Titles II

I've been visiting the poetry section of our town's used book store a lot more since I've started crafting poems, and the other day I picked up The Poet's Handbook by Judson Jerome (1927-1991) there. Jerome, who was the poetry columnist for Writer's Digest magazine from 1949 to 1979, had this brief, but useful, passage about poem titles:

"Avoid titles that are mere abstractions, such as "Courage" or "Love," or "Infidelity." Those sound like the titles of essays (and not essays that many would want to read!). A good title of a poem is part of the experience of the poem, not a label for it. It may not at first make sense to a reader, but at some critical point in the poem the significance of the title should become clear. A fairly common practice is to use some image or phrase or variation of one of these for the title, so the title will echo in the reader's mind when he encounters it in the poem."

Now, as I always do with anyone I discuss in this blog, I did some Internet research on Judson who also created and edited the invaluable Poet's Market and wrote several books in his lifetime. In addition to those credits, Jerome is noted as being a part of a controversial editing change that addressed a so-called confusing passage of unattributed dialogue in Ernest Hemingway's (1899-1961) story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" initially published in Scribner's Magazine in 1933. Jerome's part in the story is that, while teaching at Antioch College, he wrote to Hemingway about the "problem" in 1956. Hemingway responded saying, "I read the story again and it still makes perfect sense to me."

Nevertheless, for some reason, Scribner's published the story again in 1965, after Hemingway's suicide it should be noted, with changes to address the perceived "problem."

Hemingway scholars have been playing a chess game of "yes, it is; no, it's not" for years (to which I have to wonder why...?). If you really want to delve into the nitty-gritty particulars, you can see an article on the subject here.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Being a writer almost demands that one have opinions, and I naturally have one about this situation. In our poetry group, we are told we should not rewrite one another's words when giving our impressions of each other's work. That's hard to do sometimes, but really, by the time Jerome wrote to Hemingway, Hemingway had already received the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Nobel Prize. It's not like, to state the obvious, he was a beginning writer. It may surprise you, like it did me, to discover that Hemingway also wrote poetry.

On the other hand, editors do have the authority to make changes (I should know because I am one). But I really think, in this case, because the story had been printed the first time the way that Hemingway wrote it, his words should have stood as written.

This is not to say that Jerome's work should be dismissed though, as I think The Poet's Handbook has much to recommend itself to beginning poets. Especially since it's the only one yet I've come across that offers help with titles.

Here's a link to an article about song titles, but it can also be applied to poem titles, too:
What song titles teach us about making headlines stand out

Kathie Meyer, the Infant Poet