A Proposal for a Drama Program
By Jack Smith
AI Interpretation
This is a short manifesto-like prose document arguing for drama as a way to redirect emotional disturbance into recognition, reflection, and form.
The pages read less like poetry than educational philosophy under pressure, but they still belong on the site because the voice and moral concerns are continuous with the surrounding work.
More than a proposal, this document reads as a compressed artistic credo — an argument that drama is not entertainment but a form of emergency attention, a way of holding damaged experience in place long enough to see it clearly. The prose carries the same moral urgency found across the poetry manuscripts, suggesting that for the author, all writing was ultimately pedagogical: a refusal to let feeling pass without reckoning.
What makes this piece distinctive within the archive is how directly it states what the poems enact indirectly. Where the poetry trusts disruption and image, this document insists on articulating the stakes in plain language — as if the author needed at least once to say the quiet part aloud.