What's in a title?

Once I've got a poem to its "first final" draft, i.e. the point at which it moves from my handwritten notebook to a typed-up piece of paper, I often ask a couple of trusted friends for their opinion as a point of departure for the next stage in its development. Last month, I got a terrific comment back. My friend told me "I like the poem, Matthew, but the title's dead".

What did she mean by that? Well, my interpretation is that it wasn't contributing anything, not drawing the reader in, not adding an extra layer. It was there because it had to be, as if labelled "for internal use only". I immediately went back to the poem in question and renegotiated that title, always bearing the reader in mind..

Of course, what goes for an individual piece also goes for the title of a book. Which brings me to the issue in hand: the title of my forthcoming first full collection. What were the criteria? Not dead, as per the previously mentioned poem, memorable but not too wacky, relevant but not just explanatory, intriguing but not plain mysterious. However, most of all, I asked myself a key question: "would you buy a book with that title?"

So what was the result? Well, that's for a separate post...

A title

Not for a poem in this case, but for my forthcoming pamphlet collection with Happenstance Press.

I could have taken one of the poems and applied that title to the book itself, while I also had the option of selecting a catchy snippet or turn of phrase from the innards of a stanza. Instead, I went back to the poetics of my work and to the experiences that laid its foundations. In doing so, I was very much reminded of a quote by Julio Cortázar that struck me immensely on first reading it some fifteen years ago and that has stayed with me ever since:

"Supe que nunca llegaría a la verdad inventada...si me convencía de que país nuevo era vida nueva y que el amor se cambia como una camisa."

One possible translation might be as follows:

"I knew I'd never reach the invented truth...if I convinced myself that a new country was a new life and love is changed like a shirt."

Cortázar was referring to his move from Buenos Aires to Paris, to the fact that over the course of his journey between countries he remained the same person, just with the benefit of multiple perspectives, both on his origins and on his destination. I feel very much the same way when I write in both a U.K. and Spanish context.

But what is invented truth? Well, for me it's the grabbing of life, following by a transformation into poems. When writing the pamphlet, I've attempted to take so-called "experience" or "anecdote" and and turn it into verse, not fact, not fiction, not even faction, but poetry.

What's more, a key tool in the writing process is the manipulation of voice. Who is the "I" that runs through much of my book? In fact, a more pertinent question would be "who are the "I"s that run through it?" This playing with identities enables me to bounce poems between concave mirrors, distorting their points of departure so as to reach somewhere revealingly new.

In other words, my aim when writing poetry is to find myself "Inventing truth", my pamphlet's title.