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Paterson
Paterson is both a place—the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
310 people are currently reading
4890 people want to read
About the author
William Carlos Williams
413 books828 followersWilliam Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.
Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.
In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.
Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.
Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.
In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.
Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.
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June 15, 2025
MAKE IT NEW!
- Ezra Pound
When Pound famously wrote those words at the beginning of the 20th century - words which forever changed writing - William Carlos Williams was LISTENING.
And his free verse was suddenly and precipitously LAUNCHED INTO HYPERSPACE!
Williams wrote plainly and jarringly about Brute Reality from then on in.
So Paterson is US now, to a T.
Paterson, New Jersey, forever-home to the brash genius of the late (and so greatly lamented) William Carlos Williams, in becoming a speck-on-a-map microcosm for the vast entirety of fallen humanity - which is always trying to give it its best shot, but like the politicians we love to hate - always turning it into a freaking dog’s breakfast of a world, this Paterson is US. Anytown, Anywhere.
This is a world all ugly elbows and knees. And it is a world we acknowledge only when all the dreams that keep us running fall savagely afoul - like NOW.
COVID-19 in the Delta variant has made more than one of us see - though fitfully and through a glass darkly - the REAL world. The world of half-glimpsed primitive terrors. A world of habitually checking our backs. A world that yawns a vast cavernous Emptiness into our brutally checked expectations.
This is the real world. The world Williams TRIED with all his might to clearly see steadily and see WHOLE, as Matthew Arnold enjoined us, IN EVERY WAKING MINUTE OF HIS VITAL, AVID LIFE.
When Williams started to write Paterson, that town was just a whistle-stop in a burgeoning early twentieth-century America that largely ignored it. He wrote it like he had to. Through HIS unsleeping eyes and brain.
As if he had nothing better to do!
Oh... yeah?
You see, Williams was one of the town’s best sawbones. A highly successful doctor and surgeon who gave the news (bad or good) about his patients’ conditions to them STRAIGHT, NO CHASER.
Like his writing tries to do.
The chugging, well-oiled locomotive of William Carlos Williams’ hyperactive mind needed a valve to let off the steam of workaday stress.
That escape valve was his writing.
OK. How did he write and what makes him interesting?
He just wrote about the facts of everyday life, like the fine physician he was. But they are facts expressed in unforgettable IMAGES.
It’s like that moment in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin when a stray Czarist bullet mercilessly shatters the glasses that an elderly activist is wearing.
Brutal, unforgettable images.
In brilliant almost-summery weather like we have nowadays, we’d rather forget this kind of reality. We want to cut the grass, walk the dog or just shut off that blasted TV. Laze in the sun with a cool drink. We don’t much like this new reality.
A reality we have only just glimpsed in the past few viral months - but now laid out large and clear in the pictorial images of a world that can’t HELP but MUCK THINGS UP.
Scary, isn’t it?
Yes... And yes, this Great American Epic IS scary.
You want to squeeze your eyes shut to avoid reading any more.
But that’s life, in moments when we see it clearly -
Like NOW, in 2025. After COVID made fools of us!
Williams displays our family melange of fools.
- Ezra Pound
When Pound famously wrote those words at the beginning of the 20th century - words which forever changed writing - William Carlos Williams was LISTENING.
And his free verse was suddenly and precipitously LAUNCHED INTO HYPERSPACE!
Williams wrote plainly and jarringly about Brute Reality from then on in.
So Paterson is US now, to a T.
Paterson, New Jersey, forever-home to the brash genius of the late (and so greatly lamented) William Carlos Williams, in becoming a speck-on-a-map microcosm for the vast entirety of fallen humanity - which is always trying to give it its best shot, but like the politicians we love to hate - always turning it into a freaking dog’s breakfast of a world, this Paterson is US. Anytown, Anywhere.
This is a world all ugly elbows and knees. And it is a world we acknowledge only when all the dreams that keep us running fall savagely afoul - like NOW.
COVID-19 in the Delta variant has made more than one of us see - though fitfully and through a glass darkly - the REAL world. The world of half-glimpsed primitive terrors. A world of habitually checking our backs. A world that yawns a vast cavernous Emptiness into our brutally checked expectations.
