I like the idea of having titles for poems, especially if the title means something. Many poems I find either don’t have titles or they have some insignificant title or just the first line (This is probably done by other people), as though many poets either don’t consider a title important or they think it’s only for the purpose of identity.
I agree with Ayn Rand that a title should state the theme of the work in a nutshell, and I think a poem should have a theme. It should make some statement about the poet’s view of the nature of something.
The title of an artwork should be brief. I was fascinated by Dick Francis’s titles for his novels. His titles were always one or a few words, and not only indicated the theme of the story, but had multiple layers of meaning, usually at least two that I could find. Many times one of the meanings would be a term related to horses or horse racing, which his stories always centered around. For instance, his novel Longshot, which of course is a term used in horse racing, is about a non-fiction writer aspiring to be a novelist, who thinks it’s a long shot getting his first novel published, but he fights for it throughout the story and accomplishes it at the end. In the meantime while doing a biography on a famous horse trainer, the writer gets involved in the investigation of the murder of one of the trainer’s family members who was shot with a bow and arrow. As he starts to close in on the murderer, the writer becomes prey to a long-range arrow shot himself.
Trying to distill the theme down to only one word, I started giving my poems one-word or one-expression titles, and decided to continue that practice as a tradition of my own.
Sometimes my one-word theme titles are literal and sometimes not. For instance, “Launch” is specifically about a rocket launch (but it could also be taken as meaning the launch of man’s drive for knowledge and achievement in general). But “Flight” is not about space, airplane, bird or insect flight. It alludes to bees but is actually about the mental “soaring” involved in extreme pleasure. And “Ocean” doesn’t have anything to do with water. It’s about the experience of being immersed in the great “sea” of language when I’m writing poetry.
Poetry for Life 