I was going to call my new book of poems, “The Goldilocks Zone,” which, if you don’t know, is the habitable zone around a star that’s not too hot, not too cold, for life to exist there. But someone beat me to it. There’s already a book with that title. Do I want people to search for mine and end up with hers? Nah.
How do you choose a title? What I usually do is look through the poems to see if one poem title seems to speak to the whole collection. Okay, second try was “Flying Through a Hole in a Storm.” Again, about finding the zone that’s safe, habitable. But nah, too much narrative.
I’m feeling minimalist. We live a fairly spartan life, as most do right now. E.g., I haven’t bought any new clothes for ages. I felt like a short title. Brief. That’s it. Brief.
The difference between “Zone” and “Brief”—one is a safe space, the other an acknowledgement that nothing stands still. Nothing’s really safe, you might say, not even a safe zone. How about a blank cover with one small word, Brief? Life is brief. It’s made of brief moments, each one birthing and dying.
Most writers (and artists, composers, etc.) hate marketing, me among them, but you don’t want to write into a vacuum. You want readers, listeners, so you do what you need to. It’s irritating to spend a morning sending out poems and essays to journals when I could be writing. It’s like vacuuming the house. Who wants to? But someone has to.
Here’s the poem that led me to Brief. It was begun not long after I cleared out a nest of baby birds at the cottage that had all died. You don’t want to see that. You don’t want silence where there should be cheeping. You start thinking, what happened? Surely there’s a story. A real story, not one you invented.
Brief
The baby birds have been dead awhile, packed
like muffins in the nest in the porch’s upper corner,
one beak still reaching. You don’t want silence.
You don’t want this depth, from your stool’s height.
You don’t want to be this brief.
You have these brain cells designed to retrieve
stories. She might have been bringing a worm, but something
to do with a power line, and she’s dead,
or she comes back, or she’s somewhere
in between. Surely there’s an available truth,
something that actually happens inside Schrödinger’s box.
Surely you don’t cause the cat to live
or die by looking in. So crass. There is a dreaming going on
most likely, inside the box, that entangles when you
look in. Like love coming suddenly
from a blind date. And you know how you can
begin making that into a whole synchronicity.
There she is, in my mind, flying toward the nest. That space is a space of dreaming, of speculation, like Schrödinger’s box. Until she reaches the nest, or until I actually see what happened, anything could be true. If I found the dead mother, you might say I would be once again entangled, no longer able to just dream up my own “truth.”
Which somehow made me think of falling in love. You might dream of it, but when it happens, it’s an entanglement, you might say. Then you start dreaming about even that! It was “meant to happen,” you might say.
How does this title, this poem reflect the whole book? I dunno. A title is often an afterthought, but somehow in my mind it comes together. Life is brief. Everything is brief. Every moment is its own birthing and dying.
The book won’t be out until sometime next winter, which is how these things go. Some presses are backed up for several years, so I’m fairly lucky about this. Still, I wonder how much marketing (live readings, travel) I’ll be able to do, even then. I am so very sorry for writers who have first books coming out about now. Audiences for poetry don’t just materialize out of thin air. You have to give readings. People need to hear the poems aloud. They need to hear your voice and feel how your voice informs the poems. You have to travel to do that.
Or Zoom, which is how most writers are managing right now. It’s not ideal, but it’s something.
I think of it like the difference in Zoom-schooling and sitting in a lecture hall. The live teacher is giving you her presence. There’s an actual transmission that happens between a physical person who’s devoted her life to this art, or scholarship, and the listener. Maybe we’re exchanging pheromones. Whatever, it’s powerful.