By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A second First Instruction moves from old men's advice toward truth, insisting that everything between extremes fails and that youth belongs only to poets, songwriters, and mistaken typewriters.
The placement of truth after "all the way around knowledge" suggests that knowledge alone circles the issue unless someone risks choosing hard limits. "Everything inbetween will not work" is the harsh center of the poem, refusing moderation as a moral or artistic method. Youth survives only in forms that begin and end in the same place, which is why poets, songwriters, and manual typewriters remain its strange custodians.
A second page titled 'The First Instruction' that recasts the old-man-advice material from page 307 as a sharper argument about extremes. In youth, 'Between tongue and soul,' one should 'ask advice, from any old man' and 'Make his either / The best or the worst' - go 'All the way around knowledge,' because only then 'is a chance for truth,' since 'everything inbetween will not work.' The poem then repeats the collection's signature claim that 'youth has no inclusion / Excepting song writers and poets / When they begin and when they end / And of course manual typewriters / Those of which / Are made of mistakes' - the handwritten 'Up' inserted into the line about what fails. Youth survives only in forms preserved by error.