Page 71
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page turns moral accusation into something musical and theatrical, as if wickedness has both a sound, a stage, and a red line.
The language is rough, but the movement is clear: from deed to skyline to soul to the red line and silence. Even in fragmentary form, the poem feels like a study in how violence becomes atmosphere.
'Accumulation' (its typed 'Acumalation' corrected by hand) is the first of several drafts of one dense, alliterative poem that turns moral menace into atmosphere. It opens on indifference toward evil -- 'The care about the wicked, without care, / about what the deed is stuck to' -- then accelerates through s-sounds: 'The star struck, the shine with the shank / Or to sink shattered down from the skyline / Sences sworn to the soul', where a handwritten 'N' turns the typed 'sword' into 'sworn'. The threat acquires location and finality: 'Needless at nightful', 'Praying never again on A red line' (the handwritten 'A red' replacing a struck 'that'), 'As if lost were a place in a city', and 'This is where death lives / to concur.' The close pulls it toward music -- 'Any string you can play / And Sound of music / You might here' -- so violence and song share one register. A handwritten 'AS ... ARTERY' above the sworn line has no clear insertion point and is omitted. Source spellings 'Sences,' 'nightful,' 'chawk,' 'sqeeks,' 'Abhororent,' 'silencior,' and 'here' (for hear) are kept as written; the page's double-struck n-to-m ghosting is not carried into the text.