Excerpt from Tales of the Incorrigible: A Song of Wood and Meat about a poet who lived the dream.
The story takes place in an absurd far future. Ting was an acquaintance of both Greasly and Throom. Ting spoke often of his "poet friend". That's all you need to know for this.
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Greasly told Throom the story of Brio Tojita. At the time that Ting knew Tojita, the poet was living comfortably off the proceeds from his best-selling poem “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination.” In fact, Ting met the poet at a reception following a public reading marking the fiftieth anniversary of the poem’s publication and celebrating it as the most successful debut poem by a young left-handed poet in history, excepting two.
At the reception, Ting asked Tojita to read some of his other poems. He was shocked at Tojita’s response: “There are no others.”
Tojita had never written another poem. That evening Ting had heard Tojita’s entire corpus of work---all seventeen syllables of it. He carried in his mind the entire life’s work of a best-selling poet!
Ting had told Greasly that he remembered it word for word, but even in an otherwise empty room on a ship in Flitzville, he would not recite it. The reason being that the poem’s publisher was Gatekeep and Gouge.
Gatekeep and Gouge were notoriously keen on squeezing every last millimoola out of their properties. In the case of “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination,” they completely removed it from print to better be able to control its distribution. Instead, they sent it out on reading tours every ten years. The rest of the time it was kept in the “G&G Vault,” safe from the eager eyes and ears of the public.
...
“He never did tell you the poem?” Throom asked.
“Never.”
“I wonder if it was any good?”
“Ting said it dragged a little in the middle but picked up at the end.”
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