Page 42

By Jack Joseph Smith

Old Mike told a story too. Later I knew he was old enough a Scot to use words he seemed to chew. His language seeped though through his power, even when I was not so cleaver to completely hear what later I saw by the book "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle" while he spoke & like over the whistle of his tongue From Mountain Man To Scottish Man

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Old Mike's story and Scottish speech are remembered as language with weight, power, and chew.

The page is especially attentive to accent as material. Mike's words are not just information; they have texture, age, and force, turning oral history into a bodily experience.

Claude

The narrator confesses he couldn't always catch Mike's words at the time, but later recognized the language through Hugh MacDiarmid's 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.'

This connection between the Oregon mountainman's Scottish dialect and MacDiarmid's modernist Scottish long poem is the collection's sharpest literary claim. The narrator's incomprehension at the time, later filled by a book, frames the entire collection's retrospective project: understanding in writing what was lived through incompletely.