“To determine if your title is good, you have to ask yourself why you chose it in the first place.” – dimitrireyespoet.com
For the beginner poet, a title is among the first things that are written off as an afterthought. But when we consider the many things that make great poetry; tension, connotation, diction, line lengths, the title should be included on that list, too. As the first cluster of words (or single word) that the reader sees, everything rests on the title. It has the responsibility of communicating what was left out in the piece and is where the audience receives some general context to what is being expressed.
” if you don’t work your body to top physical condition in order to carry the weight of the world, you’ll be crushed beneath it. And that’s how you may feel with a poem.”
For a literary comparison, the title/poem relationship is like Atlas carrying the world, where Atlas is a poem title and the world would be “the world” in which the poem encompasses. To hold up the world, you need to have some serious musculature. To that effect, you can’t have a title that’s generic and cliche’d and this is something that we often try to get away with. We spend time creating our poems in that one session and then begin to run out of steam. To finish it, we think up of some ending and maybe a title to tie our loose ends, no questions asked, and BOOM. There’s a poem. If the poem was about a bad breakup, we’ll title it, “To Never Love Again” and when we’re struggling for an ending we’ll simply damn that ex to hell and say something like “maybe i’ll never love again.” This is an example of what we tend to do if we’re presented with a challenge. The idea of wanting to apply pretty bows on these poems and write it off as complete helps us feel better, but it doesn’t benefit the poem. To echo Atlas again, if you don’t work your body to top physical condition in order to carry the weight of the world, you’ll be crushed beneath it. And that’s how you may feel with a poem.
This isn’t to say that if you want to think about one of your high school poems that are titled “first love,” that it wasn’t a good place to start. What I’d like you to do is just remember this— at the most simplest level, the title functions as the connective tissue between the reader and the poem’s body. This is what makes a really good title.
To determine if your title is good, you have to ask yourself why you chose it in the first place. To help illustrate that process, I’ll use one of my poems as an example below. As a disclaimer, this poem received second place in the Chicago Review of Books 2017 Poetry Contest and it’s my personal opinion (because there’s no way to actually determine it) that the title may have kept me from getting first place, as the poem was good, but hadn’t reached its full potential yet.
This poem, entitled “1993 Toyota Corolla SE” was a part of a larger project that I was working on during my MFA and have since abandoned, though I still favor a lot of these poems. The basis of this particular poem is inspired by an actual situation that my grandfather went through during his career as a textile factory worker and the speaker is going through the motions of idolizing the experience. The audience learns throughout this collection that much of the speaker’s storytelling are recitations come from stories he’s heard several times. Much of the language has a working class tone and the words and phrases such as walk, walk, walk, and cut, stitch, press. Along with the working class dialogue, it would then occupy the spaces of working class (particularly Latinx working class) ideologies that include masculinity and religion.
Thinking about this information, now we’re ready to address how the title communicates with the body of the poem. Basically, I attempted to put the “pretty bow” at the top of this poem as I titled the poem after the model of the car from the actual story. You’ll see in the first line I talk about 3 toyotas. Although this reference quizzes the reader and gives them an idea of time, I might’ve been a bit overly obsessed with the idea of the car when this wasn’t all this poem was about. After sitting on this poem for some time, I started to notice lines like “every storm was a fight for his belongings/ this time his driver’s license/ a school picture of me.” This was telling me that the poem was less about my grandfather’s relationship with the car and more about my grandfather and the world around him— like the car, his place of work, and the weather. As with every poem, there’s a journey that takes place, and his journey included the consistent overcoming of challenges from moving overseas to America as a young adult and creating success out of these different scenarios.
And the water continued to return in this poem, literally “flooding” the poem, causing all of these different lines in the poem to look like they’re collapsing on each other. I thought about the word flooding but I also thought of baptism for its sense of strength and how it reacted to the undercurrents of the grandfather walking through water. It then added concepts that weren’t in the poem, like being born again after every experience, for the grandfather, and obviously the car, as another one had to be bought.
So after all of that I ended up retitling it “Baptism” and I moved a couple of things around and i felt like it worked a lot better.
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