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A recent discussion reminded me of previous discussions of titles in poetry.
What is the purpose of titles in poetry?
We had a great and vibrant discussion right here years ago on the purpose and function of titles in poetry. It started around an untitled poem I wrote (I will post at the bottom) without a title. We all started picking titles for it ranging from the silly to the serious to the bizarre but none of us could find a suitable title.
Does a poem need a title? Thousands of poems throughout the Romantic and Victorian age simply used the first line as a title (though you could argue they were written with the thought the first line would be the theme of the poem)
My magnus opus you could say was a poem I wrote with 5 individual poems all with their own title where the title is used as the key that ties them all together. I experimented for a while using the title efficiently by allowing the poem to logically continue. I do think a good title can steer the understanding of a poem. A good title can certainly draw a reader into a poem. I knew someone that wrote a book of over 900 poems and they were all titled the equivalent of Sonnet XXIV. I don't know that anyone would stop to read that in the age of short attention spans.
Anyway, I am babbling on, what is your thoughts on titles in poetry?
(Here is the poem that started the discussion, feel free to offer title suggestions)
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I connect titles to song titles on albums and set lists. I like to look at them in different orders and the poems themselves. And compare to bands' albums and live sets.
I read poems without titles, and they inspire my decisions to make poems where the title will be the first line, like I see in the table of contents in a poet's book.
Concept albums and looking at the way poets' books are structured, by editors and/or the poets themselves, are another level of context.
I've also made a series of poems with a gimmick where the title of each poem is a word in the poem, so the word simply appears in the poem, not at the top, and is in bold.
Most of the time, titles come first, and I make poems and stories around the title.
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(01-05-2026, 01:55 AM)rowens Wrote: I've also made a series of poems with a gimmick where the title of each poem is a word in the poem, so the word simply appears in the poem, not at the top, and is in bold.
I would be interested in reading this, if you have it available and wouldn't mind posting it
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I think I only started titling when I posted here, had to name the thread something. Now I’m a big fan of titles, the first line isn’t necessarily what you’d like the reader’s first thought to be. And it’s fun to give it a title the reader understands only as they read. Another tool.
Hi, Rowens
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They're not the kind of thing you tend to find interest in. I have them in a Draft for the Sewer. I even have a few paragraphs of prose in connection with them. But I'll show some of them.
I'm an EVERYMAN
amongst this hassle;
guaranteed, like a search in the mail.
Some onearmed guard brings me provisions,
as though after math is more number.
I soil each left sock
like a woman over 30.
Print oysters on the undergarments I don't wear.
Not like, but the finest wine, seven years stomped,
at the local supermarket, I hide with
greetings from leggy jewelry merchant sales representatives,
under the gift of a new mattress.
***
Tomboy,
your red fox nose clowns me:
like you had it out for me
since the beginning
of time and time and time . . .
Holding each phrase, a jibe and a half, to my throat.
O princess,
take your own time, and make a man.
Don't let the WNBA distract you.
Don't let the Black Lives Matter matter more than
the darkness in your heart.
Lil Shadows, come back to the cave of Humor,
and laugh at local commercials.
Idiotic and politic:
patched together like a deadgirl in a creek:
weary as your dresses to clubs and church;
you have your own feelings about things.
Thoughts are synthetic rhythms, drugs.
I don't care about these things, but you,
an Ideal and a half —I only wear
an overcoat of spleen. Dainty pretty,
you're a fleshsea-like Jabba the Hutt;
the freckles of a hayseed
match your champagne back.
Open-back, silver tassle, hooftoed-heels:
your sex is an understatement.
You absorb, a ring
wrapped around a finger.
Tough enough: young girls kill
each other with silliness.
A man, I must be a dieu
to withstand an earth, O Sandalphon.
My own pirate, my destiny, I AM:
lay down your armchair pundit
and streetfighting college daddies,
glib professors of the night (even fun)
and steal away. I'm that thief of time.
***
We lost an eye in a sack of marbles;
there's a fence around the heat,
even the smoke, of a winter night.
Pain and children no longer
crutch unbandaged and soldiered
in the street nor on backroads:
but adult diapers of humans
cry as cats spade upon that fence,
choked by the very venom in their dis-
trusted loins. There's a fair
that comes to town each year:
Energy in the air a September
Friday, and the routs and talents
huddle in summer's pit:
Wrangling attachments in roadside gardens.
