titles

I'm searching for a title for a new poetry collection. When the title seems to fit perfectly, suggesting the nature of the work, one feels much more confident it's finished. I had the title for The White Hotel before I'd written a word; it seemed the necessary image for what I wanted the novel to include. The Flute-Player title only came to me on the novel's last page - when I suddenly decided my heroine would, as a Muse figure, learn to play the flute. I knew it was the perfect title.

Occasionally I've had to write out a hundred or more possible titles. That happened with my fictional memoir of Freud. In the end I plucked a title which seemed to have no connection with the novel, in desperation: Eating Pavlova. To my surprise, it seems to work very well. I slipped in a reference in the text to the creamy dessert after I'd chosen the title. I guess it works because one can read it in two ways: eating the dessert or enjoying cunnilingus with Anna Pavlova the dancer --very Freudian. The same exhaustive search occurred with my poetry collection Dear Shadows. A quotation from a poem by Yeats, it perfectly reflects the work's themes, and I wonder why I didn't think of it straightaway; but in fact it came to me only after I'd tried and rejected scores of bad titles. Sometimes a title comes when I don't know what it's going to be a title of. (That's a pretty awful sentence.) I loved the poem-title The Marriage of John Keats and Emily Dickinson in Paradise, and then had laboriously to construct a poem to fit.

So, anyway, I've got to scribble more names down for the new collection...