What’s in a name? As Shakespeare once famously said, ‘A rose by any other name would sell as sweet.’ But would a pocket-sized, poetry almanack with a different name be as good? One certainly hopes so as I’ve just had to change the name of this web site and the almanack.
My original name for this site was Pocket Poetry. It fit the size of the almanack (super tiny) and it’s content (poetry) perfectly. It had a nice ring to it and even alliterated. I went ahead full steam and created the website, bought the domain name and set up the Instagram account. And after I’d done all that hard work I remembered that the Australian publisher Ginninderra Press has an imprint of chapbooks called Pocket Poets. I felt a little foolish.
I toyed with the idea of keeping the name Pocket Poetry (It was soooo good! And I’d done all that hard work.) but it just didn’t sit right. I felt like I was treading on Ginninderra Press’ toes and I didn’t want to do that. Surely I could come up with something else?
Armed with a dictionary and the excellent Rhyme Zone site I went a word hunting. Some of the ideas were Portable Poetry, Pint-Sized Poetry, Petite Poetry. None were really working. I’d half decided to go with portable as it was the best of the bunch. And then I was talking to my husband about it and instead of saying pocket poetry I said pocketry. Pocketry. Hmmm, that’s got a nice ring to is, doesn’t it? And it’s not too close to Pocket Poets. The Pocketry Almanack. Why, yes. I think that will do nicely.
After some tense moments making sure Ginninderra Press were on board with the new name and purchasing the domain, it was all systems go.
So that’s the story of how I went from Pocket Poetry to Pocketry which is a smush of the two words or to use the fancy name, a portmanteau. Or in this case a poetry portmanteau.
