You may know the site Good Reads but if you don’t and you’re into books, I recommend it. “Into books” is a little different than “likes to read,” but that’ll do, too.

I know a lot of people already spend too much time on the internet — blogging, or “networking” on Facebook, or looking for guacamole recipes. Still Good Reads is an interesting place to read book reviews from aficionados and normal people and fellow poets and maybe even some readers you know in the flesh.

If you want to catalog your books of course that can take time, but you can also categorize or stick to poetry, and branch out when you feel like it. If you have a book you can plug it there. One of my favorite things is browsing people’s favorite books, and finding people I share a favorite with. (Go, Jesus’ Son! Go Green Squall!)

Readers can shelve their books according to genre and all the predictables are there like mystery and magical realism and WWII, but people create odder categories, too. I have one called “schlock,” and I’ve seen some great ones like “threw it at the wall,” “sex and baseball,” “overrated,” “sleaze,” “books that gave me a rash,” and the very enigmatic “cheryl.”

Some people insist every poem needs its own title, as if you were naming a baby. Personally I don’t mind if a poem goes around as “Untitled,” although, of course, a title lets the poet determine how the poem is identified. Don’t title it and you run the risk of readers coming up with something like “the poem with sleet in it,” or “the dead baby poem.” Who wants that? Luckily, default will usually kick in and the poem will be identified by its first line, à la e.e. cummings. This can be a good thing.

On the other side are poets who use the same title over and over, like Louise Glück in Wild Iris. This makes identifying the poem even harder than leaving it untitled. There’s “Matins page 2,” “Matins page 3,” page 12, 13, 25, etc. Hey, they were all good, but which one are we talking about?

In my book, anything would be preferable to calling a poem “Poem.” As if there were only one!

There’s a poet I know who hates long titles. I admit this can come off as gimmicky, but usually I find it a draw. A poem called “Poem in Which the Clairvoyant Gives In and Sells Her Internal Organs to Buy the Lycra-Like Trampoline” would pique my interest more than “Snow.” (At least initially.) The danger here is the reader enters with big expectations. If the poem is a let-down, an extraordinary title won’t save it. It will only make the let-down worse.

I thought such long titles were rare but a recent cull of Verse Daily turns up a bunch of them. If any of these intrigue you, you can read them there, and see if the poems deliver.

• “Brought to You by the Letter Ox , Or: Why I Want my Son to Remain Illiterate” by Mitchell Metz  
• “Portrait of Hooper as a Drama Minor Pulling an All-nighter for the Finance Exam” by Charles Sweetman
• “The Blackmailer’s Wife Reads History and Considers the Nature of Guilt” by Judy Brown   
• “On the Abduction of Calvin Klein’s Daughter Marci: A Captor’s Narrative” by Robyn Schiff
• “The Poem You Hang on Your Wall Like a Painting Because It Does Something Different Each Time the Light” by Timothy Kelly
• “Speedy Inexpensive Chaos Theory Poem About Short Term Memory Loss” by Peggy Munson  
• “I Am Talking Dirty to You Like You are the Only One in the Room” by Danielle Pafunda
• “On a Woodpecker Drinking from a Knothole Still Full of the Last Rain” by Maurice Manning

Dear publication,

I appreciate your trusting me to be among your readers. However, after careful review of your contents, I have decided your publication does not suit my current needs.

Please know I have been overwhelmed by dozens of high quality publications this month, and my resources are limited. I must often reject journals that have merit.

I regret the volume of publications available prevents me from responding in a more personal manner. I wish you luck in placing your product elsewhere.

Sincerely,
Sarah

When I buy a poetry book from a non-English poet, I usually prefer those with the original language on the facing page. This is pretty standard for German and the Romantic languages. It’s almost difficult to find a book of Pablo Neruda, for example, that doesn’t include the Spanish. Although I never learned Spanish, I can decipher some of it via basic Italian and French. Plus growing up in America you couldn’t really avoid acquiring some Spanish, even in deepest New Jersey.

I enjoy scanning the Spanish when reading Neruda or Lorca or whomever. My eyes sometimes jump to the opposite page just to check that this marvelousness is actually happening, as if I could find out how to do it!

If you’re interested in languages, one fun way to waste money is to buy different translations of the same poetry. I have a couple English translations of Wislawa Szymborska, and it’s a very uneven business. In one poem — Contribution to Statistics — the translator resorts to a baseball metaphor, driving me insane. I doubt Szymborska ever used a baseball metaphor. Or maybe she did. Since I don’t understand a word of Polish, how can I know? Since none of the translations I have include the Polish, I can’t set out to try.

At some point, having the original language alongside the translation loses its usefulness for everyone but a handful of readers. I recently got Lidija Dimkovska’s terrific “Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers.” Although only about a million and half people actually speak Macedonian, the publisher provides the original version of the poem. I don’t read the language, but I still looked through the poems for anything recognizable. I can only report back that they use Pantene shampoo in Macedonia.