A work in progress, IN SEARCH OF VOICE

[42BelowsBack]

Thoughts for the purpose of understanding where I am.

Disclaimer, none of the following is telling anyone to do anything. They are a presentation of thoughts relative to a desired poem writing technique.

Feel Free to add your own thought explorations. I will be updating and continuously reworking mine.

“Great minds think alike and Fools never differ.” In search of peaceful solutions I for one will always look at the other side of the coin. As Sun Tzu wrote, “Know thy enemy as they self.”

 

[42BelowsBack]

Topic One: poem Titles
(in search of consistency).

To state the obvious, poem titles introduce poems.

Titles as reflections of a poem.
Presently I struggle with writing titles and poems. Most often I will write the titles after the poem has been written. It isn’t working.

Titles as key to lock in a poems meaning.

The aforementioned practice of titles as reflections evolved into an attempt to use the title to lock in a tricky poem’s possible meanings. It isn’t working in the way intended. As Jimi Hendrix reflected in the lyrics of Red House… Lord, I'm missin' the key to unlock this door…” My key / titles often don’t open my poems.

Title and poem. The eloquence of maintaining connection and disconnection, between two tracks; with singular purposeful clarity.

Example, Billy Collin’s penned a poem titled, Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

I was introduced to this poem through a conversational piece written by @Tzara (Link to Tzara’s post).

In the wonderful way that thoughtful conversations do inspire unexpected results, I extrapolated: Titles and poems could work separated in unified purpose. Like two singular tracks conveying a train of thought.

I realized a title could clearly set out the scene for a subsequent poem. The poem is now in/directly challenged by its title to poeticizes the title sentence. I really like this idea that a title can operate on one track: The poem’s body then becomes the necessary other track. As with an actual pair of rails; consistency of separation between the two is critical.

Note: @NivKay wrote an excellent essay which explores a similar vein. I recommend poets seeking their own voice read it. Including anything Tzara has written on poetry. As always, if, @Angeline comments. Angeline’s graceful voice is vital.

 

[42BelowsBack]

How does one write a poem? How does one structure a poem?

One really good solution to this is to make a kind of story. It doesn't have to be elaborate, or showy, or linguistically frilly. It just needs to engage the reader with some basic narrative that he or she can relate to.

Like Angie's "Awakening." Twenty lines, very basic story, but interesting and compelling. The poem is more than a "I looked hot in that swimsuit" poem--it references older women's opinion, the narrator's uncertainty about how she looks, her growing confidence about how she looks, the whole thing about incipient sexuality.

It is, in other words, about the emotions experienced by the narrator, which is what makes it a poem.

Or, at least to me, a pretty good one.

A future topic. Sticking with titles for the moment.

 

[_Land]

So for me personally, titles are incredibly important and I personally like to have a tie in from the title to at least one line or stanza within the poem or to the overall context.


I generally speaking we'll start with a working title

I have a concept in mind and I start with that concept based as a title

Something as simple as broccoli salad

And I 100% write poetry with each title in mind. There are a few exceptions of course to every rule I don't always think of a title for smaller form poems like tanka....

So what that looks like sometimes is I'll have a concept or an idea I'll create a title out of that as a anchor point to the rest of the poem and then is the poem develops if necessary I will change the title to reflect and sometimes they even save the original titles for a different piece of poetry.

Because not all poetry as I write ends up fitting the title and I change it.

But again this is just my process when I post a title with intent to start with I'm not stuck on it just like I'm not stuck on any specific stanza and sometimes my poetry changes a massive amount in an hour of sitting and revisions.

I can't count the number of times where I've written a line into a piece of poetry

Where the line was better than the entire context of the poetry so I chose to create a poem around that line rather than work with what I had started with....

 

[Tzara]

Topic One: poem Titles
(in search of consistency).

To state the obvious, poem titles introduce poems.

Titles as reflections of a poem.
Presently I struggle with writing titles and poems. Most often I will write the titles after the poem has been written. It isn’t working.

Titles as key to lock in a poems meaning.

