NEW M.S. TITLE, "DETECTIVE PROJECTIONIST"

So since 2004 I have been seriously peddling my manuscript, which has gone through an countless iteration of titles. I have gone from Spicaresque, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and a finalist at the University of Notre Dame, to Slow-Ass Bronze Medalist, which is probably the most frustrated, or cynical, title one might give a manuscript. The important thing is that the work is still not completed and depending on what I read and interact with in the world the title is going to change, and keep changing.

I just finished reading Steve Erickson's Zeroville and that book has lodged loose a piece of the puzzle that I was always carrying. In grad school, I wrote a narrative poem that recounts the harrowing robbery of a movie theater that I worked at in 1992 called Kendall Nine (Kendall is a Miami suburb, nine movie theaters, etc.). Two masked men came into the movie and stole all the night's proceedings and all of the concession money; I've never been able to establish how much they made away with but I it was a summer of blockbusters, so you figure it out (probably pretty close to 100 grand, give or take a thousands). This poem was one of the first poems where I talk about writing, or the writing life, in my writing (I know, I know).

Toward the end of the poem, I also use the phrase "detective projectionist" to suggest that while I write the event, I have to screen, or show or project, the movie of what happened that night in my brain to my writer self. I have to screen it for the "detective projectionist," or something to that effect.
But, after finishing Erickson's book, it triggered this phrase loose from all the phrases that I carry in my head, that you carry in your head, and it has made me wise to the possibilities inherit in this little sliver of title, Detective Projectionist. This title not only leads one to assume a narrative, it literally describes the process of recreating an episode, scene, or actual, personal, historical occurrence. The visual synapse screening the scenes of movies of my life for the cynical, worldly wordsmith, critical of all tricks, and yet reliant on the alchemy of the tricks of literature.