By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The Attica fragment treats prison revolt and state response as a struggle over who gets called violent and whose deaths are allowed to count.
Those within the prison are set against a reactionary State, while the speaker asks what violence outside implies about rebellion inside. The men cared obviously not about the death done to them is an unsettling assertion of defiance rather than a simple lament. Hate, risk and the lost breaths of should lead into chamber talk of revolution, keeping the poem between enacted resistance and discussion.
'Attica' / 'Prison' answers outside war with inside revolt: 'If the world is at war without / Then nind must lead to believe', as 'Those within rejected it' against 'a State reactionary / ON serious action / Attacking a BLOOD'. The second stanza says the men 'cared obviously not / About the death done to them' and ends in 'chamber talk of revolution'.
The poem is a compressed political statement about the Attica uprising, placing prisoners' defiance against state force. Its flat, clipped lines and odd syntax ('On our lost breaths of should') make the revolt sound both desperate and stalled, suspended between action and talk. The typed slips ('nind', 'sent of hate') are kept as the page shows them.