by a callous cleverness that seems to have become an aesthetic goal in current poetry, clearly seen when one compares Stafford’s “I thought hard for us all” (“Traveling Through the Dark”) to Willingham’s offhand-sounding “Come to think of it…”, in which the afterthought serves as an excuse for making a series of clever comparisons, culminating in a Disneyesque anthropomorphizing of the animal.
L. L. Barkat says
Ha! 🙂 Thanks, Larry.
I saw a poem that was not frivolous at all; thus, the alternate titling.
I do love your evaluation of the poem otherwise. Sure, the raccoon was a prop to answer a dare on Facebook (the dare being whether or not anyone could write a poem about roadkill). Yet I saw more than a prop in that facing off (and, again, wanted the “poor title 😉 because of it). Also, I find it fascinating to picture the masked raccoon as a kind of cardboard cutout; maybe all masked creatures have that strange dual existence… are they real or just a flat character?
Do you think the raccoon got hit? (‘Cause the writer tells us up front that this was a real raccoon that once was in front of a real Chevy Malibu.)
Larry Bole says
Regarding the ‘dare’ of finding something poetic in something as ‘unpoetic’ as roadkill: that seems to come from a rather narrow and stereotyped idea of what poetry ‘is’.
I once heard a poet say (can’t remember who now) that anything can be the subject matter of a poem but not everything is. I take this to mean that anything can be worthwhile to write about, but not every actual thing that happens to us or around us is necessarily worth writing about. But my impression of current poetry in the United States is that poets feel that every little thing that happens to them, or occurs to them, is worth writing about. I ssuggest that is why so many current poems seem trivial and frivolous.
For the best ‘roadkill’ poem I have come across, I suggest searching out William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”
Raccoons seem to bring out the ‘cutesy’ in people. For a poem about raccoons that is not so ‘cutesy’ I suggest searching out Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Ode to the Raccoon.”
I don’t know if the raccoon got hit or not. If the author of the poem did hit it, the poet’s reaction in the poem doesn’t seem appropriate to me. It makes me think of the story about the raccoon, dead on a road in Pennsylvania, that got painted over by a road crew with a yellow stripe. I get the impression that the road crew would rather have not done that, but the way the equipment works apparently made avoiding it rather difficult. But people’s reaction to it I find disturbing, especially the reaction of people who find it amusing.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/raccoon-road-kill-painted-pennsylvania-road-crew/story?id=16978993
My reaction to the poem under discussion is that in a sense it has painted a figurative yellow stripe over its raccoon.
Will Willingham says
Larry, thanks for stopping in and for your contributions to the discussion.
It’s a highly subjective conversation, really, to say what poetry is, or what’s an appropriate subject for a poem, or whether a writer was callous or indifferent or experiencing a deep level of emotion. As a poet, I have to leave that to the reader to let the poem say what it says to him, or to decide (for himself) whether the poem should have been written at all.
One thing is clear, this poem is no match for Stafford’s powerful piece, nor was it intended to be.
In this case, the poet was being playful. Yes, even frivolous, taking up a challenge in jest that was issued in jest. And the responses are varied. You see something that may be a callous affront to raccoons and even perhaps to poetry. L.L. Barkat saw something not frivolous, something deeper that may or may not exist. In the end, it doesn’t matter. I released it to the reader to decide, and each will decide differently.
It is interesting to me, to suggest that it’s a narrow definition of poetry that would allow something like this poem to sneak in as real poetry, since it would seem more like a narrow definition that would exclude it.
I do think that would be a mistake, really, were I to take my own subjective view and cast aside work I don’t prefer as not worthwhile, when perhaps it might be rather powerful for another.
Larry Bole says
I do apologize for coming on so strongly. The poem just struck me (wearing my black-rimmed glasses) that way…
But as you say, it’s ultimately up to each reader to decide for themselves.
Larry Bole says
P.S.
Meet me in a maximalist poem where we can wear more
(((((((((((( ))))))))))))
Will Willingham says
Ha! 🙂
Will Willingham says
The cardboard cutout and Disnefying of the raccoon is a fascinating observation, Larry. And for good or bad, I’m afraid it’s often how I see the world. Or parts of it. Things have a tendency to take on the comical, even cartoonish, in my mind.
Some, I see, find it troubling. Others might call it a gift. 🙂
Larry Bole says
I’m left wondering which of the “Top Ten Poems with Make or Break” titles have titles that ‘make it’ or ‘break it’.
One that I wonder about is Ryota’s haiku. Japanese haiku poets haven’t traditionally put titles on haiku, although they sometimes provide a ‘headnote’, which ‘sets up’ the haiku or contains information about the scene or subject that is too detailed to include in the haiku.
