Page 109

By Jack Joseph Smith

For Kirk From Jack I am sorry that you are weak Of course it is difficult And time consuming to be the sneek Precious with the kill Champion of the fake Let us see the absolutely not. The child grown having no matter The revolutionary woman of no army The Mount Lebanon kiss of Pennsylvania Who may see admiration as distrust or loss Is it give no chance toward growth When our evil has no ears Thus not tongues for us And give no deliverence We lie on our own Watch us falter Lously away from reality Like your saints Watched as flame We remain ugly With all new smarts The business of science America hip to literature See the ten commandments sin of gossip Put in the middle For it is there there that the house of man will fall

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

"For Kirk From Jack" accuses a weak, false, self-deceiving culture through images of saints, science, gossip, and the house of man falling.

The poem is direct, moral, and sourly public. Its addressee may be personal, but the target widens quickly into revolutionary rhetoric, literature, commandments, gossip, and national self-flattery. The repeated failures of speech and courage give the page its pressure.

Claude

A meditation titled 'Ributors of' questions whether Stevens' art is romantic, whether birds sing or shriek, whether light is balanced before or after the sun, building toward fleeting shadows cast across a moon of silver stone.

The poem works as a series of questions addressed to the uncertainty at the center of perception - romantic art, light beams, color's strange day, the mayday that takes a child's breath away. Its descent from aesthetic inquiry to 'a hell of the sword' and 'our souls to a transfigured bend / where beyond there is no time for a sigh' moves from Stevens' precision toward an older religious awe that the poem has been building toward without announcing.