What Roger says about rock band names seems especially apt. I'm also thinking of all the American microbreweries that give their beers outré names with an off-putting edge. If there's not currently a Rhino Sweat pale ale on the market, I expect there will be soon. Lots of hot sauce manufacturers go for dare-you-to-eat-it names like "Inferno" and "Satan's Anus," and we've all seen extreme amusement park rides named to sound like death threats or torture equipment. In all of those cases, the name is deliberately bad, or ironic in some way, and the intended audience is in on the joke. But if I get the drift of this comp, we're supposed to go a different way. We're supposed to imagine a poet who isn't in on the joke, someone with a McGonagall-esque degree of cluelessness who has no idea how bad the title (and the poem) is.
People have weighed in here with lots of potential ways to skin this cat. (Hmm, is there a title in that phrase, maybe?) Poems about bodily orifices and effluvia, earnest praise of something that merits a pan more than a paean, popular press headlines repurposed as poem titles. Any of those could be the key to success.
Like Adrian, I've had fun coming up with ghastly titles that so far have mostly defied me to write the accompanying poem: "There's No Jam Like Toe Jam," "Fungal Infection Be Not Proud," "Another Foreskin on the Doormat," "So Many Girls, So Few Handcuffs," "Pint of Blood, Side of Guacamole." I do have some hope for "I Taste Better Than I Smell," a love poem in which an ardent suitor likens himself to stinky cheese and urges the object of his affection to try some. Or I could try a poem addressed to my fellow competitors: "May You Totally Suck, and May I Be Even Worse."
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