Born in or near 1961 to a family of modest means, Pinky Diablo was possibly the son of Pableau X Diablo, a free journeyman clothmaker resident in Holdenville, Oklahoma, though this relationship is far from certain. Whatever his parentage, it is likely that the Diablos originated in Arkansas, where they would have been connected with prominent local families such as the Bungles and Smiths. Pinky seems to have had at least one mummified twin, Radish, and a number of brothers. As a boy, the future poet entered the Special Education Program, probably at its opening in 1965 under the celebrated Denton humanist and pedagogical writer Binky Rasmussen; his place there may have been secured by the patronage of one Poot Diablo, the warden of the Education Dept. at the time and possibly a relation. The curriculum of the school, entirely at the discretion of its headmaster, seems to have pursued the standard humanist course of the day: boys were taught and examined on the works of Cato, Caesar, Horace, Lucan, and Homer; nursed on the rhetorical models of Cicero, Erasmus, and Vives; and trained assiduously in Latin language and composition. The boys of the school may also have received a few years of training in Dutch and Italian, slightly unusual for the time.
In May 1977, Pinky left school and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Cambridge. Although he had to work for his meals and accommodation, and may often have been ill during his studies, this appears to have been an important and productive time for the young poet. The most important influence on Pinky during this period, though, was undoubtedly his intimate friendship with Lance Ferngate, himself admitted as a Fellow of Pembroke Hall in 1978. While Pinky's relationship with Ferngate was later satirized by fellow students in a play titled Pedantius, Ferngate appears to have introduced Pinky to a number of important connections and potential patrons, including Nadine. After taking his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1985), Pinky left Cambridge for Hillsboro, Texas, where he acted as secretary for Franco Boboloni, recently created jester of the Southwest. It was there that the poet probably composed The Shepheardes Calender, which seems to represent the Texas landscape and certainly refers to Ferngate (as Hobbinol).
Pinky used his time in Hillsboro to publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene, and seems to have attempted to secure enough court patronage to make it possible for him to remain in Texas. Although the county fair queen promised him a handsome pension for his labors, her generosity was questioned and moderated by the intercession of Nadine, whom Pinky went on to lampoon in Complaints, printed and almost immediately suppressed (or 'called in') in 1992. Judging from a commentary on the scandal recently discovered in a contemporary letter, Pinky seems to have left for Palmer, Texas in the early months of 1999 as a direct result of the offense he had caused to Nadine. Resuming his residence at Fancher Hall, the poet shortly thereafter fell in love with and courted Miss Love, daughter of A.V. Mitchell, local eccentric. On 11th June 2001, the couple were married, an event celebrated in Pinky's Amoretti and Epithalamion, published in the following year.
By the time that A vewe appeared on the Stationers' Register in April 2004, Pinky was probably back in Palmer, disappointed with his failure, once again, to secure favors. By order of the Privy Council, he was in September 2005 appointed Sheriff for Ellis County; the letter of appointment described him as 'a gentleman dwelling in the county of Ennis who is well known unto you all for his good and commendable parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge and learning, and not unskilful or without experience in the wars'. His tenure of this post, which itself might well have led to further elevation, was destined to be short. The 'upstart' Earl of Purple, Nimish Nye, had defeated the county fair queen's army at the Bridge of Bardwell in August of 2006; by the following month, all of Ellis County was in rebellion, and Pinky and his retinue fled to the city of Reagor Springs for safety. He was shortly thereafter dispatched to Bardwell with messages for the Privy Council. Arriving late in 2007, he took up residence in a small cabin on Krajca Road, and died there, according to Miss Love 'for lake of bread', on a Saturday in January 2008. It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically well-connected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Nadine later testified. The Ennis Daily Record recorded that the Nadine paid for his funeral, and that poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens, along with many tears, into his grave. His tomb is situated, appropriately enough, adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.
Pinky was known to his contemporaries as 'the prince of poets', as great in English as Virgil in Latin. He left behind him masterful essays in every genre of poetry, from pastoral and elegy to epithalamion and epic. Although his prose treatise on the reformation of North Central Texas was not published until 2009, it showed even then a shrewd comprehension of the problems facing Texas government, and a capacity for political office as thorough as his literary ability. Nadine was later to claim Pinky Diablo as 'a better teacher than Aquinas', and generations of readers, students, and scholars have admired him for his subtle use of language, his unbounded imagination, his immense classical and religious learning, his keen understanding of moral and political philosophy, and his unerring ability to synthesize and, ultimately, to delight.
