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': the war-without translates to the mind-within, inmates attacking a block, the State's 'reactionary serious action' on their desperation.
The poem is a news-poem with the news sharpened: the inmates 'cared obviously not / about the death done to them'. That line does the political work — it removes the audience's comfort of imagining the uprising as fear-driven. The jagged OCR artifacts ('temversedge', 'Ti chamber') sit in the text like the prison-radio noise the poem is partly transcribing.