Using Titles

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Opening Thoughts — 0:00:01

Titles are hard for everybody. There’s no point pretending otherwise. One participant observed that when a title arrives easily at the start, it can actually be limiting—you already know where the poem is going. When a title is hard to find, it often means the poem has taken you somewhere unexpected, which is frequently a sign that something interesting has happened. Robert Frost’s design for this: no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. Even Frost himself struggled—his sonnet “Design” was called “In White” for more than two decades before he found the right name.

Titles are both part of the poem and outside of it. They are the transition from the outer world into the poem—the first introduction, setting up expectations the poem may fulfill or undercut. That transitional quality allows them to do quite a number of different things.

What Titles Can Do — 0:07:00

A non-exhaustive list of uses, with the understanding that a single title often does more than one of these things at once.

Establishing narrative context—who is speaking, under what circumstances, in what location. Theodore Roethke argued that the title is often all a poem needs of narrative structure. Whether or not that’s true, it can carry a great deal of contextual weight so the body of the poem doesn’t have to.

Providing citations and references—to other texts, works of art, or sources the reader needs to know. An ekphrastic poem can name the painting in the title; a poem written in the tradition of another can include after so-and-so.

Setting the emotional or tonal register—is it warm or cold, ironic or sincere, playful or grave?

Signaling the speaker’s stance—toward the material, the listener, the reader.

Highlighting a key image or idea from the body of the poem, giving it extra weight it might not otherwise carry.

Nudging the reader toward a particular interpretation—not telling them what to think, but setting up a lens or framework that can clarify, complicate, or ironize what follows.

Linking poems in a series—using similar titles to hold a collection together structurally and thematically.

Announcing a theme or subject—though this is risky. Titles like Love or Beauty make huge promises that any single poem will struggle to keep.

Anti-titles—Untitled, Poem, or simply leaving the title blank. These can make a statement, but they can also read as unfinished or lazy; handle with care.

The Robert Hass Title Exercise — 0:15:00

Hass used this exercise in one of his courses. He gave students a single image with no title:

The mound of snow at the corner of Broadway and 100th thaws and freezes, freezes and thaws.

Then he showed how different titles transform the meaning of the identical image. “Thinking that the Marines may go into Nicaragua again” turns it into an argument about the cyclical nature of military intervention. “Good Friday, Upper Broadway 1983” locates it in a specific time and place. “Near Duke Ellington Circle at the end of winter” ties it to Ellington’s work and geography. “Waiting for your call” makes it a thwarted love poem. “For the old Puerto Rican lady who told me furiously that there is no God” creates an entirely different narrative that we have to work to connect to the image. Same six words, five or six totally different poems.

This is a good exercise to try with any image you like.

Establishing Narrative Context — 0:21:00

Craig Raine’s “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” is the clearest example. The title tells us everything we need to know about the speaker’s perspective, so the poem can open immediately into the Martian’s baffled observations—books as “mechanical birds with many wings,” a telephone as “a haunted apparatus” that sleeps and snores—without any preamble. We know why the world looks strange. Without the title, we’d spend much of the poem just trying to figure out what’s happening.

Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris works similarly. Many of the poems are named for the flower that is speaking, so the voice of the wild iris, or the snowdrop, or the mock orange is established before the poem begins. Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead” names the loss in the title—Michiko was his wife—so the body of the poem can sustain a single extended metaphor about grief as carrying a box, without ever having to say the word grief or explain who died.

Setting Emotional or Tonal Register — 0:28:00

Dean Young, “Original Monkey”

The title is simultaneously grand and cartoonish, which is exactly how the poem operates. “Original” carries the weight of deep time and origin myths; “Monkey” undercuts it. The poem is full of pathos and very funny at the same time—my agony is no sillier than yours, even if it’s riding a tiny unicycle—and the title sets up that double register in advance.

Philip Larkin, “The Mower”

By contrast, this is a completely literal title. He’s mowing the lawn and accidentally kills a hedgehog. But the figure of the mower carrying a scythe, harvesting life, is also the oldest image of death in English. By naming the poem only for the instrument, Larkin gives it a quiet archetypal weight: this is a poem about one man doing a chore, and also about all mortality. The restraint is part of the effect.

Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

The title does two things at once: it tells us this is a meditation (so we should expect associative drift rather than argument), and it sets it in a specific physical place (which grounds the more unmoored philosophical musings in a real landscape). Both signals are fulfilled. The poem wanders beautifully—from new thinking about loss to an old conversation to a memory of a former lover to blackberry, blackberry, blackberry—and the title has prepared us for that wandering while preventing it from feeling shapeless.

