Page 101

By Jack Joseph Smith

Dear Kirk Lets you and I go to Wounded Knee. We can share expenses. Do you know how to run a tape recorder? Do you have one? If not I think I can dig one up. How far is it? Is it fifteen hundred? Sleeping bags? No wine on the way up. Since we are straight, drugs are no problem. Anyway write and tell me what you think. Important? And such. My feeling is that it is to beautiful to ignore, if you are free enough realistically not to. I have talk- to Bonnie. Stuf like that. Arranged things. In terms of keeping the house up; good for about a weeek and one half... Could leave very early this comming wed. morning... Love Jack

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A letter to Kirk proposes traveling to Wounded Knee together, sharing expenses, bringing or finding a tape recorder, and arranging the house before leaving.

The page turns political urgency into logistical friendship: distance, sleeping bags, no wine, drugs, Bonnie, house care, and a Wednesday morning departure. Its force is practical rather than rhetorical.

Claude

A letter-poem to Kirk addresses his weakness, the sneaky champion of the fake, through a catalog of self-defined revolutionaries who lie on their own - the child grown having no matter, the revolutionary woman of no army, the Mount Lebanon kiss of Pennsylvania.

The poem's specific accusations read as a settling of accounts with a political circle the speaker is departing. The final image - 'we remain nigh / with all new smarts / the business of science / America hip to literature / see the ten commandments sin of gossip' - names the exact form of the failure: cultural sophistication that has mistaken itself for revolutionary action.