on naming
This April I published an essay called Cornfed. I wrote it organically, a few years out of college and still ruminating over my personal history of glorifying whiteness. The title comes from the opening line of the essay, which was a text message I sent years ago that always stuck with me. It was one of the rare times that I knew my title before I finished what I wrote.
I like my naming succinct. Maybe it's a silent defiance against the Yorubas' love of lengthiness (Olawunmi Iyabo Kudirat Faleti, anyone?). Ola leaves minimal room for misinterpretation and mispronunciation. So when I write, I lean toward titles like "Cherries", “Cornfed”, “Omniscience”, and “Apologia”. I generally abhor labels, which are, more often than not, pushed upon me without my consent. A poem titled “Cherries” could be about hundreds of things: an ode to fruit, or to losing one’s virginity, or to a shade of red, or to a friendship that’s as tough as it is tender.
One of my favorite essays that I always come back to is Aricka Foreman’s “Let Me Get Carefree Unless It Means I Live In This Political Body And Everything is Always On Fire Or How I Went To A Santigold Concert To Get Free Anyway”. I also love “F” by Megan Stielstra. The former title seems to tell you everything you’d even think to ask, while the latter title seems to do the opposite. Neither is exactly true. Foreman's title belies a layered work that mixes time and space and narrative into a poetic, purposefully meandering essay. The latter title is as if Stielstra’s essay is a song and “F” is the chorus. It’s the refrain that returns again and again, each time in a different key. Both essays are about making space for your own personhood, however sloppily or half-formed she shows up.
That last part is key. Art is seldom finished. Living in this body, in any body, is messy, unfinished business. I’m editing a series of poems I wrote this spring and I'm going to try making all those titles long and unyielding (well, by my standards). My attempts so far:
For days where I hate my cells, and long for someone else's, I pretend
His incredulous longing (how a small girl plucks heartstrings, two by two by two)
The unraveling of a woman untethered and slightly on fire: an anti-origin story
How a global pandemic births a million tiny lunar shrines//sestina for the moon