Excuse Me While I Wring This Long Swim Out Of My Hair
Some people insist every poem needs its own title, as if you were naming a baby. Personally I don’t mind if a poem goes around as “Untitled,” although, of course, a title lets the poet determine how the poem is identified. Don’t title it and you run the risk of readers coming up with something like “the poem with sleet in it,” or “the dead baby poem.” Who wants that? Luckily, default will usually kick in and the poem will be identified by its first line, à la e.e. cummings. This can be a good thing.
On the other side are poets who use the same title over and over, like Louise Glück in Wild Iris. This makes identifying the poem even harder than leaving it untitled. There’s “Matins page 2,” “Matins page 3,” page 12, 13, 25, etc. Hey, they were all good, but which one are we talking about?
In my book, anything would be preferable to calling a poem “Poem.” As if there were only one!
There’s a poet I know who hates long titles. I admit this can come off as gimmicky, but usually I find it a draw. A poem called “Poem in Which the Clairvoyant Gives In and Sells Her Internal Organs to Buy the Lycra-Like Trampoline” would pique my interest more than “Snow.” (At least initially.) The danger here is the reader enters with big expectations. If the poem is a let-down, an extraordinary title won’t save it. It will only make the let-down worse.
I thought such long titles were rare but a recent cull of Verse Daily turns up a bunch of them. If any of these intrigue you, you can read them there, and see if the poems deliver.
- “Brought to You by the Letter Ox , Or: Why I Want my Son to Remain Illiterate” by Mitchell Metz
- “Portrait of Hooper as a Drama Minor Pulling an All-nighter for the Finance Exam” by Charles Sweetman
- “The Blackmailer’s Wife Reads History and Considers the Nature of Guilt” by Judy Brown
- “On the Abduction of Calvin Klein’s Daughter Marci: A Captor’s Narrative” by Robyn Schiff
- “The Poem You Hang on Your Wall Like a Painting Because It Does Something Different Each Time the Light” by Timothy Kelly
- “Speedy Inexpensive Chaos Theory Poem About Short Term Memory Loss” by Peggy Munson
- “I Am Talking Dirty to You Like You are the Only One in the Room” by Danielle Pafunda
- “On a Woodpecker Drinking from a Knothole Still Full of the Last Rain” by Maurice Manning
Here’s a quirk of Google Alerts. I have one for my producing partner. I got an Alert for her and the first item is this post by my step-sister Sarah, that tagged my partner only because her dissociated first and last name showed up in Sarah’s post. I do not like modern living, but I do like other parts of the 21st century.
Fascinating topic, poem titles. No two Untitleds alike, and the cult of the ultra-long has about run its gimmicky course. A poem title should be a poem, I think, maybe a haiku or something even more terse. That said, if going long, I think Mitchell Metz’ title is the best. (I have an essay on poem titles on Avatar Review #2.)