Philip Metres

 

It should do more than sit up there like a pretty hat. Perhaps it could be a handle on a door. 2

—Christopher Nelson

What’s the title of that poem?, I asked my friend Dima Psurtsev a dozen times while living in Russia a couple of decades ago, listening to poets in packed halls reading their work by heart.

No title, he replied.

How do you know what to call it?, I asked. 

You know it, he said, by its first line.

Reading a poem without a title is like entering a river midstream, not knowing how deep its water, knowing you’re going to be carried somewhere, and hoping you won’t drown. 

It’s like a cliffside path you decide to traverse because it was called a “moderate coastal path” in a guidebook written by a pathological minimizer. Once you realize that the path has no safety railing and the drop is at least 200 feet to the ocean, it’s too late to turn around. 

It was only the twentieth time that a student confessed to being “bad at titles” that I realized I’d been affixing titles (or refusing to affix titles) mostly through the concussed intuition from reading reams of poems and listening to the rumblings of my gut. This essay is an attempt to remedy my incoherence and answer three questions: where do titles come from, what kinds of titles exist, and what makes for a good title? 

The word title comes from the Old English titul, reinforced by Old French title, from the Latin word titulus, meaning “inscription.” The word must have come from the tangible writing or scrawling on an object, or on the frame surrounding the canvas, on or a card that would have come with it. This is this, it explained. 

There are moments I catch myself, in art museums, spending more time reading the neatly placed title card than the work of art looking back at me, in all its majesty and confusing mystery. It’s a reflex, of course. I’m at home with words, first and foremost, and also, I want to know what the artist called this hanging creation, and what an art curator who has spent their life looking at it feels it would be essential to know. But I feel guilty, because I know it’s a bourgeois guardrail to protect the viewer from the abyss of art and the abyss of the self that must confront the art. 

Today, the quaint analogue title card, with its author and context, has expanded to include all manner of personal content—thanks to the digital apparatus of social media and its endless possibilities of self-crafting and self-commodification. You already know what to think before you have to feel it. 

Which may be the opposite of what I mostly crave in the encounter of art, where the tangle of some imaginary thicket yields something I have not expected, and something opens up inside it and inside myself, sometimes at the same time. If one must have a title, may it not steal that unique delight of discovery that a work of art makes possible. 

Classical Greek and Latin lyric poems by Sappho, Pindar, Catullus, Horace came without titles. According to scholar Gwen Compton-Engle, “those poems typically come to us numbered rather than individually titled. With the earlier writers we suspect that even the arrangement of poems within a collection, and therefore the numeration, may reflect some later editor’s choice rather than that of the poet herself or himself. This is especially true with Greek lyric, which originated in the context of oral performance and where there is a huge chronological gap between the original composition and our first written record of them.”4 Only longer works received titles, and likely originated with the editor and arranger of the manuscripts. Compton-Engle surmises a material cause for this discrepancy: “The title goes on the papyrus scroll to indicate what the whole volume is, but within the scroll, there are no titles, just as there are no tables of contents.” 3

What’s left of Sappho’s poems recognition I had, long after I’d read and commented on the poem, caused me awe. 

Poems employing titles that experiment with and explode those forms offer the reader a new kind of surprise—the wonder and consternation of seeing a building created and detonated in real time. Khaled Mattawa’s electrifying “Power Point” poems in Tocqueville riffed on the well-known presentation program to explore the predicament of a poet wrestling in empire, and in turn inspired my own poem, “The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint.” On another level entirely, George Abraham’s masterful “Ode to Mennel Ibtissam singing Hallelujah on The Voice (France), translated in Arabic” offers itself as an ode that, when one reads closely, also reveals itself to be a combination of two recent poetic forms: the Arabic (cf. Marwa Helal) AND the Golden Shovel (cf. Terrance Hayes).

Titles that signal found forms offer poets and their readers the glorious ability of poetry to cannibalize and subvert all manner of discourse and language: fridge notes (“this is just to say”), advertisements, obituaries, toasts, postcards, themes, notes, blues, prescription, recipes, text messages, classified ads, Tinder profiles. Poets have adapted virtually every genre, discourse, and language use to their own ends. 

Title as Context Provider or Occasion

Titles can provide some context for the reader, to bear some of the weight that frees the poem to fly rather than merely hang on a wall, as in the aforementioned titles by Tu Fu. Robert Browning was among the innovators of titling in English, whose dramatic monologues invited titles that would bear some of the weight of a poem. Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos,” for example, signals the speaker and setting, while “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” provides us with the speaker and situation. Over a century later, Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead” offers us a window so clear, we can dispense with the details and enter right into the gravity of grief: “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy.…” In her “Coronagraphy” sequences in Field Theories, Samiya Bashir’s titles not only tell us the speaker of her dramatic monologues, they also signal the work ahead: “Polly Ann claims her stake,” right after “John Henry stakes his claim.”

