 |
| Titling your poem is like sorting out a pile of lightbulbs... because that expression totally exists. |
If you're one of the lucky ones, you're totally confused right now. Choosing a title is scary? Frightening? Worthy of an entire blog post? Yes, actually. For a lot of writers, choosing a title can be the most daunting part of writing a poem.
You've already had the lightbulb moment and crafted a poem you're proud of; now comes the not-so-simple task of telling the world what your poem is about. Your title sets the tone for the entire poem and tells readers where they're about to go.
Your title could make your poem sound impossibly stupid, or out-of-this-world awesome. Your editors, in fact, have been shirking poem titles for the last two Featured Friday posts we've done together. (Not sure what we mean? Check out our untitled villanelles and our idiom-inspired poems.) Titles are important, and those of you who can just conjure titles like a damn poetry wizard, well, consider yourselves blessed.
Now, I won't sit here and tell you I have all the secrets to titling a poem. There are only a few poem titles I've ever come up with that I actually like. But I think it's time to open the dialogue and help each other out.
When it comes to titling your poem, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to get started:
- What inspired you to write your poem?
- What are some recurring images in your poem?
- What do you think your poem has left unsaid?
With any luck, these three questions should put you well on your way to writing the perfect title. But, everyone knows that poets aren't particularly lucky, so you may need a bit more direction:
Now that you're pondering, dive in:
- Bust out the thesaurus. What are some other ways to convey the emotion/scene of your poem?
- Pick a single word to describe/epitomize your poem. Slap it up at the top. Love it? Keep it. Hate it? Try again.
- Shack up with a preposition. "After," "Before," "During," etc. are all great words to help you generate a phrase to lead people into your poetry.
- Reference a work that directly influenced you. Not only will you be giving credit where credit is due, but you'll also be guiding other writers to more inspirational sources.
Other tactics to try:
- What's a word or phrase you love, but haven't had the chance to use? See if you can make it fit with the poem you need to title. Chances are, your subconscious may have helped you produce a poem that matches that word/phrase you're obsessed with.
- Cut the first line of your completed poem and use it as the title. Boom.
- Pick the poem's title first, and see what you can build off of that. (Obviously, this won't help you if you've finished a poem and don't know what to call it.)
- Take a look at other titles, either titles of poems or titles of books, and see if they can inspire you to break out of your titling-funk. Pick the strangest book on your shelf. How does it speak to you?
- Challenge yourself. Are you a one-word titler? Have your one-word titles stopped working for you? Write the longest poem title you've ever written and make yourself be OK with it. Example: I once titled a poem "Maybe one day I'll have the balls to make my titles as long as Anne Carson's." Is that the best example? No. But it helped me stop trying to find the singularly perfect word for my title.
- Go totally off the wall. Do something weird. Shut your poem up in a box and forget about it for a few days. Open up the box and just let your brain unravel a little and pop out a title. Surprise yourself. You might just end up surprising your audience in the best possible way.
Remember, too, that a title's not written in stone until it's published. You're perfectly at liberty to change any poem title you've written, or scrap it altogether. Like I mentioned before, we totally get leaving titles off your poems. Sometimes, they simply speak for themselves.
Tell us: what's your method to giving titles to your poems? Leave a comment below, and let's get this party started.
No comments:
Post a Comment