The Last Donkey Doctor of Tulips, California, or Properly Titling Your Poems

from the desk of our poetry editor, Johnathan Riley.

I have a confession for you: this article doesn’t have anything to do, explicitly, with Donkey Doctors, the town of Tulips, California, or even how Tulips came to have only one person of that profession. However, it does have everything to do with the idea of the title because, without one, no one will give your poetry (or writing) the time of day.

Attention grabbing isn’t the only quality of a good title but it’s a start. The next choice that happens is nuanced but can be boiled down to bland and spicy.

Bland

One of my favorite poems that demonstrates the idea of bland is “Fork” by Charles Simic. “Fork” is a short and haunting poem about Simic looking at a fork and imagining the hellscape it must’ve come from. The first stanza, “This strange thing must of crept/ Right out of hell. / It resembles a bird foot /Worn around the cannibal’s neck.”, immediately evolves the subject given to us in the title. The poem goes on to imagine “the rest of the bird” in all Simic’s bleak glory but it can only do so effectively because of our bland beginnings. It’s a title that directly treats the object and we’re not surprised to find out that the piece is about what we’ve been promised in its title.

The poem itself is what we like to call spicy— it uses imagination to transform our perception of an everyday thing by drawing an attention to it that it normally wouldn’t receive. (I believe this idea of spicy is the obligation of artists everywhere, of all disciplines, to society, but that’s a blog post for another day.) “Fork” is a great example of a bland title and a spicy poem. You can have a spicy title and spicy body. You can even have a spicy title and bland poem (this one is harder to accomplish) but, under no circumstances can you have a bland title and a bland poem.

Spicy 

One of my favorite poets that has both spicy titles and poems is Joy Harjo, our current Poet Laureate of the United States. Two great examples of this are her poems “Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace” and “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”; two narrative style poems that mirror the oral traditions found in Harjo’s native American heritage. I’d recommend listening to her spoken pieces as well because her delivery is phenomenal. 

In these pieces titles we get the promise of many things to come; in one we are promised insomnia and a guide to grace, and in the other we get the insider information that the Milky Way does, in fact, go through Los Angeles. Offering both a promise and a journey is very enticing for a reader.

Whether you choose bland or spicy for your titles, the important part is that they inform your piece so that the reader isn’t sailing off to Portugal when you want them headed to Florida. I encourage my students in the beginning of their poetry journeys to try and conjure up longer titles so that they can narrow down what sort of journey they’re promising their readers—it’s also fun to cut loose a little bit and see how whimsical you can get! Poetry, and writing at large, should be fun! Sure, those more serious pieces need to be written but I’d say it’s time to untether that imagination and see what you can do!

So, if you decide to be Charles Simic, in your next piece, and title your poem “Spoon” you better bring the heat in that soup of yours! If you decide to be Joy Harjo and title your piece “Sailing Off to Portugal and Other Things Poets Make Us Do” make sure to properly spice the rest of your piece for the reader’s journey!

The world is filled with badly named things— let’s not let it be your own writing. 

Johnathan Riley is a second-year poet in the MFA program at UNH where he teaches an introductory poetry course. He is the current Poetry Editor of Barnstorm.