This is the real world. The world Williams TRIED with all his might to clearly see steadily and see WHOLE, as Matthew Arnold enjoined us, IN EVERY WAKING MINUTE OF HIS VITAL, AVID LIFE.
When Williams started to write Paterson, that town was just a whistle-stop in a burgeoning early twentieth-century America that largely ignored it. He wrote it like he had to. Through HIS unsleeping eyes and brain.
As if he had nothing better to do!
Oh... yeah?
You see, Williams was one of the town’s best sawbones. A highly successful doctor and surgeon who gave the news (bad or good) about his patients’ conditions to them STRAIGHT, NO CHASER.
Like his writing tries to do.
The chugging, well-oiled locomotive of William Carlos Williams’ hyperactive mind needed a valve to let off the steam of workaday stress.
That escape valve was his writing.
OK. How did he write and what makes him interesting?
He just wrote about the facts of everyday life, like the fine physician he was. But they are facts expressed in unforgettable IMAGES.
It’s like that moment in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin when a stray Czarist bullet mercilessly shatters the glasses that an elderly activist is wearing.
Brutal, unforgettable images.
In brilliant almost-summery weather like we have nowadays, we’d rather forget this kind of reality. We want to cut the grass, walk the dog or just shut off that blasted TV. Laze in the sun with a cool drink. We don’t much like this new reality.
A reality we have only just glimpsed in the past few viral months - but now laid out large and clear in the pictorial images of a world that can’t HELP but MUCK THINGS UP.
Scary, isn’t it?
Yes... And yes, this Great American Epic IS scary.
You want to squeeze your eyes shut to avoid reading any more.
But that’s life, in moments when we see it clearly -
Like NOW, in 2025. After COVID made fools of us!
Williams displays our family melange of fools.
March 11, 2022
Riverrun Black & Thick
Paramus, Passaic... indeed Paterson: to New Yorkers these are names evoking suburban decline and decay, even when Williams wrote his poem in the late 1940’s. To commemorate a place like Paterson in a work which he knew would be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - the poetic story of the River Liffey as it makes its way through Dublin to the sea - is a bold artistic move, especially since Williams had no personal connection to force his hand. It just seemed to him a place in some way typical of America. And perhaps he was right. Paterson does seem an apt microcosm of the country.
Paterson was essentially founded by Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. His intention was to launch an industrial revolution, an antidote for the agrarian romanticism of people like Thomas Jefferson. And he succeeded. The old mill towns of Northern New Jersey blossomed in the early nineteenth century because he wanted them to. As did the later foundries, factories, refineries, and ports that one can see under a more or less permanent haze of pollution from the financial towers of downtown Manhattan.
More than being the genesis of American industrialism, Paterson is also the germ of corporate America. Prior to the American Revolution incorporation was a privilege granted only by parliament, and only for endeavours which were demonstrably in the public (read Crown) interests. Existing American law had no experience with corporations, their establishment, or their control. Thanks largely to Hamilton and his Society for the Employment of Useful Manufactures in Paterson, New Jersey became the go-to place for free-wheeling corporate entrepreneurs to get their bona fides for the asking from the state legislature. The subsequent history of governmental corruption in New Jersey is not an accidental or incidental consequence.
Paterson has always been a city of immigrants. In the nineteenth century they came from Northern Europe. In the twentieth, they came from the American South, and Latin America. More lately, they have arrived in what is a de-industrialised wasteland from Southern Asia and the Middle East. The place now has the largest Muslim community in America (And among other notable demographics, the largest Peruvian community as well). Hamilton’s original plan depended on a continuous flow of immigration for its execution. No one apparently gave much thought to the day that the tap might want to be turned off. The price of ambition is rarely paid by the ambitious.
So I think Williams’s intuition was correct. The name of the place itself suggests some sort of inter-generational continuity that Joyce would likely have made much of. Without the Patersons of America, the New York Cities, centres of finance and commerce not greasy toil, would never had been created. The fact that New Yorkers, or for that matter the rest of America, could care less could be part of his motivation for writing about it (unless I have missed some subtle parody). In any case, Williams’s concern and fondness for the place can only be considered quaint in a country whose obsession seems to be to forget its past lest the past make it look foolish. This is a country where...
