Page 108

By Jack Joseph Smith

Kent State A summer day Cool in its jet out of spring Yet yesterday a terrible thing Cold and dark A fear energy Cutting through flesh cutting through minds Death in the street Or on the campus Sweat rolling over Redness burst into leaking Yelling against war Their hearts stopped to throb Sobbing brought no answer Bam bam bam bam Means four dead And the president justifies his gain Where I remember beer In engraved glasses Engraved alright Jesus is it an illusion And violence Is it unreal For once the young Distinction is placed The terror in that girl's eyes Or was it only a newspaper We will all find out Oh no it won't be long Objectivity is dead too Now we will have A subjectivity Emotion never bargained for,

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

"Kent State" responds to the four dead through weather, blood, beer in engraved glasses, presidential justification, and the collapse of objectivity into subjectivity.

The poem treats the massacre as an epistemic break as much as a public trauma. Its movement from bodily violence to engraved beer glasses, the girl's eyes, and dead objectivity makes political shock enter perception itself.

Claude

'Kent State' opens on a cool summer day just out of spring, yesterday's terrible violence cutting through flesh and minds in the street or on campus, four dead from bem-bem-bem-bem, the president justifying his gain while the narrator sees beer in engraved glasses.

The poem's refusal to moralize beyond 'Jesus is it an illusion / and violence is it real' keeps it at the level of immediate shock rather than elegy. The transition from 'four dead' to 'engraved glasses' - the collegiate social world where this news arrived - makes the contrast do all the work. 'Objectivity is dead too / now we will have subjectivity' is a statement about the entire generation's epistemological shift after Kent State.