Chen Chen told the Yale Review that he usually starts a poem with the title. I love his “Tale of the Blueberries” and his words about the process of creating, “picking up an odd clue here, an ordinary mystery there.”
Titles often elude me, so just for fun (and inspiration), I looked through the Yale Review‘s Poems of the Week for recent ones, and found many that appealed, including “Fan Mail from Some Flounder?” (Harryette Mullen), “Pearly Everlasting” (Alissa Quart), “Literal Country Music” (Samuel Cheney), and “In My Terrible Years” (Aldo Amparán).
For February 20th, I have written to a prompt from David Lehman (of the Best American Poetry series): begin a poem with the last line of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, ” which is “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Do join me if you’d like. I even asked AI to suggest titles for this poem, but they were SEO-oriented duds. Stay tuned.
The Poetry Friday roundup for February 6th is at Molly Hogan’s Nix the Comfort Zone.
Photo by Susan Thomsen
Chicken Spaghetti 
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