The Great Pretender and The Despicable Dog

A comically desperate semi-Zen poet offers short bits of tawdry wisdom in three-line segments. A somewhat hostile semi-Confucian critic responds to each segment with a three-line quip about the author and-or his work. The central conceit of the work is that somehow a discredited poet (perhaps in Asia, perhaps in California, perhaps in the past, perhaps now) manages to get published again; but in a perverse twist, he is paired with one of his detractors, and the two are forced to work on the...