Paramus, Passaic... indeed Paterson: to New Yorkers these are names evoking suburban decline and decay, even when Williams wrote his poem in the late 1940’s. To commemorate a place like Paterson in a work which he knew would be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - the poetic story of the River Liffey as it makes its way through Dublin to the sea - is a bold artistic move, especially since Williams had no personal connection to force his hand. It just seemed to him a place in some way typical of America. And perhaps he was right. Paterson does seem an apt microcosm of the country.
Paterson was essentially founded by Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. His intention was to launch an industrial revolution, an antidote for the agrarian romanticism of people like Thomas Jefferson. And he succeeded. The old mill towns of Northern New Jersey blossomed in the early nineteenth century because he wanted them to. As did the later foundries, factories, refineries, and ports that one can see under a more or less permanent haze of pollution from the financial towers of downtown Manhattan.
More than being the genesis of American industrialism, Paterson is also the germ of corporate America. Prior to the American Revolution incorporation was a privilege granted only by parliament, and only for endeavours which were demonstrably in the public (read Crown) interests. Existing American law had no experience with corporations, their establishment, or their control. Thanks largely to Hamilton and his Society for the Employment of Useful Manufactures in Paterson, New Jersey became the go-to place for free-wheeling corporate entrepreneurs to get their bona fides for the asking from the state legislature. The subsequent history of governmental corruption in New Jersey is not an accidental or incidental consequence.
Paterson has always been a city of immigrants. In the nineteenth century they came from Northern Europe. In the twentieth, they came from the American South, and Latin America. More lately, they have arrived in what is a de-industrialised wasteland from Southern Asia and the Middle East. The place now has the largest Muslim community in America (And among other notable demographics, the largest Peruvian community as well). Hamilton’s original plan depended on a continuous flow of immigration for its execution. No one apparently gave much thought to the day that the tap might want to be turned off. The price of ambition is rarely paid by the ambitious.
So I think Williams’s intuition was correct. The name of the place itself suggests some sort of inter-generational continuity that Joyce would likely have made much of. Without the Patersons of America, the New York Cities, centres of finance and commerce not greasy toil, would never had been created. The fact that New Yorkers, or for that matter the rest of America, could care less could be part of his motivation for writing about it (unless I have missed some subtle parody). In any case, Williams’s concern and fondness for the place can only be considered quaint in a country whose obsession seems to be to forget its past lest the past make it look foolish. This is a country where...
“The language, the language
fails them
They do not know the words
or have not
the courage to use them .”
April 13, 2018
I had little idea Williams was influenced by his reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, before writing an 85-line poem on Paterson, New Jersey in 1926. Over the years this would expand in five volumes, and a sixth that was left incomplete. Williams at his strongest here is as good an American poet as there has been, however, I was still frustrated by the fact not all of the five books of Paterson were up to a high standard, some of it was ok at best, maybe his other job of being a pediatrician got in the way somewhat. The method of his work here is to report on the reality of Patterson. Patterson is not only the city in New Jersey but the central personna of the poem. While the work is formally structured as an epic in five parts, with fragments of a sixth included as an appendix it rather gives the impression of being a collection of random fragments that don't always bind together. Williams, who so much wanted to be true to the American experience and American speech, nonetheless, he didn't give me the impression of really making the American voice truly come alive enough. Some of the incidents and observations presented do not in my mind present a powerful emotional connection in relationships he describes. Having said that, when he gets it right, there was still much to enjoy, with moments of exuberance that was a sheer pleasure to read. Just a damn shame not all was up to scratch.
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls,
its spent waters forming the outline of his back.
He lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he-neither moves nor rouses and is
seldom seen, though he breathes and the
subtleties of his machinations drawing their
substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automatons. Who because
they neither know their sources nor the sills
of their disappointments walk outside their
bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and
forgot in their desires-unroused. Say it, no ideas
but in thin nothing but the blank faces of the
houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by
preconception and accident split, furrowed,
creased, mottled, stained, secret into the body
of the light! From above, higher than the spires,
higher even than the office·towers, from oozy
fields abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves,
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists.
A man like a city and a woman like a flower,
who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.
But only one man like a city...
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls,
its spent waters forming the outline of his back.
He lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he-neither moves nor rouses and is
seldom seen, though he breathes and the
subtleties of his machinations drawing their
substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automatons. Who because
they neither know their sources nor the sills
of their disappointments walk outside their
bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and
forgot in their desires-unroused. Say it, no ideas
but in thin nothing but the blank faces of the
houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by
preconception and accident split, furrowed,
creased, mottled, stained, secret into the body
of the light! From above, higher than the spires,
higher even than the office·towers, from oozy
fields abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves,
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists.
A man like a city and a woman like a flower,
who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.
But only one man like a city...
August 3, 2017
We know nothing and can know nothing
but the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
Satyrically, the tragic foot.
Listen to me as an Everyman. Humble, belabored with a smile and some snark amidst the hopeless. I rise eager each morning, maybe a little fuzzy but poised. I truly lack ambition beyond my wife, my books and my job. Please shield me, my flabby exterior.
A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things
I have lived in a smallish river town most of my life. Louisville is just across the bridge. Our falls though mentioned in Paterson are empty of laurels. I can't strive to the Eternal in the night, the labor of the day keeps me weedy---and thirsty. This was a triumph, unexpected to a degree. Paterson is an admixture of form, a blurring of geology, human folly and the gleam of the moment. Consider me enriched.
but the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
Satyrically, the tragic foot.
Listen to me as an Everyman. Humble, belabored with a smile and some snark amidst the hopeless. I rise eager each morning, maybe a little fuzzy but poised. I truly lack ambition beyond my wife, my books and my job. Please shield me, my flabby exterior.
A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things
I have lived in a smallish river town most of my life. Louisville is just across the bridge. Our falls though mentioned in Paterson are empty of laurels. I can't strive to the Eternal in the night, the labor of the day keeps me weedy---and thirsty. This was a triumph, unexpected to a degree. Paterson is an admixture of form, a blurring of geology, human folly and the gleam of the moment. Consider me enriched.
April 18, 2008
Two kinds of American books: house books (Walden), and river books (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers). One teaches you how to build a house, the other teaches you how to destroy the house you built. Patterson has got to be one of the great river books.
April 27, 2018
One of my favorite lessons about writing comes from this book of poetry: No ideas but in things.
The idea is that as writers, we only have our details. Nothing more. We work with our details, we flesh out our details, we make our worlds more worldly, but we are never allowed to explore the ideas embedded in those details, except in yet more details.
This, of course, is not strictly true. D.H. Lawrence and others of various romantic and Victorian persuasion have used their fictional pages to expound on various themes from time to time. Their texts are equal parts story-telling and sermon. And yet, there is price to be paid for the sermon. As one of my writing teachers used to tell me...your story dies a little every time you stop to narrate, do internal monologue, or even contemplate the meaning of your own writing.
And that's true. Let others tease out the meanings of your works.
So, shall we tease out the meanings of "Paterson"?
What is Paterson? Paterson is a city and a person, a city in a person, a person in a city.
"Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito."
From the beginning, I understood how the poem oozed with meaningful details. How to put this into my own writing is the question? For if there is one thing my writing lacks, it's those details that can breathe life into the world.
I have no way to evaluate this poem. I am not a poet, but wish to have a poet's understanding of words and "thinginess" -- I wish to look for the unique in the world and display it with language that is both shiny and subtle.
I was contemplating my dilemma, a world without details, a writer without a poet's heart on my way to work.
I waited for the bus in the shadow of an awning in front of a shop that had long been closed. It's rusted shutters were dark red with age in a way that made me think I was on my way to being lost and forgotten in the modern world. The awning also had holes and, if it were to rain that day, the drops would fall through parts of the awning...But no rain that day, instead, not quite sunshine, a gloomy overcast that makes poetry inevitable.
I felt myself disappearing into the rust-red shutters, only to materialize as Paterson.
Today, I decide to walk to work, I being Paterson. The sidewalk is an uneven valley of new concrete and old, smooth and worn, smooth and worn, worn and worn, worn and worn, worn and smooth. I come to an auto-dealership and the concrete becomes new. I walk before a laundromat and the concrete becomes used...and then used and used and used. Paterson (me) feels both new and used...My shirt still looks new, but its darkness has faded over 20 years, since the time I first used it to go to my first high school dance...I didn't know at the time what a corsage was or what to do with it.
Paterson is still not sure...
Where do I put the corsage on this book review?
