Simple

By Jack Joseph Smith

A waiste of tone is a loss of sound Strict is measure Controled as touch You can not be shallow with a piano Either you got it or not Makes a gesture and double it down on a note Draw a time with a bulky sign, anote is lost and all is hot well or a half line To know that turn on paper is good enough To have it up in the pipe, the music of cord, the music let go with strum, the final touch of changing hands, the giving with a tongue, life is hands And through music is really the way we all want to play

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A pared-down companion to 'O So Simple,' reducing musical making to touch, gesture, breath, and shared physical life.

Claude

A companion to 'O So Simple' that strips the musical meditation even further — 'a waste of tone is a loss of sound' returns, but now with less ornamentation, as if the poem were demonstrating its own thesis by reducing itself to essentials. Simplicity here is not a starting point but an achievement.

The near-repetition of lines from the companion poem creates an echo effect: two poems saying almost the same thing in slightly different ways, which is itself a musical principle — theme and variation at the level of the collection.