In The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser says, “The titles and first few lines of your poem represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader.” 13 This is classic Kooser, a sort of Dale Carnegie poetics. For him, poems are a good (Midwestern) handshake, a look in the eye that invites you in. And truthfully, early titles did—and perhaps still do—may have an entrepreneurial function. After all, we want our poems to be read, don’t we? 

Carnegie, incidentally, once argued, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” 14 Uncannily, Tomás Q. Morín notes how a title “functions like the name of a person. Our names shouldn’t be throwaways.” 15 If a poem is a kind of creature, then the title is its name. May it tell us something about that creature’s essence. 

George Franklin wrote that a title could be “a window opening onto the poem”—as if the poem were a scene that the title helps us peer through. 16 Or, to return to our epigraph by Christopher Nelson, our titles should be less like pretty hats than handles on a door. 

Marwa Helal’s title, “poem to be read from right to left,” actually offers instructions to the reader to navigate her invented form, the Arabic. In her book, Invasive species, the title even walks down the page:

poem to be read from 

right

to left

Your titles, undoubtedly, will signal something about the work at hand, but also something about your approach to poetry more generally.

One final example that radiates a comic poignancy: Noor Hindi’s recent “Poem In Which My Mother Tells Me Not To Do A Pap Smear Because It Might Tear My Nonexistent Hymen” provides us the occasion (or rather, at least two occasions) and an implied background of a mother-daughter conversation about health and hygiene in a conservative Muslim household. 

Title as North Star

According to Oliver de la Paz, “Alberto Ríos compared titling poems to navigation via North Star. There has to be a fixed point in the title that triangulates the reader with the context of the poem and where the writer wants the reader to be at the end of reading.” 17 This metaphor is like a context provider but must resonate past the immediate context. There’s a certain magic when a context-providing title also vibrates beyond its immediate situation. 

It’s good to remember that T.S. Eliot’s towering “The Waste Land”—an attempt at nothing less than a hallucinatory post-apocalyptic vision of European civilization after World War I—used to be titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” That title, whimsical as it is, failed to capture the grand devastation that Eliot intended. 

Another classic of this variety is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The poem’s title situates us in a museum of fine arts, with the speaker strolling among the Old Masters; however, it also invites us to think about what the fine arts include and exclude—and where suffering happens (in the corners of things sometimes, where and when no one is looking) amid all that beauty. Incidentally, the original title was “Palais des beaux arts”—the Palace of Fine Arts. 

Title as Fourth Dimension, and Other Realms of Amazement

Poetry thrives in metaphor, as metaphor—where everything can come to be a way of talking about something else entirely. As Ian Demsky writes, “If a poem is about ‘the thing and the other thing,’ as they say, then often it can be the title that signposts the ‘other thing.’” 18

Kooser proposes “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.” But Kazim Ali quips, “unless you’re John Ashbery or Wallace Stevens.” 19 Poem titles in the hands of masters of evasion like Ashbery and Stevens can act as an additional layer to an otherwise straightforward poem, or a poem that seems about something else entirely. 

In “My Stevens: A Titling Hero,” Matthea Harvey outlines five types of Stevens titles: “license-plate titles, spotlight titles, helium titles, greased-pig titles, and untitled or not wearing a tie.” 20 Most of these monikers require no explanation, except the helium title, and that’s the title as fourth dimension. In Harvey’s words, “If you think of the poem as a balloon, the helium title allows it to rise … expands its scope.… They aim to increase the levels of meaning in the poem. Poems with helium titles are often extremely dependent on their titles. If you take away a helium title from a poem, it will seem much less complex. Often helium titles identify a theory or a philosophical problem.” 21 

Take, for example, Stevens’s poem “A Postcard from the Volcano.” The poem begins: “Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill.…” What an opening. There is no volcano in the poem, and the poem is much too long to fit onto a postcard. (Is the volcano writing the postcard? Probably not.) Yet somehow it feels like the perfect way to describe the insufficiency of a form (postcard) to something sublime (volcano). It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s line, “Vesuvius at Home.”

Our emotional lives can contain such force and power, yet does any of it stick to the page? Stevens is lamenting the insufficiency of his art to capture the fugitive feeling of feeling, of being “a spirit storming in blank walls.” Even in his lament, Stevens captures something of a midlifer teetering between death and youth so dangerously, so beautifully. 

