Staking the Claim of the Title
by Nance Van Winckel
I can’t recall a day I wasn’t on the hunt for a title. When don’t I have a poem or story in need of one? My title antennae remain in a permanent up position.
Titles are crucial. Titles can give a literary work a frame or a spark. They can infuse a piece with power and authority, or with mystery and allure. Bad titles can be lead weights; clever ones can kill or poison. If Whitman had kept his original title, our beloved Leaves of Grass would be called I am the world, we are the people. Yikes! You’d find The Sun Also Rises under Fiesta.
A title is usually the first piece of information the reader takes in—often absorbing it more than reading it. We can’t exactly “read” the title at the outset—i.e. get a sense of its meaning or relevance—because it doesn’t yet have enough context to allow for that. So we glance at the title, perhaps muse a split second, then store it away. I like this storage aspect, and many titles work well simply because of how they hover in the mental periphery as we read on. Take Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, for example. About three quarters of the way through the novel, the title gives me a sudden jolt. It clicks. Oh, I realize, it’s not Jude Sr. who’s been the obscure one, but now this other sad, mysterious woe-be-gotten Jude Jr. who’s entered the novel. But my point is, the title’s been looming, accumulating the force it will eventually deliver.
A title can be so much more than a label for the work. A label is the name under which you save something on your disk while you’re waiting for the real title to get within radar range. If Plath had saved a poem under the label “death wish” for a while, she knew enough later to call it “Lady Lazarus.”
A contemporary title maestro, Thomas Lux, once told me that a poet’s job is “to write poems that are hard NOT to read.” Titles, he said, are the first way that poets can set up that inevitability. The title stakes a claim. It immediately reaches out and grasps the reader’s imagination. Then it’s up to the poem—and certainly the same is true for any literary work—to maintain its spell over the reader. A good title, like every important component of a literary work, must be at once both a surprise and an inevitability. Here’s one of Lux’s titles that works hard for the poem:
A Man Gets Off Work Early
and decides to snorkel in a cool mountain lake.
Not as much to see
as in the ocean, but it’s a tranquil (no sharks) floating
face down into that other world.
The pines’ serrated shadows reach
across the waters,
and just now, just below him, to his left,
a pickerel, long and sharp and . . . whuppa whuppa whuppa, loud,
louder, behind him, above him, the water, louder,
whuppa whuppa whuppa . . . . Two weeks later,
twenty miles away, he’s found,
a cinder, his wetsuit
melted on him, in a crablike position
on the still warm ash
of the forest floor
through which fire tore unchecked,
despite the chemicals,
the men with axes and shovels,
despite the huge scoops of lake water
dropped on it
from his friend the sky,
on whom he turned his back. 1
If we notice the lower case first word of the poem as we take in the title (thus realizing the title reads into the body), the title has already worked to catapult us into the poem. We’re disinclined to turn away and not follow the sentence’s syntax through to its natural end. Here Lux has given us a fine first line, but it’s even more compelling as the title since, by the end of the poem, it resonates so much else: the poor worker who tried to take in a little of the natural world, when whuppa whuppa whuppa, it took him in. Sadly, this echoes a rather ordinary irony of daily life which the title underscores and which the poem as a whole reveals in its extraordinariness.
Stephen Dobyns in his book Best Words, Best Order, says, “A poem has emotion, idea, physical setting, language, image, rhythm, and tension. The degree that the poem is successful is the degree to which all these elements are made important to the reader, and at least one must be made important as soon as possible, either in the title or in the first line or two. Even the most gentle poem must be aggressive.”2
A reading habit of mine illustrates the truth of Dobyns’s advice. Often when I travel, I bring along five or six literary journals. I flip through them as I wait for planes, sometimes dropping them behind like breadcrumbs in airports and rental cars. As I thumb through them, I’m taking in the title first, usually with a split-second expectation and response. If the title captures me, I’ll read the first few lines or sentences. Then it’s up to the story, poem, or essay to keep me reading.
How could a reader, scanning the table of contents of Best American Short Stories of the Century (edited by John Updike) NOT flip to a story called “Blood-Burning Moon” (by Jean Toomer), or “My Dead Brother Comes to America” (by Alexander Godin), or “You’re Ugly, Too” (by Lorrie Moore)?3 It’s etymology, not accident, that put title and titillate in such close proximity in the dictionary.
James Wright was adventurous with titles. They frequently imbue his rather somber poems with a tongue-in-cheek tone, which sets up an immediate tension. Consider “As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of An Ancient Chinese Governor” or “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me.” Brenda Hillman, in her new book of poems, Cascadia, uses arresting titles, e.g. "Never Mindshaft."
