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Teaching The Ape to Write

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair
then tied his pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

-James Tate, 1970

Essential Poem
(for John Hollander)

Although it’s likely you’re on your own
at this moment in this city of three million
reading the poems of Traherne,
and there was no one till you lit your lamp,
the kingdom of childhood keeps being founded
in his voice and his seeing,
which are a sort of birth. A birth goes on
in the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone.
Then comes the small bright circle of the faces:
lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over child
in their enclosure we name home,
a hut in the plain so bare there’s not a tongue
of grass to make the wind hiss. Unknown
to the world a world exists:
trees and streams, birds all the colors of the flowers.
So Traherne pours over you
his wild remembrance of the world to come. And would
even in the silence of his book
if it were lost and lay unopened
two hundred years. Even if he had died
before he sang the Eden in his look.

-A. F. Moritz, 2011

I started Wednesday poemday almost three years ago on a lark. Other than missing the month of August in 2009, and also taking off for a month in 2010, this thing has been going strong. In celebration (celebration?) today we have two sides of the poetry coin.

Also here is some information about poetry.

(Happy Leap Day.)