startle title

Don’t use the device of a ‘startle title’ too many times. If you do, you run the risk that many readers won’t read on beyond the title, or that what they do read beyond it seems lesser than its promise.

summarized

The poem’s title was a synopsis of the poem.

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

top down

Your title is cliché…it’s all going downhill from there.

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
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I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
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If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
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I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
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Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
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Books are made out of books.
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Language is always an abbreviation.
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The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
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When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
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Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
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Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
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The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
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A poem is just a shape.
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The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

tripping hazard

Tripped up by the poem's title.

line denies line

A poem in which the first line denied the title and each line after repudiated the prior.

coat-hook

The title was just a coat-hook, a thing to hang a poem on.

disappearing title

One of those titles that dissipate the moment the poem is read.

three lines away

One is always three lines away from getting it all said, once and for all.
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Actually, I usually write about whatever swims into my mind. And since I’m always, unlike Heraclitus, sinking in some water, it’s usually the same fish that swim in—ghostfish, deathfish, firefish, whatever can rise to the top.
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Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer.
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I think the absence of people in my poems enhances their presence in the objects and the landscapes.
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More often than not, the title is all a poem needs of narrative structure.
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Poetry is an exile’s art. Anyone who writes it seriously, writes from an exile’s point of view.
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We write approximations.

—Charles Wright, “Halflife: A commonplace notebook” in Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews 1977-87 (U. of Michigan Press, 1988)

old marquee

Like on the marquee of a closed-down theater, letters had tilted, slipped down or fallen entirely from the title.

unentitled

Like any first words on the page, a title is a place to get started. The title shouldn't be considered sacred like a totem...it can be discarded at the whim of whatever words follow.

head above

As it turned out the title was too good for this poem.

library of the mind

He closed his eyes and saw in his mind where all his books were, those shelved and those stacked on their sides. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t find the one title he was looking for.

top down

Fire the CEO…meaning: drop the title.

title bigger than the book

The more grand and encompassing its title, the less likely it is that the anthology adequately contains the important writing of its time.

decorative library

The hotel lobby had many bookshelves but the books were turned so that the spines were facing in, facing the wall, as though their titles and authors mattered not, and their purpose was merely decorative like any wall covering.

that's it then

He had a talent for titles, but the poem itself seldom measured up.

colorful icing

A title that was cake decoration.

new and abused

I had to give him credit for titling his book, New & Rejected Poems.