Untitled ("Get Quebec and lakes")

By Jack Joseph Smith

Get Quebec and lakes Get the old phone poles, we banged cursing violence, our begining heads on From back in hillbilly Venice Seer sucker suits and liquor stores, and intellectuals stuffed as help Wild men then pretended to play a gutar, presenting themselves as normal Let thee think it is a care for color, a want for goods Our past marks our own, our honor Not living now for what we would Yet we havw the face of a women There when the blindnesss, has sheeted you, while we guess, above we are watched, around and around and around

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This poem gathers commerce, intellect, disguise, and regional swagger into a circling meditation on honor and public performance.

Claude

The imperative 'Get' drives the poem forward — get Quebec, get the old phone poles, get the beginning — as if acquisition and violence ('we banged cursing violence') were aspects of the same grasping energy. Commerce and swagger and intellect all circle the same unnamed need.

Phone poles as objects of cursing and collision ground the poem in a physical world where communication infrastructure is encountered bodily, not abstractly — you don't call on the poles, you bang your head on them.