"Dastard" rhymes with "bastard" she said

Over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Herotomost has all the Real Toads in a sleazy joint in New Orleans. The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has been stolen right out from under the nose of our boss Toad, and we are asked to solve the mystery.
Better check the Toads link first for details, then check my solution below:

THE PULITZER MYSTERY

by Kay Davies, August, 2013

Basin Street is the street

where the elite

always meet,

but Bourbon Street

ain't got elite

for you to meet.

The bad bastards

and bad buzzards

are there, and hard.

Hard tattooed faces

in hard cold places

talk of horse races.

The sumo wrestlers

were just hustlers

but they had

Sherry’s back,

and Sherry

had the knack

of finishing poems

in English so foreign

you’d think it

was written,

each word bitten,

and then splittin’

from South Africa.

The Pulitzer committee

thought the poem witty

and awarded it the prize,

Wikimedia photos

but it was a surprise

to Missus S.A.
on that very day

when the lights went out.

Her poem, her life’s work

had, by some light-quirk,

been submitted by a frog

who wasn’t a real toad

n o t a t a l l a t a l l.

Whereupon all

the Real Toads were writing

and they were inciting

and hoping for sightings

of the dastard

—that bastard.

He had written the

end, you see,

not uncircumspectly 

but just incorrectly.

It should have 

said “braai”

but in USA

what do they do

but say

“barbecue”!

When the committee

came out to the city

to figure an end

to the furor

a skeleton slipped

out of his crypt

and claimed to be

the fuhrer.

“You’re crazy,”

they said, 

“and you are too dead

 for the Pulitzer,

 so we’ll give it instead

 to Missus S.A.”

and the real toads were happy

for the rest of the day.

And as for Sherry

she got away to the west coast of Vancouver Island where she lived happily ever after, never writing another word of South African English, but tying herself to trees every now and then, to protest clearcut logging, oil pipelines, unrecyclables, and cruelty to animals.