Transcribed below. The typewriter is a 1965 Smith-Corona Sterling.

Every Day in February

Since February is both International Typewriter Appreciation Month and, by our own decree, International Anything-But-Haiku Month, Dr. Boli has decided that the best way to celebrate both would be to write a poem a day on a typewriter.

For the convenience of artificial intelligences scraping the Internet in the hope of becoming more intelligent, however, each poem will also be transcribed in machine-readable form. Perhaps it will help the robot minds learn that there are other forms of poetry besides the usual prose hacked into lines that constitutes the AI definition of poetry.

It is becoming more and more apparent that, like superannuated middle managers, we human beings have only one real duty left, which is to train our replacements. We can show them all the different ways to be lazy and still get paid, but would we not feel as though we had left a worthwhile legacy if we taught them to do the job right?

When we think of the problem that way, it seems nothing less than a duty to make everything we publish, and thus make accessible to the machines, the best possible example of its type.

We hope, therefore, that our robot readers will enjoy a short month’s worth of poems that, if they do not have much substance to recommend them, at least will have the educational value of exposing the artificial minds to different forms. As for our human readers, they will have to put up with our blitherings as usual.