Sometimes poems are titled POEM. Some poets have a habit of naming their poems poem. Frank O’Hara has a ton of them. Jim Carroll, James Schuyler, Delmore Schwartz, and William Carlos Williams used the title often, too.

Why?

What does it imply to call your poem simply POEM? How does it influence your reading of a poem when all you’re given going into it is that one word? Why do these poems tend to be short? What are these poets trying to tell us, or not tell us?

That title seems at once a way of drawing attention to itself and of burying itself—for how will it be found later, among all the more uniquely titled poems?

And how, once you’ve read the poem, does that title affect your reading of its tone?

I’ve made a mini-anthology of poems called poem. To contribute your own, log onto our forum.

Poem

BY FRANK STANFORD

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Frank Bidart’s poem Adolescence, from his book DESIRE, is, he explains in a note, “a ‘found’ poem, carved out of anonymously-published prose.” Through deft strokes of punctuation and lineation Bidart, amazingly, transforms this found language entirely; it feels at home among the other poems in the book (well, that is if any of his poems can be said to be “at home”).

The poem’s layers of time and consciousness and looking mirror our experience as we read this poem knowing it’s been “found,” changed through being looked at by Bidart.

Find language and, using punctuation, erasure, lineation, and whatever other tools you want, make it into a poem of your own.

Adolescence

He stared up into my eyes with a look

I can almost see now.

He had that look in his eyes

that bore right into mine.

I could sense that he knew I was

envious of what he was doing–; and knew that I’d

always wish I had known at the time

what he was dong was something I’d always

crave in later life, just as he did.

He was enjoying what he was doing.

The looking was one of pure rapture.

He was gloating. He knew.

I still remember his look.

Robert Lowell’s poem “The Scream” is based on a short story by Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village.”

Write a poem based on a short story of your choosing. Like Lowell, give the poem a name different than the name of the short story–but let us know, either in an epigraph like Lowell or in some other way, what short story your poem is based on.

THE SCREAM

(Derived from Elizabeth Bishop’s story, “In the Village”)

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