@katharine.coles
Katharine Coles
@katharine.coles · 4:40

How do you name a poem?

Partly because poems inherently have few words, at least lyric poems tend to, and partly because they are inherently mysterious. I've always hewed to the belief and taught my students, especially my undergraduates, that they shouldn't give up the opportunity be of having a title for a poem, not to explain the poem, but to help the reader into it

I was taught (and I have taught) that everypoem needs a title. Now, I am not so sure.

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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 1:27
And in other cases it's the name that you add on afterwards. And I guess either works. But I think the cases where you have put in a lot of thought made the title as an integral part of the poem, I think those seem to be more interesting in some ways. Anyway, that's just my two cent on it as a reader, not as a writer of poems. But thanks for making me think about this topic
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@geo_rhymes
Nidhin George 🔷
@geo_rhymes · 1:19

@katharine.coles

I might sit and think of maybe five or different five or six different amazing titles, but none of them sound or feel right as much as the first thought that crossed my head or the first emotion that came into my mind before I started writing that poem. And that's just worked for me, and I stick with it
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Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

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@DBPardes
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:07

@katharine.coles

Oh, I'm so enjoying this idea and this conversation, and I wanted to just put a lyricist perspective in here as a songwriter for many, many years, I always had the poll to make the title of the poem, the Chorus, like the one that would stick in people's heads as the rep repetition. So a chorus is the celebration of a song. It's the anthemic, kind of like beachhead, that people can go, oh, that's that song
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@katharine.coles
Katharine Coles
@katharine.coles · 3:05

Thanks’!

And then finally, this splendid bird, Merlin, with whom we lived for such a long time and who we buried under primroses. These things appear to have nothing in common with each other on the surface. And so trying to name that emotion or that connection in some ways was really the job of the poem and the job of the title. And especially since it's actually a very complicated emotion it's not one that can be shorthanded, I think, in any particular kind of way
@sdfxsggrimmlin
Shawn Gomez
@sdfxsggrimmlin · 0:40

@arish

You're asking how I name a poem? It depends on what kind of poem I'd be writing. If you're writing a limerick, if you're writing a hymnal, or if you're just writing a haiku or just a regular stanza in a poem, usually I would title it after I finish it, because then you can get a good idea of how you're working through things working things through. Or I might start it before and run my title off the poem
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