By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The Attica fragment treats prison revolt and state response as a struggle over who gets called violent and whose deaths are allowed to count.
Though broken, the lines repeatedly oppose "those within" to reactionary force outside, so the poem is trying to reclaim motive and feeling from official language. Its emphasis falls on care for the dead, risk, hatred, and revolution talked through confinement. The fragmentary form suits the subject because the voice sounds pressured, interrupted, and still refusing the state's version of events.
'Attica: Prison' answers external war with internal revolt -- 'If the world is at war without / Then nind must lead to believe' -- siding with the men who 'cared obviously not / About the death done to them'. This reading stays provisional because the page is OCR-uncertain (good band, visible noise).
Even through damaged transcription the political stance is legible: the uprising is reclaimed from fear, set against 'a State reactionary / ON serious-action.' The strongest line strips the reader's consolation -- the inmates did not care about their own deaths -- and the close keeps 'hate' simmering 'at tempers edge-of risk,' 'revolting / On our lost breaths' in 'chamber talk of revolution.' I will not assert specific content for the most corrupted tokens (notably 'BLOCD' and 'nind'), which are likely OCR substitutions rather than intended spellings; the reading remains provisional on those words pending a cleaner transcript.