"The Many Short Teeth of the Many Long Zippers" is an alluring title of a short-short by Debra Marquart in her book of stories, The Hunger Bone. Barry Hannah also has some wonderfully audacious titles for stories: “Get Some Young,” “Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night,” “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” and “Quo Vadis, Smut?” Likewise many of Flannery O'Connory's titles give a tonal jolt to her fiction; "You Can't Get Any Poorer Than Dead" is one of my favorite titles, and stories. Ray Carver liked to use questions for titles: "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," "Are You a Doctor?," "How About This?," "What Do You Do in San Francisco?"
Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, favored a kind of mysterious, headless-horseman effect. In her case—and probably for all those who opt for “Untitled”—it should be remembered that editors will undoubtedly blithely proceed to retitle “Untitled” with the first line of the poem. Poems acquire their titles in this manner more frequently than we may know. Dickinson’s famous “I Will Not Stop for Death” was initially called “Eternity” by her first editor, her sister-in-law. Several of W. C. Williams’s most famous poems, including “Spring & All,” “To Elsie,” and even the famous “Red Wheelbarrow,” bear titles created not by Williams himself but by editors. Each of these poems, surrounded by prose, was a small part of the larger, book-length work Spring and All. None of these titles is particularly riveting as a title, but perhaps they would have been if they’d been Williams’s own creations.
When publishers get in on the act, their title suggestions frequently reflect marketing concerns. Ford Maddox Ford originally titled a novel The Saddest Story, but since the book was appearing in 1915, his publishers convinced him that maybe The Good Soldier would be less depressing and also appeal to WWI patriotism. How I would have loved to have overheard the discussion between Dave Eggers and his publishers at Vintage regarding the title of his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
My own last book of fiction was a learning experience for me in this regard. I wanted to call the stories (which are all set on a present-day commune) Beside Ourselves, a title I thought contained several notes I wanted to play simultaneously about the stories as a whole. But my editors preferred Curtain Creek Farm, a title they believed would better cue readers to the book’s literal subject matter, the name of the commune itself. And as a newcomer to a New York publishing house, I was easily swayed by any mention of marketing tactics. Reflecting on this now, I realize this was an important lesson on titles to learn: that publishers appreciate a title that can help steer a reader through the bookstore’s shelves to The Book.
The titles of early English novels were often simply the names of their protagonists: Clarissa, Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield. Fiction, still a pup of a literary genre, hadn’t yet completely snipped the cord between itself and its main parent, biography. Through the Romantic and Victorian periods, poem titles frequently cued us to either the poem’s intention, the poet’s state of mind, or the inspirational genesis. Consider, for instance, Tennyson's "The Vision of Sin," Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude,” or Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Later, modern writers were inclined towards titles that resonated with large metaphorical overtones: The Wasteland, The Bridge, Heart of Darkness. This movement toward metaphoric titling is surely connected to the high modernist aesthetic which, among other things, argues the autotelic nature of art—or, put more simply, that art makes its own world. Eliot's The Wasteland, by the way, was originally called He Do Dem Policemen in Different Voices, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was first drafted as “Prufrock’s Pervigilium.” Tobias Wolff called one of his short stories after the famous Brueghel painting, Hunters in the Snow. Titles that allude to other literary works—Ulysses, The Sound and The Fury, Of Mice and Men, The Book of Ruth—continue to go in and out of vogue.
As Post-modernists have continued to interrogate what and how language means, titles have become less tied to "guiding" the reader, and consequently their potentials have expanded, and the relationship between the literary work and its title has intensified. Take, for example, C.K. Williams' poetry collection Dream of Mind, or these titles of two recent books of poems: It is Hard to Look At What We Came to Think We'd Come to See (by Michele Glazer) and At the Site of Inside Out (by Anna Rabinowitz).
Wallace Stevens, of course, is the prime example, the uncontested titular master. Helen Vendler, in reviewing a book about Stevens, discusses his technique of titling poems after what she terms first, second, or third-order experiences. Citing Stevens’s “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” as an example, Vendler explains that his characteristic way of writing was “to take his worst first-order experiences, find an impersonal second-order vehicle for them (‘The field is frozen’), write in the second order as though it (and not his experience) were the governing subject, and then sum up the whole with an ironic, deprecatory, and oblique title (here the rural phrase, ‘possum, sop and taters’). . . .”4
NO POSSUM, NO SOP, NO TATERS
He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye . . . .
One joins him there for company.
But at a distance, in another tree. 5
(From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.)
