Cracking Of The Mirror

By Jack Joseph Smith

AI Interpretation

GPT

Written in 1975, this collection moves through war, industry, childhood, sea-light, myth, and political anger with a voice that treats private feeling and public violence as parts of the same historical pressure.

Again and again the poems try to think beyond official language: justice, labor, religion, machinery, and beauty are all tested against what the body actually endures.

Claude

Cracking Of The Mirror (1975) is the archive's most argument-driven collection: roughly seventy short poems plus a handful of three-page set pieces such as 'The Tower' and 'The Wonderful Door'. It treats perception, value, and power as things to be tested rather than described. The recurring move is to flatten a false distinction in a single line - 'Gold and gold plated are the same' - and to read the visible world as a crust over what was buried to build it, as when Mount Lebanon's soft suburban lawns sit 'over yesteryears coal-mines'. Its concerns return across the book: industrial labor and class memory, fame as disappearance, group eros, drug-vision cosmology, and a Blakean credo that meaning lives 'beyond the classic duty' of social need. Place ranges from late-sixties Santa Monica to Western Pennsylvania, and named figures like Hemingway, Poe, Eliot, and Blake appear as instances to be judged, not authorities to be cited.

The collection coheres through a consistent intellectual posture rather than a narrative. The speaker distrusts surfaces and keeps prying at the seam between real and counterfeit, comfort and the cost that paid for it. The longer poems sustain this method over several pages while the miniatures compress it to a verdict. Set beside the later, rawer Sinatra-to-Christ books, this is the most argued and least confessional thing in the archive, and preserved misspellings ('eneny', 'demention') keep it legible as a manuscript record.

Contents