Page 96

By Jack Joseph Smith

Dear Steve and Penny It is very seldom that I use husband and wife in adress. Times have changed; or else I just never knew about what always was. Social gossip is in a practical way hurting in ... why and wherefore. It works (suggestivity) like the age old need to be not quite (as in English irony) dead, but with that last appearance what drama can be palor deemed into the dream. I will not get fancy with this letter, as my spelling has something to be delivered, but the cheese is Frence and the wine is bad. I am uncapaple of telling a story so let me write it: Trees and Stones I have seen trees that were really big I knew how one must pick up sawdust as a young dropped out boy. The finest thing about the branches was that they did not stop. And the greatest smell about the trail Was that at each ten miles there was dinamite. A pick up truck in sixty one had me rover The mountains had me done, but I thought the valleys looked like L.A. I joined alot of tribes meaning three and got put up in jail a little bit more And "God's Country" bade me back, many times for women sticks and music Yet Eastern Hell has me bound away from her again

Original Scan

Page 96

AI Interpretation

GPT

A letter to Steve and Penny turns from social gossip and address into the poem-fragment "Trees and Stones."

The page frames storytelling as difficult but necessary. The letter's awkward social self-consciousness gives way to a rough autobiographical poem about trees, sawdust, dynamite, jail, tribes, and Eastern Hell pulling the speaker away from God's Country.

Claude

A logistical letter to Kirk proposes sharing expenses and a tape recorder for a trip to Wounded Knee, estimating fifteen hundred miles, no wine on the way up, drugs no problem since they are straight, leaving Wednesday morning early.

The letter's practicalities - sleeping bags, a tape recorder, a week and a half of house-keeping arranged - carry the weight of an impulsive but serious political commitment. The sign-off 'Love: Jack' after 'Important? And such' is the collection's most affectionate and least elaborate closing, the urgency of the Wounded Knee trip reduced to a friend's direct ask.