Lucille Clifton, “Homage to My Hips”

The title tells us exactly what the poem will do and sets up the mode: simultaneously serious (an homage is a formal act of tribute) and playful (the subject is the speaker’s own hips). “These hips are big hips. They need space to move around in.” The combination of grandeur and self-assertion, established by the title, gives the poem its confidence.

Highlighting Key Images — 0:42:00

Mark Doty’s “Golden Retrievals” uses the title to do two things: identify the speaker (a golden retriever), and introduce the poem’s central pun—retrieval as the dog’s obsessive purpose, and also retrieval as the poem’s argument about mindfulness and presence. The dog, always in the moment, turns out to be a kind of Zen master for the distracted, past-haunted human at the other end of the leash.

Robert Hass’s “Faint Music” is a long poem about self-love, a friend’s suicide attempt, heartbreak, and philosophical drift. “Faint music” appears only briefly, almost buried—described as hovering “like grace” beneath everything—but the title pulls this nearly invisible detail forward and makes it the emotional and thematic key to everything else. Without the title, we might lose it entirely.

Nudging Toward Interpretation — 0:47:00

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

The title shifts the weight of the poem’s repeated phrase—”the art of losing isn’t hard to master”—from the losing to the art. It invites us to read the poem as an ars poetica, a poem about the craft of making poems. This matters because it puts us inside the poem’s central performance: Bishop has committed to a form (the villanelle) that requires her to end by saying that losing the you—the beloved—is not a disaster. She cannot bring herself to say it cleanly. The poem ends with write it—an instruction to herself, surfacing right in the text. The title’s emphasis on art makes us notice that she’s wrestling with the demands of the form as part of the poem’s meaning.

One participant noted they might focus on one rather than art—is this the number one art? One of many? The title’s ambiguity is productive.

Alan Shapiro, “Old Joke”

Shapiro opens in contemporary vernacular and then moves into an elaborate, overblown address to Apollo. The title sets up the contrast in register and prepares us to read the elevated language as performative. Old carries multiple meanings: the old joke of the dad’s crude pun; the gods as ancient joke figures the speaker can’t take entirely seriously; and old age itself as the joke the gods play on mortals. The title is doing several things at once, all of them useful.

Robert Hass, “A Story About the Body”

A short prose poem about a young composer who falls for an older Japanese painter, who tells him she’s had a double mastectomy; he can’t go through with it, and in the morning finds a small blue bowl on his porch—rose petals on top, dead bees beneath. The title puts the focus firmly on the body, which is one possible reading of the poem but not necessarily the most interesting one. One participant argued the title might be redundant—the body is clearly the subject—and that the final image of the dead bees is so striking it could anchor the poem better than the title does.

Linking Poems in a Series — 0:55:00

Terrance Hayes’s collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin gives every poem in the book the same title. The repetition creates intense thematic and structural unity, tying each poem to the others. Glück’s The Wild Iris uses flower names for poems spoken by flowers and different titles for poems spoken by the human character, so the titling system itself is a signal about who is speaking.

Announcing a Theme — 0:59:00

Abstract noun titles like Love or Beauty are hard to pull off, because no single poem can live up to such a sweeping promise. When they work, it tends to be through irony or complication. Tony Hoagland’s “Beauty” is nominally about beauty but quickly becomes about the loss of beauty—and then the discovery that the loss itself is a kind of beauty. Thomas Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing” works because the phrase is unusual enough to feel like a specific insight rather than a claim to cover the whole subject.

One participant offered a useful principle: abstract titles work best when the poem beneath them is dense with concrete images—the abstraction overhead, the specificity below.

Anti-Titles — 1:02:00

Langston Hughes’s “Poem” is a good example of the anti-title done with intention. The poem is about the loss of his friend: I loved my friend. / He went away from me. / There’s nothing more to say. By refusing to title it, Hughes enacts a refusal to aestheticize the loss—except, of course, he has aestheticized it, and the poem itself acknowledges this by calling attention to itself as a poem. The anti-title does both things at once: it says I won’t make this a made thing, and it is unmistakably a made thing.

Numbering poems, especially in long sequences, is a related strategy—common in extended series where the individual poems are meant to be read together.

Closing Thoughts — 1:06:00

The table of contents of a journal or collection is a real factor: titles are how readers decide whether to read a poem, and how they remember and refer to it afterward. That’s something to keep in mind, though it doesn’t need to be the primary consideration. The most useful question is what the title does inside the poem’s universe—what it adds, opens up, or focuses. If it’s redundant, consider whether it’s pulling its weight; if it’s doing something the body of the poem isn’t, it may be doing exactly what it should.