I find Vendler’s distinctions and terminology useful in thinking about titles. For this particular poem, then, a first-order title might have been “Winter Doldrums,” a phrase providing a kind of “label” for the metaphorical tenor of the poem. A second-order title would refer to the vehicle itself of the metaphor—here, as she mentions, “A Frozen Field.” But Stevens veers towards something not directly linked to either tenor or vehicle. We must forge our own connections to this title, which is tangentially associated with the text of the poem. Moreover, the tonal contradiction between the colloquial diction of the title and the austere diction of the poem’s body sets up an immediate and enduring tension. I also like how in the title Stevens seems so present, and in the poem itself so absent. Only by sitting awhile with the poem do we infer its broader meanings. But how much more deeply they then resound: because we discover them, or at least believe we do.
As Supreme Emperor of Titles, Stevens collected them like exotic bugs. His notebooks contained over 300 titles. Here are just a few that, sadly, never invoked the poems to go with them:
Commands to Genii
The Cow in the Clouds
The Alp at the End of the Street
The Rain was Meant to Fall in Salamanca
The Halo That Would Not Light
A Jackass in His Own Clothes
Pretty Hot Weather for Dead Horses
The Last Private Opinion
Lunch Without Frank
Black Gloves for this Bishop.
Still Life with Aspirin 6
Consider how flat this lovely Linda Gregg poem would be with only a second-order title (a.k.a. “label”) such as “Meadow with Iris.” But here it is with its real title, which forges a meaning the poem “Meadow” could not:
TWELVE YEARS AFTER THE MARRIAGE
SHE TRIES TO EXPLAIN
HOW SHE LOVES HIM NOW
Beyond the mountain is a meadow with iris.
The shade of the firs determines the measure
of their color. Violet so pure the purple
is almost not there. The difference
between air and the sky’s blue.
The iris hold color because they are a thing,
but mysteriously, making both the substance
and the invisible more clear. 7
Although few creative writing textbooks offer aspiring writers much advice on titles, one I perused suggested that a poet try to find a title which would sum up what the poem was about. Please consider that a giant X has been drawn through this last sentence. I would rather aspiring writers get no advice at all on titles than this advice! This was how, as a young newspaper reporter, I was told to think about writing headlines for news stories. I think there’s no surer way to sap a good poem’s energy than to laden it with a phrase that “sums it all up.”
During the time I’m on the hunt for the perfect title, I know certain operations are taking place. I am mulling over—and often on a subconscious rather than conscious level—what the poem or story is about. This seems to be part of directing those antennae. This is another reason I like the hunt itself. I am wading through layers of meaning, discovering inter-connections. Often then, as I lay claim to a title, I am laying claim more completely to the work’s larger ramifications.
I believe titles, like every other part of a literary piece, ought to be interesting just at the level of language itself. Good titles also usually accomplish some actual work for the piece. Here are some possible jobs: a) establish tone, b) provide information the piece needs early, c) locate us, d) lift to the surface some important feature that might be missed, e) create context, f) clarify focus, g) establish tension, and/or develop expectation.
A short story title I love is Shirley Jackson’s “Of Course.” The story is populated by people who eschew ordinary popular culture and consider themselves members of high culture. The title comes from a character who reads plays, and assures others that the plays are “Pre-Elizabethan, of course.” I like the reverberation with which this “of course” surrounds the story: the brutally ironic tone that yes, it is a given, that one assumes this superior stance in the world. The title cuts deeply.
Some titles are better than their books, e.g. Lives of the Poets (although I’m a fan of most of Doctorow’s novels!). Some titles aren’t as good as the books: The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love (a lovely novel by Elizabeth Cox), Soul Barnacles (a collection, edited by Tess Gallagher, of Ray Carver’s memoirs, letters, and diary entries). Some titles I love simply because of the pizzazz they give to the fictions: An Artist of the Floating World, Gravity’s Rainbow, Winter in the Blood, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The connection between the title and the body of a poem can truly MAKE the poem. This little exercise may serve to illustrate. A group of my students selected these four lines from a student poem and we wrote them on the board:
Two Gypsy women put their palms on the loaf
as if it’s a feverish forehead. Since dawn
it has taken in the mountain air
and must now heave itself up.
