Page 31

By Jack Joseph Smith

Consquence It takes a farmer to be a poet You don't learn the myth, you be the myth No one teells you what to do or how to do it You single out your self and nobody else You know that the pretense to see in life, while protected, can make thought easy, but will not give any kind of afterlife, how less the difficult, the apelling of your name may be

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker locates poetic authority in farming, lived myth and the difficulty of making a name.

A farmer becomes a poet through work and self-direction. The warning about protected pretense now includes the scan's inserted the and thought. The final name contains a visibly lowered a, so its typography does not support an interpretation based on a missing letter.

Claude

'Consquence' is a typed set of plain statements about becoming a poet: 'It takes a farmer to be a poet / You don't learn the myth, you be the myth'. It warns that 'the pretense to see in life, / while protected, can make thought easy, / but will not give any kind of afterlife,' and ends on 'the apelling of your name'.

The poem treats poetry as labor and self-making rather than instruction, with the farmer as its model of earned authority. Its repeated 'You' lines give it the tone of a credo or advice to the self, and the close ties the difficulty of the vocation to the spelling of one's own name.