[lbo-talk] The Waste Land by Wendy Cope

[C. G. Estabrook]

Cope is brilliant, even in the poems ascribed to Jason Strugnell, the
perfect tump (Cope's acronym for "typically useless male poet"), including
the sonnet that begins "The expense for spirits is a crying shame..." and
the following:

	Strugnell's Sonnets (VI)

	Let me not to the marriage of true swine
	Admit impediments. With his big car
	He's won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
	I have no spare; henceforth I'll bear the scar.
	Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
	I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
	If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
	And soar above Tulse Hill on poet's wings --
	A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
	Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
	Outlives their din. One day I'll make my mark,
	Although I'm not from Ulster or from Mars,
	And when I'm published in some classy mag
	You'll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.

-- Wendy Cope from "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" (1986); she also does
things like the lovely and technically perfect "Summer Villanelle"
<www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=0&poet=6663&num=11>. --CGE