***
The Capital Landscape
A museum and a Dollar General
have all the magic we need.
Friends are liminal in the 40s,
post signs of depression:
a kind of eel, sparingly at ease
with an absent host, still lights
all men's rooms A-Go-Go:
Walls breathing kerosene.
A lesson not to laugh, in cramped
rooms, sows gardens of evil.
The majoring marathon man of crime,
scat on ghetto breezes,
uniforms several truths: stashing
mystery in vials and alleys.
The cash register twins,
how they change-in accents
and candy bullets. Jokes
that rip off the tongue:
hunger just that missing match
some urchin stuck in a urinal
as though life doesn't depend
on each another's breath:
though a toy is as much
a saving token.
***
Living is enough—though if we can't accept
and must entitle nudity with heritage,
it may be grasping beyond wind
that mills our satanic heartaches,
long since uncensored
in birdseed for brains.
I held a God's hand when this
was a sky with loins that twinkle
in rain and hot cheeks.
Red like death, red as clay;
our feelings. No allegiance.
Demarcations mock now.
Men hang themselves from their own
gallows.
Loneliness, no long riddle;
people feel, but, digitally,
understanding is enhanced
—unlike the heart.
***
Lucy Carlyle poem 6
[unfinished, will be inserted later]
***
Looking at a man, past familiarity,
to the simple son he is past who he is,
the simple meat past the words and even
wounded smile of being seen,
the simple skin beyond the local celebrity:
That is what I am in all my poems,
the sound that doesn't come from my face
nor enter you by eye and ear,
but at once and for once,
no record of a reconciling machine;
as you, simple ape, are sense and sense
and sense and sense and sense and not that
processing sixth.
***
Posts: 1,367
Threads: 218
Joined: Dec 2016
(01-05-2026, 04:42 AM)rowens Wrote: They're not the kind of thing you tend to find interest in. I have them in a Draft for the Sewer. I even have a few paragraphs of prose in connection with them. But I'll show some of them.
I'm an EVERYMAN
amongst this hassle;
guaranteed, like a search in the mail.
Some onearmed guard brings me provisions,
as though after math is more number.
I soil each left sock
like a woman over 30.
Print oysters on the undergarments I don't wear.
Not like, but the finest wine, seven years stomped,
at the local supermarket, I hide with
greetings from leggy jewelry merchant sales representatives,
under the gift of a new mattress.
***
Tomboy,
your red fox nose clowns me:
like you had it out for me
since the beginning
of time and time and time . . .
Holding each phrase, a jibe and a half, to my throat.
O princess,
take your own time, and make a man.
Don't let the WNBA distract you.
Don't let the Black Lives Matter matter more than
the darkness in your heart.
Lil Shadows, come back to the cave of Humor,
and laugh at local commercials.
Idiotic and politic:
patched together like a deadgirl in a creek:
weary as your dresses to clubs and church;
you have your own feelings about things.
Thoughts are synthetic rhythms, drugs.
I don't care about these things, but you,
an Ideal and a half —I only wear
an overcoat of spleen. Dainty pretty,
you're a fleshsea-like Jabba the Hutt;
the freckles of a hayseed
match your champagne back.
Open-back, silver tassle, hooftoed-heels:
your sex is an understatement.
You absorb, a ring
wrapped around a finger.
Tough enough: young girls kill
each other with silliness.
A man, I must be a dieu
to withstand an earth, O Sandalphon.
My own pirate, my destiny, I AM:
lay down your armchair pundit
and streetfighting college daddies,
glib professors of the night (even fun)
and steal away. I'm that thief of time.
***
We lost an eye in a sack of marbles;
there's a fence around the heat,
even the smoke, of a winter night.
Pain and children no longer
crutch unbandaged and soldiered
in the street nor on backroads:
but adult diapers of humans
cry as cats spade upon that fence,
choked by the very venom in their dis-
trusted loins. There's a fair
that comes to town each year:
Energy in the air a September
Friday, and the routs and talents
huddle in summer's pit:
Wrangling attachments in roadside gardens.
***
The Capital Landscape
A museum and a Dollar General
have all the magic we need.
Friends are liminal in the 40s,
post signs of depression:
a kind of eel, sparingly at ease
with an absent host, still lights
all men's rooms A-Go-Go:
Walls breathing kerosene.
