Page 31

By Jack Joseph Smith

Consquence It takes a farmer to be a poet You don't learn the myth, you be the myth No one teells you what to do or how to do it You single out your self and nobody else You know that pretense to see in life, while protected, can make though easy, but will not give any kind of afterlife, how less the difficult, the apelling of your n,me may be

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The farmer-poet is imagined as someone who does not learn myth academically but inhabits it through work, solitude, and name.

The page defines poetic authority as lived consequence rather than instruction: the speaker sets farming, myth, isolation, difficulty, and the unstable spelling of a name against protected ease.

Claude

'Consquence' is an aphoristic credo, each line set off by white space: 'It takes a farmer to be a poet,' 'You don't learn the myth, you be the myth,' 'No one teells you what to do or how to do it.' Authority comes from solitude - 'You single out your self and nobody else' - and the poem warns against 'pretense to see in life, / while protected,' which 'can make though easy, / but will not give any kind of afterlife.' It ends on the difficulty and even the unstable spelling 'of your n,me,' fusing poetic vocation with the precarious survival of a name. Source spellings 'Consquence,' 'teells,' 'though,' 'apelling,' and 'n,me' are preserved.