I wonder if another good (and simple) approach to naming a book of poems is just to use the title of one of its poems. This is such a common practice in poetry books, music albums and short story collections.
For example, Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars also contains a poem with that title. Is it the book’s best poem? I wouldn’t say that, but it does hint at the book’s themes: space and the questions that contemplating space brings to mind.
Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited also includes that song, but is it the most memorable song on the album? Uh, probably not; the album also includes Like a Rolling Stone. Yet the album title, with the word Revisited, is intriguing.
Some of this might just be a numbers game. You’ve already gone through the title-naming process for dozens of poems. Surely one of the titles is really, really good.
Examples: Work, for the Night Is Coming (Jared Carter); The Gods of Winter (Dana Gioia); For the Union Dead (Robert Lowell).
One could argue that Aronson’s book could have been called Dear Gravity. Perhaps Anchor has greater meaning once the book has been read, but as an advertisement, an enticement, it feels slightly abstract to me.
It reminds me a little of Gregory Pardlo’s Digest. Pulitzer or no, I can never remember the title of that book and it contains no poem with that title.
One advantage to using a poem’s title as the book’s title is that if you remember one, you remember the other. Another advantage might be less risk of an eye-rolling construction with an air of strained profundity that tries to encompass too much.
My book's title, High Stakes & Expectations, is in two definitive parts, and the title was inspired by comments noted on the manuscript by one of my teachers who counseled me on the work. She kept noting the danger, high stakes, and not what I expected, and variations of those words, throughout the book. The book's first chapter is all about risks (real and imagined) and the second is about hope which an acquaintance of mine defined as "expecting something new," which became another inspiration for the second half of the title.
I wonder if another good (and simple) approach to naming a book of poems is just to use the title of one of its poems. This is such a common practice in poetry books, music albums and short story collections.
For example, Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars also contains a poem with that title. Is it the book’s best poem? I wouldn’t say that, but it does hint at the book’s themes: space and the questions that contemplating space brings to mind.
Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited also includes that song, but is it the most memorable song on the album? Uh, probably not; the album also includes Like a Rolling Stone. Yet the album title, with the word Revisited, is intriguing.
Some of this might just be a numbers game. You’ve already gone through the title-naming process for dozens of poems. Surely one of the titles is really, really good.
Examples: Work, for the Night Is Coming (Jared Carter); The Gods of Winter (Dana Gioia); For the Union Dead (Robert Lowell).
One could argue that Aronson’s book could have been called Dear Gravity. Perhaps Anchor has greater meaning once the book has been read, but as an advertisement, an enticement, it feels slightly abstract to me.
It reminds me a little of Gregory Pardlo’s Digest. Pulitzer or no, I can never remember the title of that book and it contains no poem with that title.
One advantage to using a poem’s title as the book’s title is that if you remember one, you remember the other. Another advantage might be less risk of an eye-rolling construction with an air of strained profundity that tries to encompass too much.
My book's title, High Stakes & Expectations, is in two definitive parts, and the title was inspired by comments noted on the manuscript by one of my teachers who counseled me on the work. She kept noting the danger, high stakes, and not what I expected, and variations of those words, throughout the book. The book's first chapter is all about risks (real and imagined) and the second is about hope which an acquaintance of mine defined as "expecting something new," which became another inspiration for the second half of the title.