Hey, Hey, We're The Monkey Poets

"If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters,
they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare."

One of the Monkeys
by Nicholas Johnson

I'm one of the monkeys they've got typing
in a room full of monkeys. It's a play
Shakespeare wrote back in the old days
they want us to write again. So we're writing
a play we never read. They keep inviting
strangers to watch us and the strangers say:
"They wrote 'to be or nutti to be'!" They stay
too long if we write something exciting
but the bananas flow like wine. We know
it's a crazy, morbid, ranting play, a stew
full of murder, love, but with a noble feel.
Shocked, I see hack monkeys come and monkeys go.
One keeper killed my father. What should I do?
I'm watching him. My teeth are as sharp as steel.

Poets.org

NICK JOHNSON's new chapbook, Degrees of Freedom, is published by Bright Hill Press. A MacDowell Colony fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of The Lyric Recovery Festival Award 2000 at Carnegie Hall, he has published work in Rattapallax,, Pivot, American Poetry Review, Chance of a Ghost anthology, and elsewhere. Nick is Co-Founder and Senior Poetry Editor of Big City Lit (BigCityLit.com), an on-line literary magazine. He has taught creative writing for many years at the Payne Whitney Clinic and The Lighthouse in New York City.

http://wordworksdc.com.hosting.domaindirect.com/cafe_muse.html

It is frequently stated in books and articles on probability that if a succession of monkeys were set before a typewriter with limitless paper, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare would be repeated by chance. If there are 50 keys on the typewriter, the probability of the monkey getting Shakespeare correct is raised to the power of the number of characters (letters and spaces) in Shakespeare plus the adjustments of the typewriter needed for capitals and punctuation. On this basis the chance of the monkey typing the word 'Hamlet' correctly is one in 15,625,000,000, so to quote the probability of him typing the complete works involves a large number indeed.

http://www.probabilitytheory.info/topics/bridge_monkeys.htm

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