Wasted Real Estate: The Parts of a Poem Most Underutilized by Poets

As I teach poetry workshops online, I often encounter students who haven’t yet figured out how to fully utilize all the parts of a poem. A poem’s formatting and structure aren’t just about form—they’re also a way to fit more information, detail, imagery, and surprise into a poem. Here are some ways you can be more creative in how you approach the title, epigraphs, and structural elements of a poem:

Titles

New poets often struggle with how to title their poems. They end up with poems called “untitled,” numbered poems, or poems with simple titles like “Observations” or “A Dream.” Simple titles are not bad, but often, during revision, a more distinctive or striking title can be found to hook the reader.

The title, like a starting line, is one way you can surprise a reader.

At The Poetry Lab, Bridget Kriner suggests there are five “jobs” for a poem title. These are common title forms, but here is how each one can be tweaked to provide further poem real estate:

To Locate
Poem titles can place us in a setting, such as Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923).

While this is one way to prime us to enter the poetic space, I find settings-as-titles somewhat obvious and old-fashioned. Instead, the poet can place the setting in an epigraph or within the poem itself, giving the poet space to explore a different title that may be more evocative. See “Believing Green” by Christian Wiman.

To Signal a Poetic Form
William Shakespeare’s beloved sonnets are all untitled and instead numbered. Contemporary poets have reworked the sonnet form, as in “Triple Sonnet for Black Hair” by Dorothy Chan, which celebrates the tension in the meanings of black as a color in Chinese traditions.

If the structure or form signaled in the title is being changed, keeping the form in the title can be useful. However, a poem that is titled simply “sonnet” or “haiku” may be missing out on the opportunity to let the reader discover the form as they read. For example, “There’s No Meaning: A Repeating Poem” by Afrizal Malna seems to suggest that its experimental image form both lacks meaning and repeats. Would the poem be changed with a different title?

To Allude or Refer
Nearly all poetry contains some allusions to other works. Found poetry, one of my favorite forms, often is referential. List poems, for example, are quite popular. One of the best-known found poems is “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, supposedly written after he found a note from his wife.

Found text makes fantastically interesting and unique titles. The Library of Congress has a resource of texts to use in found poetry. I was struck by the article entitled “Alice Paul Talks,” with the subheader “Hunger Striker Describes Forcible Feeding.” That would make a great poem title. If you can’t write a poem title, borrow one.

To Name (The Speaker, Subject, or Object)
The most famous object poem is probably “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. I could probably write an entire lesson on object poems, and in fact have included object poems as the backbone for my book, The Smallest of Bones (see: “Sacrum”). Titles that name the subject of the poem (in noun format) often can feel flat, though.

Here’s a prompt for your next title: Write a poem about something, but don’t name it! See if your reader can guess the subject of the poem without it being blatantly stated in the poem.

To Begin a Thought
My favorite titles flow into the poem, becoming part of it effortlessly. When a line breaks in an unexpected place, linguistically, we call it enjambment. I’ve always thought that there should be a word for a title that uses enjambment.

KB Brookins’ poem “LimeWire Taught Me” is both a reference to the 90s music P2P file-sharing site and an example of a poem that begins mid-sentence.

I would add a sixth job to this list:

To Emphasize (or Repeat)
It’s my belief that titles which repeat phrases from within the poem body should be used sparingly. New poets often use the first line from a poem as their title. While this is fine, it is also often wasted real estate. Consider: Is a title that repeats making new meaning?

One poetic form that makes interesting use of repetition is the Pantoum. My collection Numinous Stones is entirely made up of Pantoums, four-line, four-stanza poems with repetition. Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Anaphora Using Wilfred Owen’s Line ‘If you could hear, at every jolt’” is both referential and repetitive, using the poetic device anaphora (the repetition of the beginning of a line). Wilfred Owen was a WWI poet who died in France in 1918, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a haunting depiction of the front lines.

Epigraphs

One underutilized element of poetry is the epigraph: A small line or section that precedes the poem and provides additional context or information. You’ve probably seen this most often in the “after” poem: A poem inspired by another poet where the epigraph merely says “After Poet Name.” Epigraphs are often drawn from other sources or reference other poets and may be quotations. Often, epigraphs are used to overtly explain form or structure to the reader. Used in a collection, they help format the book’s structure or provide thematic entry points to sections.

Rickey (Key) Laurentiis proves that not only can you have an epigraph, you can also have two titles in one poem with “Tall Lyric for Palestine (or, The Harder Thinking).”

Epigraphs might be excerpts from news sources (“Lament of Submerged Persons” by Sasha Pimentel), quotes from the Bible (“The Revel” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), or little- or well-known literature (“Lear’s Wife” by Elise Paschen).

Ekphrastic poetry, which is poetry that is inspired by art, always relies on the epigraph to explain the source material, such as in Keith S. Wilson’s “Impression of a Rib,” inspired by Edgar Degas.

Think of the epigraph as not part of the poem but aside from it, a space to reference a source or inspiration. If a poem isn’t “clicking” with your readers, an epigraph is an easy fix to give more context.

Here’s a revision prompt: Take a poem that you’ve been told in critique isn’t clear enough or didn’t grab a reader. Find an epigraph to add—a quote from the inspiration for the poem or just a related piece of information.

Structural Elements (Sections/Parts)

Very often, new poets start out by writing poems that have no structure at all. Later on, we often discover that poems can be broken up into fragments. Poems can be sectioned like parts in a book using numbers, letters, or other more experimental break-makers.

These breaks can be narrative: creating a beginning, middle, and end. One prompt I use in my workshops is to write either a piece of flash fiction or a poem that has three section headers: Before, During, After. The goal is to show an event or moment from all angles. Some combination of these can result in an interior three-act structure.

Structure Prompt: Write a short story or poem that has three parts: Before, During, After. Feel free to tweak these headers to make them more original or to reflect the content of the piece.

This form of poetry is sometimes called the “sequence” poem. For example, Marilyn Chin’s “Two Goats” uses Chinese characters in each fragment. As the poem progresses, the characters become more complex. This poem educates the reader and can be enjoyed even if you don’t know Chinese. Another common sequence is the haiku sequence—a series of haiku that fit together—such as “8 Haiku on Falling” by Masaoka Shiki, which has a beautiful experimental visual translation by Abby Ryder-Huth. 

If you feel like your poem could benefit from subheaders or a narrative format, consider making it into a sequence.

These are just a few ways you can better take advantage of the structure of poetry in order to make your poems stand out to a reader.

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