I'm still having trouble picking a title for my collection. Sigh.
I need some help.
What's the title of your collection or book? Why did you title it so? In a paragraph or less. Please. What work does the title do for your collection? Does your title reveal the major theme/ motif in your collection? Is your title misleading? Is your title an umbrella for all the themes/ motifs in the collection?
Tell me.
About Me
- Eduardo C. Corral
- Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. He holds degrees from ASU and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Post Road. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation award and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. He's the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review. He won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
7 comments:
This is a good question, Eduardo. My forthcoming collection is titled Radish King. The words radish king appear in a poem in the book that sparked the rest of the poems in the book as well as my blog. The poems are about burning, all of them. I think of radishes as being hot, burny. With this book I knew exactly where I was going.
The book I'm working on now, Cavader Dogs, had three different titles until I found the right one. I didn't even know myself what my book was about until recently. Even though %98 of the poems in the book have dogs in them, I still wasn't seeing that. I can't tell you why exactly, except that maybe I just didn't want to.
r
Eduardo, my new manuscript is titled "Like Luck." I went the pull-a-phrase-from-one-of-the-poems route this time, and this phrase just jumped out at me. It's a kind of umbrella, since many of the poems are about relationships -- in the sense of finding the right someone, and what happens after that -- which definitely involves luck or something like it. And then as I was ordering the poems I began to pick up on "luck" as a reoccuring word in several of the poems, which I hadn't quite realized before. Along with meaning, though, I also just liked the sound of it. I think that's what really made me try it out to begin with.
It might be interesting (at least to me) to hear from people who had their ms titled one thing and then would up publishing it under a different title. I can think of two people who changed titles between winning a contest and the actual publication of the book.
Book 1: I picked the most interesting phrase from one of my poems that epitomized destruction, loss, and minimalization.
Book 2: I came up with a title and then googled it to find an epigraph that contained it.
Book 3: I keep changing the title.
Chapbook 2: I used an ironic phrase from one of the poems. I don't know why.
If you can't find a title, it's probably because you don't have the order right yet.
By the way, how's your penis?
1) Better To Travel is the title of a very short poem that set the entire book in motion. The title was borrowed from Swing Out Sister's first album, It's Better To Travel, which was stolen from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said "It's better to travel, hopefully, than to arrive."
2) Slow To Burn is the name of poem from the chapbook...the title borrowed from Vanessa Daou's sadly out of print album of the same name.
Right now, the manuscript is called The World Folds Inside an Envelope, which is a poem line that I think also covers thematic issues and is a silly play on all that sending-poetry-out business. I don't know how long the title will last, though.
how about "el gordito speaks"?
-juan
Can't decide? Perhaps your book should be:
The Unentitled Consequences
Cheers,
Thomas Fortenberry
*my universe in the palm of your mind
www.thomasfortenberry.net
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