A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Twenty-Seven

 I have been thinking a lot about the act of titling a work recently.  Part of this is due to working on a chapbook that contains a number of poems that were not given titles at the time of writing, which is, itself, a result of the fact that I often find adding titles to be a difficult thing.  I also want to acknowledge that my friend Freesia McKee has expressed an interest in this topic, as well, which has encouraged me to consider titles in more and deeper ways.  She mentioned a poem from a student where a shift in the title suddenly turned the piece from a mediocre poem into an incredible and affecting one, without any other changes to the work.  I know that often I dash titles off, or just use what had been the first line, and I recognize this as a result of a certain fear, and I think that fear is a product, in turn, of an uncertainty about titling.

In exploring this issue, I've come to a question that I think is quite essential, and is about the issue of what a title does, what it is at root, and is to do with a tension that exists between the concept of a title and that of a name.  When I think of giving a work a title, I am considering it as an act of naming, but when one thinks of giving a title to an entity, it is not the same as naming it at all.  That is to say, I am wondering what happens when I consider the question of what it means to give a poem a title in the literal sense, in the sense of "entitling" it, and how that differs from the question of naming.  I wonder if their is a sense in which I might consider the name of a poem as a secret it holds, and how that changes my thinking about this.  I do not, of course, have any answers at present, but am considering how I can apply this way of thinking in my work.  I do not really know what it means to say that a title of a work is not the name, or if that is a silly thought, and I recognize it is only a perceptual shift and one resulting from a fluke of language, but I also sense that I may be finding something of value for myself, even if not meaningful as a distinction for anyone else.  It is a way to explore, and I am hoping that this exploration will help me to discover what I really want titles to do for my work and how I can enact that.