Titles as Doorways

A prompt based on poetry titles themselves.

Author

Sean Glatch
September 03, 2025

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Table of Contents

Freewrite

In your journal, respond to each of the following short prompts in 1-2 minute bursts. There are no wrong answers!

  • What is a catchphrase you have? A phrase you say often? Make one up if you don’t have one.

  • How would you title this exact moment in your life?

  • Think of an important moment in your life. Write down, with extreme detail, the exact location of that moment.

  • Write down a one sentence description of something that makes you emotional.

  • What is a line from a poem that you really admire? Yours or someone else’s.

  • What is a constant reminder you have to give yourself?

  • What do you most want right now?

  • If all your poems were published in one book, what would the title of the collection be?

Poem: "The More Modest the Definition of Heaven, the Oftener We’re There" by Albert Goldbarth

Years later they let him go. New evidence
―somebody's shoe and a letter, and then
another man confessed. So along with the cheap gray suit
and job ads that they all receive, he
had a brief note of apology. I suppose some people
go wild or bitter. But this is what happened to him:
we're sitting up way past midnight in August,
the six of us, hoping for a breeze. The air
might move in a solid block, as if pushed
by a streetsweeper's broom, but you couldn't call it
a breeze. Hot isn't the word. The stars
only make the sky a sore throat. And one of us,
Sally maybe, says we must be dead because
it's hell for sure, and the rest of us laugh, but
he's been called far out of our little bent circle,
you can tell by his eyes, they're filled with the moon,
with the simple delight of seeing the moon touch all of us
all over without a bar in the way,
without the shadow of even one bar
to fall on the light like a nightstick.

Divinations

That title is the kind of thing you say when you've reached a moment of insight. And yet, Goldbarth uses it as a doorway into a poem that is even more of a gut punch. Which, really, is kind of an epic feat of poetry. The title tells you exactly what the wisdom of the poem is, and yet the poem is still able to enact that wisdom through narrative and image.

Part of what makes this poem work is that it operates in different registers: images of society and images of nature. We open in the prison, then move into the oppressive August heat, then the two intersect—like an eclipse, like a moment of revelation.

I also love that this speaker names his friends, something that always gives me a bit of joy in poetry. But I don't want to speak too much on how this poem operates, because it will ruin the magic, and sometimes, great poetry just invites mystery and wisdom into itself.

I want to talk a bit about poem titles. Did Goldbarth begin with this title, or did he discover it through the process? I can't say, but I do know that titles are sometimes hard to come up with. Sometimes they don't happen until after the poem is drafted. Sometimes, for me, they're tacked on like tiny admissions of failure.

One useful piece of advice I've been given is to use titles as a means of generating opposition. This might seem counterintuitive, but you can do this within the poem's craft elements. For example, if the poem is rich with sensory imagery, the poem's title could be more abstract, or vice versa. I'd say Goldbarth's poem is doing this. If the poem itself is short, perhaps the title can be long, as in June Jordan's "Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love".

Finally, you might just come up with a wacky title, and use that as a doorway into a new poem.

Poem Titles I Appreciate

Here are a few poems whose titles themselves I appreciate for being so out there.

Prompt

Remember that freewrite? What was the point of that?

I was tricking you into writing titles for new poems. Gotcha!

Write a poem using one of your freewrite responses as a title. Whatever those titles inspire, let that into the work.

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!

Divinations - Poemancer: A Card Game For Poets

Writing Prompts, Craft Essays, and Poetry inspiration

poemancer.com/divinations

Jameson: The Talisman of Good Poetry Writing <3