The aforementioned practice of titles as reflections evolved into an attempt to use the title to lock in a tricky poem’s possible meanings. It isn’t working in the way intended. As Jimi Hendrix reflected in the lyrics of Red House… Lord, I'm missin' the key to unlock this door…” My key / titles often don’t open my poems.

Title and poem. The eloquence of maintaining connection and disconnection, between two tracks; with singular purposeful clarity.

Example, Billy Collin’s penned a poem titled, Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

I was introduced to this poem through a conversational piece written by @Tzara (Link to Tzara’s post).

In the wonderful way that thoughtful conversations do inspire unexpected results, I extrapolated: Titles and poems could work separated in unified purpose. Like two singular tracks conveying a train of thought.

I realized a title could clearly set out the scene for a subsequent poem. The poem is now in/directly challenged by its title to poeticizes the title sentence. I really like this idea that a title can operate on one track: The poem’s body then becomes the necessary other track. As with an actual pair of rails; consistency of separation between the two is critical.

Note: @NivKay wrote an excellent essay which explores a similar vein. I recommend poets seeking their own voice read it. Including anything Tzara has written on poetry. As always, if, @Angeline comments. Angeline’s graceful voice is vital.

Some thoughts on titles:

I did a quick scan through the various books on writing poetry that I own and didn't find anything about titles. I'm not sure what that means. Do the poets who write books about the writing of poetry think titles are unimportant? Or that they're so idiosyncratic there's nothing really to be said about them? Or that they're so personal that's it's up to poets themselves to compose appropriate titles or avoid titling their poems at all?

Not all poems, of course, have titles nor are they expected to have them. Forms such as haiku and tanka typically do not have titles. Sonnets and sonnet sequences often do not have titles—think of Shakespeare's or Berrigan's sonnets which are, if anything, numbered rather than titled. Edna St. Vincent Millay's many sonnets often (usually?) don't have titles and are "titled" by placing the first line in quotes or within brackets/parentheses as a title (like some of her poems listed here).

What about a poem that is labeled "Untitled"? Is that label a title or an explicit rejection of a title? (Some publication formats require something like a title, for example a web page listing a variety of poems by a particular author where the actual poems appear on separate pages or in the table of contents of a book of poems.)

In my experience, even poets who do brilliant and descriptive titles will also write poems with rather mundane or uninteresting ones. I'm thinking particularly here of James Wright, whose poems include awesomely well-titled poems such as "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me" or "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned" but who also wrote poems with more generic titles like "Youth". Or take Billy Collins, referenced in the post mentioned earlier, who sometimes has great and evocative titles like "Shoveling Snow with Buddha" but also ones with titles like "Poem".

There is also the danger of crafting a title that is more interesting than the poem itself. If I had somehow managed to come up with a title like "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me", any poem I could have written would fail to measure up to the brilliance of the title (unless, perhaps, I was smart enough to let the title be the poem, with no following text). The British poet Wendy Cope illustrated the problem with this little poem:

​

Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis​

​

It was a dream I had last week​

And some kind of record seemed vital.​

I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem​

But I love the title.​

​

As to my own practice, I usually come up with a title after I've written the poem. This isn't always the case, but it probably is true 80-90% of the time.

 

[Angeline]

I'll join the title struggle club. I know they're important (well *I* think they are) in that they should invite a reader into the poem. I've written poems with horrible titles like "Dance Trance," where readers even commented that they like the poem but oy that title.

The problem is that I can't (usually) write the title first because once I begin my poem goes in whatever direction it wants. And once I've written the draft I feel like I need space from writing for a bit. Like Tzara I write the title after the poem most of the time.

I said I usually don't write titles first because long ago on this forum we had Same Title Challenges wherein we'd torture each other by coming up with the most insane titles. And then everyone who signed on had to figure out how they'd interpret the title. Of course that can mean you're writing about the title, rather like Tzara's Wendy Cope example. That's not always a bad thing obviously but this is why I'm always on the struggle bus with titles. I'm just never sure what to do or if what I choose is any good. Looking forward to anyone's brilliant suggestion(s)!