Paterson walks the pavement...endlessly walking...a book review can be a city too, Paterson says, and as he does so, he becomes my black shirt from my high school dance, worn again as a 30-something-year-old on his way to work.
Paterson, like the river of a city, like a writer-novelist lost in a poem, like a man lost in his thoughts, like a character lost in a book review, can go on and on forever.
The idea is that as writers, we only have our details. Nothing more. We work with our details, we flesh out our details, we make our worlds more worldly, but we are never allowed to explore the ideas embedded in those details, except in yet more details.
This, of course, is not strictly true. D.H. Lawrence and others of various romantic and Victorian persuasion have used their fictional pages to expound on various themes from time to time. Their texts are equal parts story-telling and sermon. And yet, there is price to be paid for the sermon. As one of my writing teachers used to tell me...your story dies a little every time you stop to narrate, do internal monologue, or even contemplate the meaning of your own writing.
And that's true. Let others tease out the meanings of your works.
So, shall we tease out the meanings of "Paterson"?
What is Paterson? Paterson is a city and a person, a city in a person, a person in a city.
"Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito."
From the beginning, I understood how the poem oozed with meaningful details. How to put this into my own writing is the question? For if there is one thing my writing lacks, it's those details that can breathe life into the world.
I have no way to evaluate this poem. I am not a poet, but wish to have a poet's understanding of words and "thinginess" -- I wish to look for the unique in the world and display it with language that is both shiny and subtle.
I was contemplating my dilemma, a world without details, a writer without a poet's heart on my way to work.
I waited for the bus in the shadow of an awning in front of a shop that had long been closed. It's rusted shutters were dark red with age in a way that made me think I was on my way to being lost and forgotten in the modern world. The awning also had holes and, if it were to rain that day, the drops would fall through parts of the awning...But no rain that day, instead, not quite sunshine, a gloomy overcast that makes poetry inevitable.
I felt myself disappearing into the rust-red shutters, only to materialize as Paterson.
Today, I decide to walk to work, I being Paterson. The sidewalk is an uneven valley of new concrete and old, smooth and worn, smooth and worn, worn and worn, worn and worn, worn and smooth. I come to an auto-dealership and the concrete becomes new. I walk before a laundromat and the concrete becomes used...and then used and used and used. Paterson (me) feels both new and used...My shirt still looks new, but its darkness has faded over 20 years, since the time I first used it to go to my first high school dance...I didn't know at the time what a corsage was or what to do with it.
Paterson is still not sure...
Where do I put the corsage on this book review?
Paterson walks the pavement...endlessly walking...a book review can be a city too, Paterson says, and as he does so, he becomes my black shirt from my high school dance, worn again as a 30-something-year-old on his way to work.
Paterson, like the river of a city, like a writer-novelist lost in a poem, like a man lost in his thoughts, like a character lost in a book review, can go on and on forever.
December 30, 2017
We sit and talk quietly,
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes,
which has no speech;
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes,
which has no speech;
May 17, 2016
Probably the best American long poem, more continuous than Berryman (though I rode the Prospect Park bus with him for years in grad school at MN). Of course, the best long poems I know are Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, Byron's Don Juan, Wordsworth's Prelude.
WC Williams' Book I, "The Delineaments of the Giants", contains great prose sections on Passaic Falls, and Mrs Rev Cummings, who fell into the gorge there, and Sam Patch, who dove but did die in his Genesee Gorge plunge, publicized with excursions from Canada to visit. I.ii, "Divorce is/ the sign of knowledge in our house,/ divorce! divorce!"(New Directions, p 28). Note Symonds: "Deformed verse [choliambs, with spondee at end] was suited to deformed morality" (New Dir, 53). Book II, Sunday in the Park. But before that,
"things, things unmentionable,
the sink with the waste farina in it and
lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle tops have
here a tranquillity and loveliness
have here (in his thoughts) a complement tranquil and chaste."
WC Williams' Book I, "The Delineaments of the Giants", contains great prose sections on Passaic Falls, and Mrs Rev Cummings, who fell into the gorge there, and Sam Patch, who dove but did die in his Genesee Gorge plunge, publicized with excursions from Canada to visit. I.ii, "Divorce is/ the sign of knowledge in our house,/ divorce! divorce!"(New Directions, p 28). Note Symonds: "Deformed verse [choliambs, with spondee at end] was suited to deformed morality" (New Dir, 53). Book II, Sunday in the Park. But before that,
"things, things unmentionable,
the sink with the waste farina in it and
lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle tops have
here a tranquillity and loveliness
have here (in his thoughts) a complement tranquil and chaste."
