Bugs Bunny, Cartoons and Human Identity

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins rhapsodizes on the common root of poetry, cartoons and human identity. Inspired:

I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. . . . This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.

Bugs

There he leans:

cracking wise,

biting his bright orange carrot

bugging the world

speed demon

ventriloquist

and master of disguise

he is everywhere at once

buck-toothed

and spectacularly eared

he is armed with dynamite

he is the only one

who really knows what's up.

Elmer

The mailbox in front of the neat cottage

spells out the unfortunate name.

This morning the homebody

is singing in his sunny kitchen

dum-dee-dum, waiting

for the tea water to boil.

Later he will have his nap,

the enormous pink head

rolling on the pillow

dreaming again of the wabbit,

the private carrot patch.

Waiting by his bed

is the shotgun and the ridiculous hat

for he is the human.