I have been seriously slacking with you, blog. I've been treating you like that dear friend I so badly want to get together with, but then cannot pierce the membrane of fatigue and blase enough to heed to my social urges. I've also been working on my poetry collection, and as it sits on my escritoire nameless (and yes, I have an escritoire), I've been thinking about the titles of successful collections that have come out in the past twenty years. It seems I can't escape the urge to be precious, even when I make a conscious effort to avoid it. I at first thought to name my collection something bold, something wild, something wholly subject and definitive; naturally then, a title with a definite article would allude to that occult panache, that surrounding talisman, that American gothic that so defines a book about haunting artifacts and desiccated kingdoms. However, upon turning it into my thesis class, I felt immediately self conscious and knew that my title (which will not be disclosed here or anywhere ever unless I make it in this world and it then becomes a thing I and all of my cohort can chortle at with retrospective ceremony and understanding for the next generation of writers) would carry little more than the lifespan of an inside joke.
Titles that successfully descry the mysteries of their books with "The ______" are rare gems in this world. Let's play around with those successful poets who in kind have successful titles that earn this construction.