The title on Ryota’s haiku, “Communion,” is the title created by Harold Henderson for his translation. Rexroth’s translation, found in “One Hundred Poems from the Japanese,” (New Directions pb, 1964, sixth printing) does not include a title.
I think that Henderson meant to suggest silent communing (contemplation) among the two people and the flower.
The setting is presumably a room in which a tea ceremony is being held. Tea ceremonies are often performed with a relaxed-yet-observant silence.
I think R.H. Blyth is right in his interpretation of this haiku in which he suggests an allusion to the Buddha’s “Flower Sermon” in which Buddha held up a lotus flower and showed it to his disciple, Kasyapa, who understood its meaning without a word being spoken.
I think there is also a further allusion that an educated Japanese haiku poet or reader of Ryota’s era would have understood, which is that the first phrase of the haiku, ‘mono-iwazu’ (“not saying anything” echoes the Japanese translation of a saying of Lao Tzu, from the Tao Te Ching, ‘shiru mono iwazu, iu mono shirazu’ (Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.)
The problem I have with the imposed English title is that although it does suggest a ‘silent communing’ between both people and the flower as equal partners so to speak, it also has the unfortunate English language overtones of Christian communion rituals.
Will Willingham says
It’s fair to say the title of the post is at least a little hyperbole. 😉 Nevertheless, I think the titles in the poems included play an important role. Barkat’s of course, without which you’d be left with parentheses. (Or nothing.)
I think Stroud’s is extremely effective, creating a sense of wonder from the beginning — a nagging “what does it mean?” that followed me through the poem. Had he used the title as the last line, where one could argue it “belongs,” it may have felt trite, contrived. But it manages instead to somehow create a sense of hesitation, as the reader has to loop back to the beginning to get the meaning. I don’t know if it can actually be explained, as I’m demonstrating with this limited effort. 🙂
Titles don’t come easy for me, so I appreciate haiku’s lack of requirement. I suspect you’re right about Henderson’s intent in the Communion title, though I wonder what he thought might be missing in the poem that required he title it.
Lao Tzu spoke a special kind of brilliance there. 🙂
Larry Bole says
Henderson, in his preface to “An Introduction to Haiku,” says that since some Japanese haiku occur in prose works or are preceded by forewords of varying lengths (what I referred to as ‘headnotes’), and since he is presenting those haiku out of context, a title “becomes almost a necessity,” and he put titles on the rest of the haiku he translated “for the sake of uniformity.” He also says he hopes the titles are “usually innocuous.”
For the sake of comparison, here is Rexroth’s untitled translation again:
no one spoke,
the host, the guest,
the white chrysanthemums.
And here is Henderson’s translation:
Communion
From them no words come:
the guest, the host, the white
chrysanthemum.
Note two differences: 1) the order in which ‘guest’ and ‘host’ appear. Henderson follows the word order as it appears in the original Japanese; Rexroth does not. 2) Rexroth has made the flower(s) plural; Henderson has made the flower singular. The Japanese language does not distinguish between singular and plural except by context. I agree with Henderson that one chrysanthemum seems more appropriate here.
Larry Bole says
I agree with you about the effectiveness of Stroud’s title.
What if he had titled the poem “The Young Goat,” or “What I Saw on My Daily Walk”? And then ended the poem:
“…I saw the little goat
hanging from a tree by its hind legs, and a Gypsy was pulling
the skin off with a pair of pliers which he waved to me in greeting
and I raised my hand in return.”
It would almost seem that the poem was just a more-or-less straightforward report of something that happened, ending in a friendly gesture, and one might wonder what the point of the poem is.
But by making what should be the last line the title, he not only startles the reader, he also forces the reader, as you point out, to read the title again, as if to say, “really look at what I did!”
This is like a visual representation of irony–the situational irony of upsetting what we expect to be a last line by using it as a title instead. And it points out the irony of a situation–the goat being slaughtered and skinned–at which the narrator should feel sad, upset, maybe even a little angry, but instead reflexively returns a friendly greeting, as if giving tacit approval to the killing of an animal toward which the narrator has developed an attachment of familiarity at the very least.
The narrator, by emphasizing the last line in such a startling way, seems to be castigating himself for his seeming acceptance of the situation, perhaps out of guilt or shame.
For some reason, this makes me think of Stevie Smith’s poem, “Not Waving but Drowning,” in which (most) of the last line is the title, as well as being the last line of the poem.
We see the narrator of Stroud’s poem waving, but perhaps it’s not too far-fetched for us to also see him drowning a little inside as he waves.