The point for Stevens—particularly the Stevens of his first book Harmonium—is to play, to open up something new, to live in the realm of the fantastical and the amazing. Once, my little cousin once pranced into a living room full of adults to show us some new magic tricks, announcing in his loudest voice, “prepare to be amazed!” That’s what a good Stevens title invites us to. 

Title as Tether or Ether

The opposite can also be true. A poem that is full of flights might benefit from a tether to the earth. In Amy Dryansky’s words, “If the poem is somewhat free ranging and abstract, I try to choose a title that provides a bit of context or anchor.” 22 Similarly, Traci Brimhall notes that “with super lyric I give a narrative title so the dense music has its Virgil before entering the poem.… Often I choose something that I hope will encourage a reader to read it again after finishing the poem and looking back up.” 23 

Elizabeth Bishop’s modest title “One Art” causes its reader to return to it, to think more about the essence of all art as a bulwark against the wreck of transience. John Ashbery’s “The One Thing That Can Save America,” by contrast, sets a reader on high alert. Every line becomes filled with possible implications, turning the reader into a Calvinist looking for signs. Even if, in all likelihood, Ashbery’s title is tongue-in-cheek, it pulls the poem against its own wanderings. 

Title as First Line of the Poem

Anne Ferry names William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore as “among the first poets writing in English” to employ the title as a running first line into the poem, though she notes that it was already implied in many of Walt Whitman’s poems. 24 Poems like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” offer an example of a context title and a first line of a haiku. Williams clearly had a lot of fun with his titles, sometimes employing them as feints, as in “To a Poor Old Woman.” Without reading the poem, one might think the poem is addressed to the putatively poor old woman, summoning some earnest occasion worthy of tears. On the contrary, Williams dismantles the sentimental convention, beginning the poem: 

munching a plum on

the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

They taste good to her

Similarly, Marianne Moore’s poem “An Octopus” is not about an octopus at all, but rather a glacier, as we learn by the first line of the poem: “Of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat.” The modernists, obsessed with inviting the reader to see again, differently, anew. 

Today, using the title as the jumping-off point of the poem is a standard option in a poet’s toolkit of titling. It creates a sort of tumbling effect that is startlingly pleasing for a reader, like meeting someone for the first time as they’re about to embark on a journey. John Ashbery’s monostich, “The Cathedral Is” is over as soon as you meet its first line: “slated for demolition.” 

Title as Dialogue with Other Poems or Works of Art. 

Titles can announce how the poem is in dialogue with, inspired by, or arguing against other well-known poems or works of art. This sort of title invites dialogism, the third dimension of a poem talking with or back against an assertion of things. In the English poetry tradition, this started early, with Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” coming just one year after Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” written in 1599. Raleigh’s nymph counters Marlowe’s come-hither spring pastoral, questioning the long-term prospects of said shepherd and the complexity of long-term love:

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move

To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;

And Philomel becometh dumb;

The rest complain of cares to come. 

Hang on, she’s implying. How do I know you’re not lying? I know that natural beauty of summer now will turn to fall. More than that: that male desire seems inextricable from male violence. Witness Philomel and her rape, not only her honor but her very tongue torn from her. Even those who are more fortunate than Philomel are full of worries and concerns. There are times when it seems that the spirit of poetry flares precisely in its reversal, its voltas, its rebellions against norms or traditions. 

Poems can also be in dialogue with other works of art. The practice of ekphrasis, or verbal renderings of visual works of art, has a long tradition. From Achilles’s shield rendered by Homer to Brueghel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” addressed by at least two great poems of note, including William Carlos Williams’s poem of the same name and W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”—ekphrastic poems can signal their dialogue right in their title. 

The whole catalogue of titles “After X” can signal homage to another writer or thinker, though it often departs as much as imitates. David Wojahn’s “After Wittgenstein” deploys a well-known Wittgensteinian quote from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“the world is everything that is the case”) in a swirling haunt of a poem that is the opposite of the clean logic of the philosopher’s treatise. 

Titles as Luminous Mysteries, Sorrowful Mysteries

In Roman Catholicism, there are ways to pray the rosary, including meditating on a variety of scriptural stories gathered by their feelings, like “the luminous mysteries” (about Jesus’s miracles), or the sorrowful mysteries (about Jesus’s crucifixion). 

Whether the title is luminous or sorrowful, it can still be, in the words of Twila Newey, “a mystery.” 25 After all, doesn’t great art evade total understanding? I’ve long puzzled over some titles, and maybe I’ll never know their meaning. And maybe that’s okay. 

