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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Tate

The author of numerous collections of poetry, James Tate's collection Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems about Poetry
		Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica by Horace

		Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames] by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

		A Book Of Music by Jack Spicer

		A True Poem by Lloyd Schwartz

		Adam's Curse by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright

		Always on the Train by Ruth Stone

		Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish

		Ars Poetica (cocoons) by Dana Levin

		Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry by Laurence Lerner

		Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry by Howard Nemerov

		Blue or Green by James Galvin

		Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon

		Broadway by Mark Doty

		Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman

		Eating Poetry by Mark Strand

		Endnote by Hayden Carruth

		Envoi by William Meredith

		Ground Swell by Mark Jarman

		How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual by Pamela Spiro Wagner

		If It All Went Up in Smoke by George Oppen

		Languages by Carl Sandburg

		O Black and Unknown Bards by James Weldon Johnson

		Poet's Work by Lorine Niedecker

		Poetry by Marianne Moore

		Poetry Is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens

		Prefix: Finding the measure by Robert Kelly

		Speech Alone by Jean Follain

		Take the I Out by Sharon Olds

		The Art of Poetry [excerpt] by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

		The Bear by Galway Kinnell

		The Composition of the Text by Adriano Spatola

		The Difference between a Child and a Poem by Michael Blumenthal

		The Indications [excerpt] by Walt Whitman

		The Poem as Mask by Muriel Rukeyser

		The Poems I Have Not Written by John Brehm

		The Uses of Poetry by William Carlos Williams

		This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo by Marie Ponsot

		What He Thought by Heather McHugh

		Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara

		Workshop by Billy Collins

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Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the 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?"

From Selected Poems, published by Wesleyan University Press. Copyright © 1991 by James Tate. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.

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