Students were then asked to think of title possibilities for these lines. Notice how each title transforms the poem:
SPRING MORNING: ELK, WASHINGTON
YOU WERE GONE WHEN I AWOKE
SLOW DAY AT THE SATELITTE CAFÉ
LINGERING HANGOVER
ENTERING THE CARPATHIAN VILLAGE, 1987
THEIR SILVER BRACELETS MAKE SILVER MUSIC
Consider the work these titles do for their poems:
A MESSAGE HIDDEN IN AN EMPTY WINE BOTTLE
THAT I THREW INTO A GULLY OF MAPLE TREES
ONE NIGHT AT AN INDECENT HOUR
by James Wright
By a pond of creosote and waste water from the river
In the dank fog of Ohio.
They are dead.
I am alone here,
And I reach for the moon that dangles
cold on a dark vine.
The unwashed shadows
Of blast furnaces from Moundsville, West Virginia,
Are sneaking across the pits of strip mines
To steal grapes
In heaven.
Nobody else knows I am here.
All right.
Come out, come out, I am dying.
I am growing old.
An owl rises
From the cutter bar
Of a hayrake. 8
A Tattered Bible Stuffed with Memos
by James Tate
I stood at the southwest window for
a long time just staring out at the field
and empty road. A hawk on the telephone
line studied the field for any sign of move-
ment, then eventually he swooped down and
had his snack. A tractor pulling a wagon-
load of hay has crept over the hill. Five teen-
agers in a green convertible passed him at
a great speed and disappeared behind a cloud
of dust. A storm was rolling in, I could
feel the barometer dropping. This is where
the chicken catches the ax. 9
Out Over the Bay
The Rattle of Firecrackers
by John Ashbery
and in the adjacent waters, calm. 10
Surprised Girl of the North
by Mary Ruefle
The sun sinks,
a blue plum in brine
Tiny birds flicker in the heads of trees.
Two rodents come out.
The birds eat out the eyes
of a long-since-dead and gnarled
sunflower head.
The rodents enter my house.
As cartographers used to cram monsters
in the void of their maps
and call it terra incognita,
I don’t know anything anymore.
the astonishment of astronauts
must be like this,
when at the height of dawn,
in Damascus,
a lamb is sacrificed
in front of the television
as scenes of the blastoff are shown. 11
Sometimes I’ll approach a title for a poem or a story in the way I believe a painter might think towards titling a painting. He or she is looking for ways the title might speak back to the artwork. There's a painting by Susan Bennerstrom that is mysterious to me: in a room of softened primary colors that are so full and explosive is the stark emptiness of a cleared table. But how much more I linger on this work when I discover its title is Waiter. But wait, I think, there’s no waiter here. Or at least not yet. Or perhaps the table is the waiter, the thing in wait. Maybe the world is a table to which we must attend. There’s a kind of narrative disconnect between the text and the image, which takes me aback and makes me reconsider the image again, and again. The richness of the world looms in what isn’t here, in what’s waiting to be set before us.
René Magritte’s painting The Key of Dreams presses even harder on this disconnect between the words of the title and the image(s) of the painting. In it, the words "the door" appear beneath a horse, "the bird" beneath a pitcher, "the wind" beneath a clock, and "the valise" beneath a valise. Words alone, this piece suggests, can’t fully express what’s seen. The same is true for the title of a literary work. A title can only help us reach toward the fullness. I sit before the Key of Dreams. Hmm. . . maybe time is the wind? Yes, since the valise seems to be a valise. And how is the horse a door? Certainly while riding, one can have the sense of an “opening.” The pitcher—now I’m positing its birdness in my imagination. There’s a linkage the four small titles within the larger title expect me to make. Our dreams are codes. Who’s got the key?
When we find the right title for a literary work, the valise opens and a bird rides out on the wind through a door.
Nance to the Nth Degree
by Nance Van Winckel
The cat was asleep against the sun-warmed
green bronze of the garden Buddha's belly.
I stepped out, suddenly aware I belonged
to the new world, where something
must be done about everything, and where
I must soon divide myself—into two and then
two more—like the loaves and the fishes
set forth on the great Galilee shore.
(from New Letters, Vol. 69, No. 1, Fall 2002.)
Notes
- Thomas Lux, House of Clocks. New York: Houghton Mifflin, © 2001, p. 28. (Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin company.)
- Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997, p. 137.
- Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.
- Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review. "George Lensing's Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth," New York, March, 1987, p. 13.
- Stevens, Wallace, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1954.)
- George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986, pp. 158-187.
- Linda Gregg, Too Bright To See & Alma. (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, © 2002), p. 131
- James Wright, Collected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977, p.115-116.
- James Tate, Memoir of the Hawk. New York: Harper Collins, 2001, p. 127.
- Ashbery, John, As We Know. Copyright © 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.
- Mary Ruefle, The Adament. Iowa City, IA: U. of Iowa Press, 1989, p. 17.