Page 108

By Jack Joseph Smith

24 Kent State A summer day Cool in its jet out of spring Yet yesterday a terrible thing Cold and dark A fear energy Cutting through flesh cutting through minds Death in the street Or on the campus Sweat rolling over Redness burst into leaking Yelling against war Their hearts stopped to throb Sobbing brought no answer Bam bam bam bam Means four dead And the president justifies his gain Where I remember beer In engraved glasses Engraved alright Jesus is it an illusion And violence Is it unreal For thE once yoUNg Distinction is pLAcEd The terror in that girl's eyes Or was it only a newspaper We will all find out Oh no it won't be long Objectivity is dead Now we will have subjectivity Emotion never bargained for,

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker responds to four deaths on a campus through images of flesh, fear, blood, sobbing and a girl's eyes. The speaker questions political justification and the distance between newspaper images and experience, then says that objectivity is dead and names an unbargained-for emotion.

The speaker names Kent State and four dead within the poem. The retained once, handwritten placement revisions and cancelled alternatives matter to the reading. These lines express the speaker's response; they do not provide an independently checked historical account.

Claude

'Kent State', folio '24': 'A summer day / Cool in its jet out of spring / Yet yesterday a terrible thing', 'Bam bam bam bam / Means four dead / And the president justifies his gain', 'For thE once yoUNg / Distinction is pLAcEd', 'Objectivity is dead / Now we will have subjectivity', ending 'Emotion never bargained for,'.

The poem responds to the shootings with shock and anger at official justification; its claim that objectivity has died frames the poem's own stance.