By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Career" weighs a life in poetry against humbler professions and concludes that the fight for meaning mattered even if the lost fun could never have saved the ruined world.
The speaker does not fully repent ambition, but he no longer disguises its cost. What keeps the poem alive is the hard turn toward poetry as labor and combat rather than prestige. The final lines make private enjoyment seem trivial beside collapse, which gives the page its exhausted conviction.
'Career' weighs a poet's life against humbler trades - thinking himself 'better / than a juke box salesmerr / and a small college basketball / coach' - and refuses to fully repent the ambition while no longer hiding its cost: 'I am not saying I made a mistake / But I have been thinking / about it, / and what poetry means.' The hard turn casts poetry as combat, 'Fight like hell,' yet the exhausted close makes even pleasure seem trivial beside collapse: the 'fun you,, / you would have had / Would not have done / any good anyway, / with the world being gone.'