Who's Technological Revolution?
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker rides toward a Pittsburgh furnace job, shares a pre-dawn restaurant visit with Dan and Hungarian Joe, and describes forging machinery and piece work. The speaker observes women above the mill and quotes a woman's garden dream, then sees dawn through a crack in tin.
The speaker sets faster production beside workers' ailments and constraints on imagination. The quoted woman imagines her man resting with beer and insists one cannot run out on a brick-layer; the speaker leaves her identity open. The word after Possibly on page 030 remains unread and is omitted from the transcript.
The poem follows laborers 'Riding Shotgun out the Pittsburgh Parkway', breakfast at 'Jolly-John's', co-workers such as '"Devil Dan The Furnace Man"' and 'Hungarian Joe', and a pour of 'chemical castable' atop a furnace, then turns to 'the ten hour houses of pronged men' and the 'menace industral' of machines 'Contimued from Dante's disected forms-'.
Industrial work is shown from the inside, with humor and fatigue, before the poem widens into an argument about technology reshaping laborers and farms. Names and episodes are the poem's figures; one word on the second page is unread and omitted.