i was working on my table of contents last night, and it suddenly dawned on me that i use a lot of names in my titles. a lot! don't believe me? well, here's a list of the name-centric titles:
Our Completion: Oil on Wood: Tino Rodríguez: 1999
Poem after Frieda Kahlo’s Painting The Broken Column
To Robert Hayden
Misael: Oil, Acrylic, Mixed Media on Canvas: Julio Galán: 2001
Midnight Coffee: Rafael Rodriguez Rapún: 1936
Variation on a Theme by José Montoya
La Pelona: Mixed Media: Ester Hernández: 1980
After Bei Dao/ After Jean Valentine
My Hands Are My Heart: Two-Part Cibachrome Print: Gabriel Orozco: 1991
Untitled (Perfect Lovers): Two Commercial Clocks: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: 1987-89
most of the names belong to visual artists. the rest belong to writers. one name belongs to lorca's last lover.
i wonder what this means? why am i obsessed with naming specific folks? well, i know why i use the names of these writers in my titles. they are the names of four poets who are very important to me: hayden, dao, valentine, montoya. and i like to honor my influences.
and the visual artist names are there because i have a standard way of giving titles to ekphrastic poems: title of art piece, materials used in piece, name of artist and date completed.
of course, now that i've noticed this habit of mine, i will stop plugging in names in my titles.
i'm crazy like that.
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.
3 comments:
I actually like this in collections, especially if it's a work I don't know. Then I can go check out the painting or poem or whatever the reference is.
Maybe that's obvious. Or I don't know enough about art.
But I don't think you should be too quick to drop the names from the titles...
name-dropper
I once had the privilege to attend a Bei Dao lecture at UTEP. He's a fantastic writer.
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