Page 18
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A compact ars poetica in which the speaker reduces life to one lasting obligation: keep writing poems until death interrupts the task.
The page is bare and direct, but that is its point. Poetry is not presented as inspiration or prestige here, only as the one thing left to keep doing.
Seven short handwritten lines reduce a life to one task: 'Write these / Poem til / the day I / die'. The singular 'Poem' under a plural 'these' makes the work feel like one unending piece rather than many. 'Nothing / else to do / of course' is offhand, almost a shrug, and the trailing 'then / is....' breaks off into four dots that leave the thought open - the sentence refusing to close the way a life refuses to announce its own ending.