24.4.09

Don't Title Your Poem 'Untitled'

The Virginia Quarterly Review blog recently ran the ten most common titles of submissions they've received in the past two years.

Here they are:

1. Untitled
2. Aubade
3. Gravity
4. Prayer
5. Homecoming
6. Night
7. Drowning
8. Home
9. Sonnet
10. Sleep


Read their original post here.

On their own, those words make pretty banal titles. For the heck of it, though, I thought it would be fun to write a poem that uses every one of those words from the VQR list. Enjoy!

Untitled


The aubade spoke of gravity
and made us kneel by our beds in prayer
for it was homecoming and daybreak was on the horizon
but we were drowning in our thoughts
and home seemed very far away
and no aubade or sonnet can ever make things right
and the only thing that can resolve our anxiety
is sleep.

-Greg Santos

7 comments:

DM said...

I would have thought the most common poem title would be "Chocolicious!"

bmirov said...

I read the first part of this post and I was like I'm going to use all of these words in a poem and then I read the last part.

Greg Santos said...

B,
You should definitely write a poem using these words. Post it here in 'comments' or on your own blog when you're done. That would rule!
G

Anonymous said...

Hey, that's not aubade at all!

Carolyn Cordon said...

Hey, I'm impressed. I've got to look up the word 'aubade' - I have no idea what it means!

Gerard L. Callan said...

hi, did you purposely leave off night?

Greg Santos said...

Night is a dirty, dirty word. Shame on you for suggesting I use it in a poem. For shame...