Ruby Street

I am currently involved in the various tasks in getting a book ready for print and release . The book, at this moment, is called Breaking the Days , and was a joint winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize last year . The other winner, Tracy Ryan, has already published her volume in late July. But back to this process. Because they are tasks, things that you do to make something. My initial task was to complete the manuscript after having the initial 150 lines (or so) being chosen last year. And thanks to Whitmore Press folks for offering this ongoing opportunity to poets, and, of course, for picking my manuscript last year. I did, in fact, have a longer manuscript idea I was working from, so I knew the field of poems I would be playing with. Mostly, though not entirely, they were a series of writings I had done during 2014, and to narrow it down, mostly during the first seven or eight months of that year. I have since included a few newer 2015 poems and reworked one or two ...

I seem to have written a small book of poems in the last few weeks - maybe - there's a touch over 40 pages worth. All done in the thin cracks of a very busy time - I made myself do it. But the problem is, none of the poems have titles. One almost did but the title came down into the poem. Now, I've always been someone who'd said that titles are important, as important as the poem in one sense (well, they are part of the poem, part of the visual as well as the textual). I'm usually quite good at them. So, what has gone wrong? Am I just being titularly lazy? What to do? Overturn years of well-established practice? I feel a wee crise washing across me. I've read a lot of poems without titles, sure, we all have, but leaving these ones as they are doesn't seem quite right (and I wonder why I think that). Neither does numbering them nor calling them all 'poem', or suchlike. Nor could they become one long poem - that is not right either, in this instan...