By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem contrasts American knowledge of death with a foreign PLACE where death felt constant, then turns laughter, travel, hurt, and trouble into a test of what suffering means.
The handwritten PLACE sharpens the line from vague foreignness into a physical location. The final insistence that hurt and trouble should be mixed keeps the poem from becoming a clean comparison.
Under the title 'Shuned', the poem inverts the usual geography of safety: 'Now that in America / I know nothing but death', while abroad, in a handwritten-emphasized 'PLACE', 'Every one died all the time' yet life was cheap and free ('Crossing seas for beer'). It splits its readers into those 'who have been there' and laugh in recognition and those who 'have not,, / or pretended' and 'laugh also', as if no one can take it straight. The closing argues against tidy categories: 'I suppose hurt and trouble / should not be mixed up / But I think they should'. Source spelling ('Shuned') is preserved.