The title field
This field identifies the titles of individual works in a publication or collection, such as poems in a periodical or tracks on a CD (to search by the title of a particular publication made up of numerous individual works, such as the periodical Newsweek, use the publication field). The title and publication fields will occasionally contain the same information, as in the case of a book-length poem such as "The Vermont Notebook" or "Girls on the Run," or in the case of a cinematic interpretation of Ashbery's work, a concert performance of a setting of Ashbery's work, a portrait of Ashbery, or any other item for which there is no useful distinction to be made between an individual work and an entire collection.
Information in the title field will identify, for example: poems or prose texts in a collection or periodical, musical compositions on an LP or CD, etc. For publications that include multiple relevant titles, those titles are listed in the order in which they appear in the publication.
Tips on searching the title field
*Page numbers, track information, etc., are usually given in parentheses after the title, when available. For example, the title field of the entry for the CD that includes Alvin Lucier's "Theme," a musical treatment of work by Ashbery, reads: 'Theme' (track 2) (18 minutes, 45 seconds).
*When the title field includes multiple titles by different authors, authorship is clarified by listing the name of the author after each title.
*Untitled works will be designated as such within square brackets, followed by either a short description of the material or the first line of the text. For example, the title field of the entry for American Victorian, a book including photographs of Ashbery's Hudson home, reads: [untitled photograph, newel post] (p. 25); [untitled photograph, stained glass window on front staircase landing] (p. 32); [untitled photograph, library] (p. 40); [untitled photograph, wallpaper used in master bedroom] (p. 64); [untitled photograph, wallpaper used in dining room] (p. 72); [untitled photograph, dining room] (p. 129 and back cover).
*Capitalization of titles has been standardized according to the practice of American English. Exceptions occur for foreign-language titles and for those in which it seems the author has consciously manipulated the capitalization.
*Initial articles (A, An, The) have been dropped from English-language titles (but not from foreign-language titles) by authors other than Ashbery when those titles are the first to be listed in the title field. However, for titles by Ashbery, the initial articles have been placed at the end of the title, after a comma. For titles that occur within a group of titles by Ashbery, rather than as the first title in that group, the article appears normally at the beginning of the title. This has been done to facilitate alphabetization of results when sorting by the title field without unnecessary awkwardness or inversion.
* Citations for articles by or about Ashbery that were published with both a headline and standing head or kicker generally note all such titles.
*Citations for translated works will give the translated title as well as the original, when possible. For example, the title field of the entry for the Swedish periodical Artes identifies the translated poem as: 'Ur självporträtt i en konvex spegel' / 'Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror' (pp. 16-27). Non-Latin alphabets are not usually used in the catalogue; for a Japanese translation of poems by Ashbery, for example, the title field will identify the translated poems only by their English titles.
*For blurbs by Ashbery, the text of the blurb will be given in the title field. For example, the title field of the entry for Gillian McCain's book Tilt reads: Gillian McCain's poems are like urgent telegrams from next door, or oddly but brilliantly cropped snapshots of the life that is going by.
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