Bruce,
If your poem only has a body, as I think it did when I helped you mock this site up some time ago, then you don't need CKK. CKK is for adding fields to a node type beyond title and body, not for creating a new node types. It used to be that you needed flexinode to create a new content type, called Poem, but now you can do this with stock drupal. You can still add categories (taxonmy terms) to new content types as before. You can create the Poem content type without using other modules, provided that you don't need any additional fields. CKK Let's you add fields to custom defined content types.
With regard to views, it is used to provide different slices of the data. Want to provide a custom page showing all the poems submitted by a user, or the currently logged in user, Views is good for that. Want to provide a block containing all poems of a specified category? Views is good for that as well.
Views and CKK are considered a couple of the basic must haves in Drupal, and well worth the time to just get them downloaded and installed in your Drupal 5 site.
Hope this finds you well.
P.S. I left up my mockup of your Poem site (drupal 4.7) on www2.evergreen.edu/dave, and was surprised to find that people are periodically finding this site and submitting Poems. :) It's been entertaining, so I've left it up.....