A Poem by Any Other Name: Poems Titled "Poem"

     We
     reckon on a simple
     agreement.
        —from "A Poem" by Robert Creeley

It is very simple to title a poem, "Poem." Hypothetically, no other label could be less specific. A poem called "Poem" shows its reader that there is a poet at work—and also that there is a reader. It points to nothing in particular, and to itself at the same time.

"Poem"s are inherently postmodern, and in their author's seeming nonchalance about their composition—it's just another poem, after all—these works keep a low profile, on purpose.

As in Elizabeth Bishop’s "Poem" about an old family member's painting, the minor relic remains: "Useless and free...handed along collaterally to owners / who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to." And yet this is what embodies her lines:

     —the little that we get for free,
     the little of our earthly trust. Not much.

A notorious practitioner of this, Frank O'Hara, wrote 56 poems titled "Poem" (including "Poem [I will always love you]," "Poem [I live above a dyke bar and I'm happy.]," "Poem [Dee Dum, dee dum, dum dum, dee da]," the list goes on...). Despite their variety, each of these are infected with a casual air—dashed off at work, during lunch, at a party.

As in O'Hara's "Poem [Light   clarity   avocado salad in the morning], the poem titled "Poem" can include anything, "clarity" as well as "avocado salad." Other writers, like William Carlos Williams, have taken advantage of the freedoms associated with such a broad title to write strange works, like a list of American heroes: "Daniel Boone, the father of Kentucky. Col. W. Crawford, the martyr to Indian revenge. Simon Gerty, the White Savage. Molly Finney, the beautiful Canadian Captive..."—and call it "Poem."

In many ways, "Poem"s can also function as a sort of ars poetica. Michael McClure writes in "Poem": "There is joy in thought, / The size of the word / Is its own flight from crabbedness." Louise Glück takes the opportunity to mark a moment of daily life as a poem in itself—"It is a form / of suffering: then always the transparent page raised to the window." As Homero Aridjis writes in "El Poema":

     The man makes his poem
     from whatever he can grasp

     That which escapes
     will belong to future men

A "Poem" is inherently humble, which is why it cannot be the greatest work of a poet's career. It remains basically unmarked. But with a poet like Frank O'Hara, he breaks the rule. His "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]" stands out as one of the most "casual" great poems of the 20th century. As John Ashbery writes in his introduction to the Collected Poems:

     Frank O'Hara's concept of the poem as the
     chronicle of the creative act that produces it
     was strengthened by his intimate experience
     of Pollock's, Kline's, and de Kooning's...[It is]
     anything but literary. It is part of a modern
     tradition which is anti-literary and anti-
     artistic.

The New York School poets have certainly made their mark on the form as an extemporaneous mode, from Alice Notley’s "Poem"s to those by Ted Berrigan, Bernadettte Mayer, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and many more. Notley asks, in her "Poem":

     And who will know the desolation of St. Mark's
        Place
     With Alice Notley's name forgotten and
     This night never having been?

And Rachel Zucker responds with "Poem [The other day Matt Rohrer said]," while updating the form to feature her own New York poet-friends, as O'Hara did so frequently. Rohrer writes in his own "Poem":

     I have been practicing
     a new way to say hello and it is fantastic.

And so, the tradition lives on.

Take this opportunity to browse these "Poem"s, including work by Charles Bernstein, Frank O'Hara, Susan Wheeler, Rachel Zucker, and many more.

Poems titled "Poem":