Title as Revelation of Poetic Style

David Baker provides a prickly, yet productive reply. He writes that 

“how any one poet creates a title is different from other poets, and different from that poet’s other methods—unless a poet really likes obedience to methodology. I do not. Perhaps if a poet is launched on a project, the titles will stem from that; but (I promise I’m not cranky today) I really don’t care for projects either. I care for poems one at a time, and hope they are distinctive and significant. I am patient. If a title comes first, great; if midstream, great; if later, even much later, great.… I do like to fumble around in the dark. I trust the dark. I do not trust prompts, processes, the professional production of poems. I prefer not to think of it as a profession at all. Teaching is a profession, an honorable one. But poems? or Poetry? Not so much. So I’ll call my reply here, for a title, ‘David Has Some Coffee and Doesn’t Really Answer His Friend Phil’s Good Question.’ Or ‘Sunday Morning.’ There’s a good title!” 26

David’s wry second title brings us back to Wallace Stevens’s, and the way in which a title reveals something about the poem to be read. “Sunday Morning,” of course, was Stevens’ attempt to grapple with the pull and limits of organized religion, an attempt to create his own sort of sermon for sensuality—his own religion of poetry, even—in the face of mortality. 

Well, That’s All Well and Good, But How Can I Trick Out My Titles?

Here’s an experiment, combining the above methods with Lucy Biederman’s (author of the catchily titled The Walmart Book of the Dead), to find a title that might grab a reader’s attention. 

1.              Write a title that signals the form of your poem.

2.              Write a Situating title that situates the reader in the context/situation. 

3.              Write a title that is a North Star, offering guidance not immediately connected to the poem.

4.              Write a Fourth Dimension/Amazement title. 

5.              Write a Tether/Ether title, depending on the type of poem. 

6.              Write a title that quotes or signals a work of art or poem that this poem is in dialogue with. 

7.              With a Luminous/Sorrowful Mystery title.

8.              Copy a line from the poem that could serve as the title of the poem.

9.              Write a full sentence that doesn’t appear in the poem, but that could serve as the title.

10.            Write a title that is a question beginning with Who, What, When, Where, Is, Does, or Will.

11.            Write a title beginning with the words How To.

12.            Write a title beginning with an –ing verb.

13.            Write a title beginning with the word On.

14.            Write a title that is a time—of day, or a date, month, or year, life.

15.            Steal a title from elsewhere—a song, movie, another story.

16.            Write a title that is a play or pun on your stolen title, or that changes that title in some way.

17.            Write a one-word title, a two-word title, etc. 

18.            Write a title that has a non-English word in it.

19.            Choose two of the titles you’ve written and join them together by placing the word Or between them. 

20.            Write the title of the poem you wish you had written.

 

Title as Hypothesis

From a process point of view, an initial title is nearly always more like a hypothesis, a proposition that the poem will prove or disprove. Ed Pavli? invites us to “wait for the title to arrive. Sometimes they arrive years before the work they introduce. Other times they’re hidden in the work already.” 27 I read somewhere that a title was often tucked away toward the ending of the poem—say three lines up and halfway through the line. It’s nearly always more interesting than the title you began with. 

Title as Trigger

Some poets find titles as initial triggers to inspiration. Erika Meitner, for example, writes that she keeps “a running list in a notebook from art exhibits, and reading (architectural & art theory or exhibit descriptions), and … put[s] 1–3 titles at the top, start[s] writing and eventually see[s] where it goes.” 28 Recent titles from Meitner include “Invitation to Tender,” “Light-Sensitive Puzzle Piece,” and “What Follows Is a Reconstruction Based on the Best Available Evidence.” Similarly, Morín writes that his titles “often arrive years before the poem does [often with other notes about character and situation].” 29 Rebecca Hazelton keeps “a document of phrases that were interesting to me and would go to it, pull one out and write a poem. And then I would determine if the phrase was actually the proper title or not. If it wasn’t, I would retitle the poem, and then put the generative phrase back in the document.” 30

The Title as the Last Thing 

For many poets, the titles arrive at the end. Surya Barrow proffers that “the title seems to come last for me. Long after I began to understand why the poem wanted to be written.” 31 We may begin with a title, but that title may cede to the greater title that the poem has become. 

Book Titles

Elise Gabbert confesses that “the poet Ed Skoog told me ‘Titles are advertising.’ I think this is true, especially for book titles—like covers and blurbs, they are trying to tell you what kind of book you’re holding, what other books it is like, and what kind of person is supposed to like it. But good titles do something more than that; they make the book better, by telling you how to think of it.” 32 There’s no way around it—a title is something carried on the cover of a book, and much thought should be put to how it hails its audience. Exciting titles can range from the pithy (Refusal or Homie or Rue) to the ornate (Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod). 

---

---