My Stevens: A Titling Hero

Abstract

My Stevens:A Titling Hero Matthea Harvey Stevens is my titling hero. I can't think of any poet who doesn't wish they had thought of titles like "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion" or "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade" or "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." In a letter of 1935, Stevens writes: Titles with me are, of course, of the highest importance. Some years ago a student of Wesleyan came up to the office. Apparently he had been given the job of writing a paper on Harmonium. He was under the impression that there was no relation whatever between the titles and the poems. Possibly the relation is not as direct and as literal as it ought to be. Very often the title occurs to me before anything else occurs to me. This is not uncommon; I knew a man in New York who ought to know who once told me that many more people have written the first chapters of novels than have written the rest of them, and that still more people have given their novels titles without having given them any bodies. (L 297) I have a little test with which I have come up for myself to explain the relations of poems to their titles and Stevens provides wonderful examples of all of them (except for the untitled category because he seems to have loved titles too much to ever use that). The five categories are: license-plate titles, spotlight titles, helium titles, greased-pig titles, and untitled or not wearing a tie. The license-plate titles give important identifying information: who is speaking, who is being addressed, the setting—for example, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon." The untitled category is self-explanatory. But I would like to talk here about three Stevens poems that sport a spotlight title, a greased-pig title, and a helium title. Spotlight titles are titles that highlight a phrase or an image in the poem. One of Stevens' most interesting spotlight titles is "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch." This is a coy and complicated spotlight, one that hops from name to name. The name "So-and-So" makes a point of its anonymity, so that each renaming in the poem is highlighted. First the painted woman who is being described is called "Projection A." Then she is decorated by a crown called "Projection B." And finally she becomes "Projection C" (CPP [End Page 112] 262-63). None of these names comes any closer to specificity. Instead the painter is showing that he is projecting layers and layers onto the blank face of So-and-So. Projection C is described as half the woman herself and half the artist's projection. So when her name is so suddenly Mrs. Pappadopoulos in the final line, we experience a bumpy ride back into reality. Interestingly, the minute she is given her name back, she is also dismissed. Abstraction is what keeps the painter interested. However, the reverse is true for the reader. We have been set up with the spotlight of So-and-So, jumping from Projection A to B to C to be very attuned to the moment her name is revealed. The next category of titling is the greased-pig title. In greased-pig contests, participants try to catch a young pig covered in cooking oil. It's apparently very difficult. Greased-pig titles, like their namesakes, evade connection with the poem. In these titles, the reader can grasp only a tiny point of tangible intersection between the title and the poem, like two lines that intersect in one spot and then go on to infinity in their separate directions. Greased pigs are able to glancingly touch the poem's content, but it is a brush by, not an embrace, as in the title, "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs." The only truly explicit connection between the title and the poem here is the last word of the title, "hogs," and the word "swine" in the first, second, and final stanzas of the poem (CPP 62). The title's construction sets you up to think about food chains, so phrases that...