Monday's Poem: "Maybe Very Happy" by Jack Gilbert from Refusing Heaven. Monday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of the writer James Fenimore Cooper, born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the 11th of 12 children. Cooper was only 13 years old when his parents sent him to Yale. He didn't study much; mostly he wandered around the woods by New Haven. He went back to Cooperstown for a while and then became a sailor and joined the Navy. Then he inherited money from his father, so he tried to make his living as a gentleman farmer, landlord, and investor, but he failed at all those things. And meanwhile, he was running out of money. One day, he was reading aloud to his wife, a book about English social life, and he said, "I believe I could write a better book myself." His wife told him to prove it, so James Fenimore Cooper began his first novel. It became the novel Precaution (1820). He also wrote The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground (1821), The Pioneers (1823), and The Last of the Mohicans (1826)...