Page 93

By Jack Joseph Smith

PUT YOUR MONEY IN NIETZSCHE The night before... We had a candle on the cover; as the holy whiskey burned in the stars away lots of brains And as the anarchist wax from our less-then-care flame ate away Nietzsche's name, so we continued to detain, his resurrection toward our youth for the Danish in us: Yet on the spot up... At a Hobo rainbow wilder still dawn (remaining civilized?) Altogether I regarded Jesuit schoolboys memories After being away seven years on various foothills Without educationalized television Hamlet studies And I headed out for town... ...leaving our potatoe shack To learn how to spell his library name We had to some mention been judging... (between the fiddles and the fire wood) I had sensed then That all was well After all I'd heard so much bad stuff offed about the man called Nazi enough: That I easy put my two weeks hundred bucks in the book between the near done down desolate pages of the crazy snaked caveman, between the holding strings, scorched to their yellow bind through the wax to ash pealed jacket And our Hillbilly Heaven Had made one hell of a mess out of "Beyond Good And Evil" Later I realized after reading it a bit That the bad Nazi stuff wasn't quite it My hands had correctly put my money away from worry Because Nietzsche had lost his own names on purpose For a kind of vibration in life, that pickers don't need to steal

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

"Put Your Money in Nietzsche" turns a scorched, half-mocked book into an argument for reading past slogans and finding a harsher, freer kind of life in it.

The poem begins in comic ruin, with whiskey, candle wax, firewood, and a damaged copy of "Beyond Good And Evil," so philosophy enters through poverty and clutter rather than reverence. The speaker admits hearing "bad stuff" about Nietzsche and then discovering, through actual reading, that the easy accusation misses the point. What remains is a rough faith in a vibration of life that cannot be reduced to labels or stolen by "pickers."

Claude

In 'PUT YOUR MONEY IN NIETZSCHE' the speaker recalls a candle burning on the cover of a book while 'the holy whiskey burned', its wax eating away 'Nietzsche's name', and later tucking 'two weeks hundred / bucks in the book' of a man he had heard 'called Nazi enough:', whose scorched copy of 'Beyond Good And Evil' their 'Hillbilly Heaven' had made 'one hell of a mess' of.

The poem sets philosophy in a rough rural shack of fiddles, firewood, and 'potatoe' sacks, so Nietzsche arrives as a damaged object before he is an idea. Reading past the rumors, the speaker decides 'the bad Nazi stuff wasn't quite it', and the title's joke about investment turns earnest: the money was safe in a book whose author 'had lost his own names on purpose' for a vitality no one can steal.