By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Alternations of quiet and loud, love and war, freshness and loss turn sequence itself into a broken pattern that can no longer hold event together.
The page reduces experience to paired reversals and abstractions: quiet/loud, there/gone, love/war, seeing/knowing. Its final movement treats sequence as a failed pattern, ending in a smear rather than a resolved order.
'Sequence I' opens with a reversing pattern, 'Quiet when there / Loud when gone / Loud when there / Quiet when gone', called 'the essence / Of twice what is wrong'. It moves through 'A spring in the wooded night', 'Love and war in daylight' and three 'No matter of' lines to 'Beauty sees; thought knows of all of lost', and ends with 'A smear now completely unclear'.
Short, evenly weighted lines build a pattern and then let it decay, so the form enacts the claim that 'sequence becomes a sham become event'. The tone is abstract and aphoristic, with repetition doing the work that images would do in a more descriptive poem.