By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This variant of 'The Loss of Quest' brings back the street girl, street guy, river, and woodsmen, turning personal exhaustion into a public field of pursuit and possible refusal.
The corrected transcript makes the drafting relationship clearer: this page tightens the river-and-street material into a more continuous poem that ends on the choice to join, refuse, or stay silent.
A fuller draft of 'The Loss of Quest' that folds the river-and-street material into the disaffected opening - 'I don't care about the sunlight / I do not care abous the dawn ... Yet nothing better then gone' - and then runs straight on into the 'Street girl and street / guy too' by 'the wonderful river' where 'American woodsmen will come to / hunt you down'. Where the companion fragment hedged with 'you are not all that is lost', this version flattens it to the blunt 'Yes you are lost', and its closing 'Join, or don't, say a word' (trailed by a lone 'x') compresses the earlier wavering into a single shrug - the drafting cycle visibly tightening the poem toward fatalism.