What's in a name? Well, as far as titles of poems go, usually not very much. Indeed, most poets seem quite happy to come up with any old title to slap on the top of the page, as if they'd expended so much imaginative energy on the poem itself that they couldn't be bothered wasting any more time trying to dream up a name for the damn thing.
This deplorable laziness afflicts even the finest poets. We've come to accept it from those of a bygone age, for whom titles were obviously of no interest whatsoever (why else would they be content with Love, Epitaph, Elegy, Invocation, Youth and Age, Melancholy, Thoughts in a Garden and To Nature?), but really, modern poets should know better.
For instance, I'm amazed that Philip Larkin was even considered for the Poet Laureateship when the best he could do, title-wise, was feeble efforts like Coming, Going, Days, Spring, Love, Age, Aubade, At Grass and To the Sea. And I think Seamus Heaney was pretty lucky to get the Nobel Prize with titles like Poem, Oracle, Song, North, The Walk and Postscript. Not that Derek Mahon is any better - I mean, Lives, Deaths, Afterlives, Leaves, Midsummer and Dejection, for God's sake: who'd be bothered?
When will these people realise that if you're going to make it in today's world, with all its frenetically competing attractions, you've got to grab the reader's attention from the word go (actually, that's not a good word for a title)? For instance, though I admire John Updike's verse anyway, there was no way I wasn't going to read a poem as alluringly and intriguingly titled as "No More Access to Her Underpants". That's an irresistible invitation to read further, as is Robert Penn Warren's "Wet Hair: If Now His Mother Should Come" (a terrific poem, but would you have read it if it was called Lament or Memory or My Sad Childhood?)
I'm prompted to these ruminations by the appearance of a book called The Title to the Poem, written by Anne Ferry, published by Stanford University Press and distributed on this side of the Atlantic by Cambridge University Press (£30 in UK). In more than 300 pages she examines her subject from every conceivable perspective (titles that suggest an imaginary speaker or that emphasise the poem's form or that are echoed directly in the poem or that seem wilfully unrelated to the poem, and so on), and she also singles out those poets whom she regards as having singular titling skills - including Browning, Whitman and Eliot.
I'm happy to see that, among the latter, she reserves special praise for Wallace Stevens, who, as well as being among the greatest of modern poets, was a genius at titles. Indeed, the finest of these are so good that they're complete poems in themselves - in a couple of instances, better than the actual poem that follows.
Here, then, in no particular order, are my ten favourite Stevens titles: "A Child Asleep In Its Own Life", "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad", "A Clear Day and No Memories", "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage", "The Woman That Had More Babies Than That", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating", "Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is", "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm", and "The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard".
I suppose, though, that one should also recall the practice of that other great American poet, Emily Dickinson, who wrote 1,775 poems and gave titles to none of them.
This year's Cardiff International Poetry Competition, offering a total of £5,000 in prizes (including a substantial first prize of £1,000), is being judged by Donegal-born, London-based Matthew Sweeney, whose eighth collection is due in October, and by Gillian Clarke, a Welsh poet and teacher.
If you wish to enter, just remember that each submitted poem must be in English, be previously unpublished and be no longer than fifty lines. You can send in as many poems as you like, but each must be accompanied by £4 (in sterling) and should be attached to the entry form, which you can get from Cardiff International Poetry Competition, P.O. Box 438, Cardiff CF1 6YA. The closing date is October 31st next.
Or you can enter the Book and Pamphlet Competition which a Huddersfield-based group called The Poetry Business set up in 1986. Here the rules are slightly more complicated. Accompanied by an entry fee of £15 sterling, you send in a collection of poems (no more than twenty-four pages), and if yours is one of the five manuscripts selected by the judges you'll share the prize money of £1,000, as well as having your collection published in pamphlet form.
Then, if you're one of these five winners, you can submit an extended manuscript (containing another thirty-plus poems), and if you're deemed the overall winner, this will be published in book form.
If you want to know more, entry forms are available from The Competition Administrator, The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade, Westgate, Huddersfield HDI IND.