Page 104
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Materialism" defends artists, miners, farmers, tradespeople, suburban rebels, and inner-city loners against a culture willing to let greed and violence ruin all of them at once.
The poem is unusually direct in naming a broad social body rather than one emblematic figure. Its anger comes from the sense that these lives already hold dignity, skill, and imagination before ideology ever touches them. By the end, materialism is not just money-love but the choice to abandon whole classes of people to damage.
Materialism: the young artist with the handbook, the coal miner, the very small farmer, the suburban rebel, the inner city loner. Are you going to let greed and violence keep messing them up all at once.