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Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
The Cuckoo Is a Pretty Bird
When asked by the Committee on Acknowledgment for A Purpose to Be Named Later to choose a favorite poet, or the poet who had most influenced my own work, I felt a sudden panic not nearly as sudden as I would have hoped, for I was afraid the wrong poet would end my masculine rhymes with a full stop forever and ever without end. Although my sycophantic synapses raced to name the most obvious choices– Youngblood, for example, or Pedant, or even Frisco – it was my heart, the ruby-roasted Rocinante, that came to the rescue, as it always does, since it, alone, thought of the one poet who truly did shape my work as does a clown his balloon. Hence, when I told the committee I would be choosing Cuckolded Wombat, author of such works as Totem in Tow, Muskrat for Sale, and Anchors Ahoy, among others, I told them with the fierceness of a mama lion for her flock, a papa goose for his brood, or a mercurial wombat for his or her marsupial trust. This, I now know, was a mistake. In other words, the Committee not only showed me the door, but also the elevator, the front lobby, the security staff, and, finally, the street onto which Larry, the head of security, threw me with the force of a dynamo that although not as human as some, was the most expressive.
That I had effectively grounded my iambs with the alacrity of assonant alliteration did not descend upon me for I, at first, was not merely hurt, both psychically and physically, from his throw but Larry,
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as good of a fellow as he was, had bruised my ascending aortic ulna, or my Worcester, and I had grown overcome with great sadness for my hero, Cuckolded Wombat, whose extensive array of asphodelible arias to the aspirations of the average Harry would never be as subsumed as they so deservedly deserved to be. In other words, alas my Cuckold, no one knows thee very well.
Yet, what is, perhaps, even more stunning than the way in which I was treated is the story of how Cuckolded Wombat came to be so reviled, so despised, so unequivocally equivocated into a diminutive hut down by the river, for that is truly the most heinous of barbed wire offenses. Poor Cuckold, who, despite his reams of perfunctory prosaic prosody, the chief executive officers of the Incorporated Amalgamation of Verse, not to be confused with the Institute for Verse Culture, a phantasmagoric entity that exists solely for the purposes of pigeons, had relegated to the outer banks of such institutions of lending as Pay as You Go and For a High Interest Rate for crimes, they said, against the “rhythmic calibrations of internal suffering,” or a sonnet.
Why Wombat had been so influential for me was not because of his subject matter, which ranged from the inappropriate to the mundane, or his spry, although peg-legged meter, which, had it not been for my tone-deafness, may have assaulted my ears with shantytowns befitting a sailor’s song. Nay, or no, it was actually because of something much less poetic, much less literary. Among all other poets, I found Cuckolded, or Cantankerous, as his friends liked to call him, Wombat to be eminently influential because of his theory that all works written in the present are simply responses to works already written in the past. In other words, when I was adrift in a sea of white botanicals, Wombat threw me an anchor. Wombat, my dear reader, gave me a place to begin.
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