A lesson not to laugh, in cramped
rooms, sows gardens of evil.
The majoring marathon man of crime,
scat on ghetto breezes,
uniforms several truths: stashing
mystery in vials and alleys.
The cash register twins,
how they change-in accents
and candy bullets. Jokes
that rip off the tongue:
hunger just that missing match
some urchin stuck in a urinal
as though life doesn't depend
on each another's breath:
though a toy is as much
a saving token.
***
Living is enough—though if we can't accept
and must entitle nudity with heritage,
it may be grasping beyond wind
that mills our satanic heartaches,
long since uncensored
in birdseed for brains.
I held a God's hand when this
was a sky with loins that twinkle
in rain and hot cheeks.
Red like death, red as clay;
our feelings. No allegiance.
Demarcations mock now.
Men hang themselves from their own
gallows.
Loneliness, no long riddle;
people feel, but, digitally,
understanding is enhanced
—unlike the heart.
***
Lucy Carlyle poem 6
[unfinished, will be inserted later]
***
Looking at a man, past familiarity,
to the simple son he is past who he is,
the simple meat past the words and even
wounded smile of being seen,
the simple skin beyond the local celebrity:
That is what I am in all my poems,
the sound that doesn't come from my face
nor enter you by eye and ear,
but at once and for once,
no record of a reconciling machine;
as you, simple ape, are sense and sense
and sense and sense and sense and not that
processing sixth.
***
There is a lot here that is quite good. Of course there is a lot here.
There are two techniques you can take in reading them, you can read top to bottom so that when you reach the title, it reimagines the poem in a different way and then read it again with this new found knowledge or you can skim to find the title and then read it with the knowledge. I like the first technique more as it allows me to see the poem from different angles. Of course that doesn't work for the one where the first word is the title.
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And one doesn't have a title at all. And one poem isn't there. I think that when I arrange my poems in my concept album way, I'll have the first five Lucy poems together, and have the advertisement here in this group. And later find some contextual significant place to put the sixth Lucy poem.
Arbitrary editorial grotesqueries is yet another thing to make a thing to do things with.
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Threads: 218
Joined: Dec 2016
(01-05-2026, 05:23 AM)rowens Wrote: And one doesn't have a title at all. And one poem isn't there. I think that when I arrange my poems in my concept album way, I'll have the first five Lucy poems together, and have the advertisement here in this group. And later find some contextual significant place to put the sixth Lucy poem.
Arbitrary editorial grotesqueries is yet another thing to make a thing to do things with.
Well don’t hold back, man
Clean it up and post it
milo wants poetry
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Threads: 385
Joined: Sep 2014
The moon begins waning this week, so I may be away a while.
I'm trying to find special interests that have religious qualifications so I can get some tax breaks.
People don't think I'm so crazy anymore, so they're trying to make it where I'll have to earn money in order to drink.
So, if I'm not crazy, I can at least pretend to be religious. And I found a religion where it's prohibited to do any work of any kind between Full Moon and the Third Night of the Dark Moon.
(What these people don't know, and they wouldn't believe it anyway, is that my grandfather owned the moon, and when he left it to me and my sisters, for some reason they don't have any interest in it. Must be because they're both Leos. Anyway, I can make the moon wane for as long as I want, and people won't guess it's me.)
Posts: 1,367
Threads: 218
Joined: Dec 2016
(01-05-2026, 08:52 AM)rowens Wrote: The moon begins waning this week, so I may be away a while.
I'm trying to find special interests that have religious qualifications so I can get some tax breaks.
People don't think I'm so crazy anymore, so they're trying to make it where I'll have to earn money in order to drink.
So, if I'm not crazy, I can at least pretend to be religious. And I found a religion where it's prohibited to do any work of any kind between Full Moon and the Third Night of the Dark Moon.
(What these people don't know, and they wouldn't believe it anyway, is that my grandfather owned the moon, and when he left it to me and my sisters, for some reason they don't have any interest in it. Must be because they're both Leos. Anyway, I can make the moon wane for as long as I want, and people won't guess it's me.)
The income provided by the moon is probably inconsequential compared to the tax burden it adds. If you need any tax assistance to get you through these tough times, let me know, I am personal friends with the director of the IRS
Otherwise, I look forward to reading your poetry once the lunacy passes.
Thanks
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