By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem stages a grim street scene where ordinary work, police violence, and moral degradation collapse into one another.
Coins, parking, and an alley begin in plain urban routine, then the sound of violence shatters that everyday frame. Calling the witness a Hyena too suggests that survival in such a scene can itself become degrading, even before any action is taken. The final image of the bleeding policeman and the assailants' cold distain leaves behind a city where brutality has become almost procedural.
Titled 'HOW LOW IS RENAISSANCE', the typed poem follows 'A man is driving' whose 'work is in coins' to a parking place by an alley where there is 'bad sound', a death 'not on Heroin / but of a cop'; he 'got down / By the wall / and went / A-ye-ea'', and the bleeding policeman is left by assailants who conceived of the citizen 'in cold distain'.
The poem reports urban violence in flat, clipped lines, which makes the scene feel both close and numb. The bystander who can only 'be a Hyena too' is dragged into the scene's degradation, and his cry is rendered as a bare sound rather than speech. The ironic title sets this alley against the idea of a cultural rebirth, asking how far a city has fallen.