Page 25

By Jack Joseph Smith

Alone Keneth Patchen did it best In Ohio Hemmingway did it worst in Idaho That should be enough Sorry, there is another story to tell Clear your hearts and tear your minds Find your worth and do not come down; it is the signignifance way beyond, the terror they talk of now When you get old enough to see and not know Through beauty, a cell of any kind, or some kind of land or even landmark, or street lost, with sign and cup, or taking it up again, with the better of the gun, or contagous, and slipping away; or crippled and dragging the streets you once leaped through Watching Christ belittled, as if even you, were a normal man "My sweetheart said goodby, or was it I" Our dreams are not easy, our wisdom is frightening Our Blackness and our handging, and our wonderful giving from thievery too takes our souls back to the beginning of books, which we write now, for our children, as it appears we have been made, forever gone

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker weighs literary solitude, suffering and farewell before turning to books written for children.

Patchen and Hemingway open the poem as examples of aloneness. Beauty, weapons, diminished strength and Christ lead into an uncertain farewell. The final lines connect writing with children and disappearance. Unresolved handwritten revisions limit any stronger claim about the ending.

Claude

'Alone' opens 'Keneth Patchen did it best In Ohio / Hemmingway did it worst in Idaho' and then says 'there is another story to tell', urging 'Find your worth and do not come down'. It moves through age, loss and 'Watching Christ belittled', quotes 'My sweetheart said goodby, or was it I', and ends with books 'which we write now, for our children, / as it appears we have been made, / forever gone'.

The poem starts from the deaths of two writers and turns toward the speaker's own sense of decline and loss. Its long, comma-strung catalogue of places and conditions gives way to a collective 'Our' voice in the closing lines. Several handwritten words above the lines are not clearly placed, so the reading follows the typed text with the clearly placed revisions.