July 20, 2016
I neither know, nor care, what this book is about. I've read a number of reviews here where people complain about a lack of cohesion. I stopped caring a long time ago about what this and that are about. Yes, there is the concept that the city is a man the man is a city. I don't really think that matters. That concept is a road Williams used to go. I followed the path he took, as you will if you read it. Poetry in general is a lot more comprehensible if you realize that it's not a mathematical equation. When you finish (is this possible?) a book of poetry, you do not have to come away with something specific. You don't even have to know what you come away with. Paterson was a healthy read, in that it demands one think. We are not all scholars of Williams, nor scholars at all. So what? Should we then not read such works? What a fuckin' shame if that is so. Paterson, obviously, was in Williams' bones. Here we suck on Williams' bones. There's a point for you, if you need one. Perhaps poetry in general is not about taking away some concrete meaning, but rather about sucking on someone's bones. Delicious. Here is the place Paterson experienced through the research and experience of Williams. Poetry is essentially physical, like making love. Like eating. Bon appetit.
June 24, 2017
FRom BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3:
American poet William Carlos Williams's poly-vocal epic poem 'Paterson' is a portrait of his favoured city in New Jersey where he worked as a doctor. Michael Symmons Roberts presents a portrait of the same city today in reportage and documentary alongside a fictional drama which responds to events described in Williams's poem.
Roberts travels to New Jersey to meet William Carlos Williams's family, friends, academics and community figures to explore Paterson and the stories in the poem. His new writing, commentary and interviews all arise from a direct engagement with the city and the poem, responding to the place as it stands - politically and economically.
Recorded at a political and economic turning point for the USA, Michael Symmons Roberts tests today's Paterson against the place Williams knew, and asks if the poet's warnings about the effects of modernization and technology were prescient, or merely nostalgic. Walking the same streets, visiting the same districts, calling at the same buildings, this programme opens up a great 20th-century poetic masterwork and at the same time create a new dramatic work, reportage and documentary - a new 'Paterson'.
William Carlos Williams wasn't from Paterson. He was an outsider. Michael is also a different kind of outsider who, like Williams is interested in the bigger picture - the state of the nation, looking through the intimate lens of small-town America to comment on it
Paterson is a mid-sized industrial town in New Jersey, USA. In 1963, the great American poet William Carlos Williams published his masterwork. It had taken him almost three decades to write and consisted of five books of poetry, reported speech, fragmentary reflection and conversations with other Patersonites, including Williams's fellow poet Allen Ginsberg. It is a truly epic piece of work, still regarded as a jewel of modernist writing.
Williams knew the city intimately, not just as a poet, but as a father, a friend, a doctor working in the community. Turning his back on the grand abstractions and international perspectives of his fellow modernists Eliot and Pound, Williams dug into what he called 'the local'.
Paterson is a poetic monument to, and personification of, the city of Paterson, New Jersey, which was Williams's hometown. Its three driving themes are Paterson the Man, Paterson the City, and Identity. At the heart of the poem is an in-depth questioning of the burgeoning process of modernization and its effects.
A half century on, the town of Paterson has a population just under 150,000. It has large communities of Puerto Ricans, Bangladeshis and a Muslim population substantial enough to warrant Muslim holidays for all the town's public schools.
As with many American cities, recession, unemployment , crime and social unrest in Paterson have grown in recent years.
All of this is explored in A Traveller's Guide to Paterson.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xrq9n
American poet William Carlos Williams's poly-vocal epic poem 'Paterson' is a portrait of his favoured city in New Jersey where he worked as a doctor. Michael Symmons Roberts presents a portrait of the same city today in reportage and documentary alongside a fictional drama which responds to events described in Williams's poem.
Roberts travels to New Jersey to meet William Carlos Williams's family, friends, academics and community figures to explore Paterson and the stories in the poem. His new writing, commentary and interviews all arise from a direct engagement with the city and the poem, responding to the place as it stands - politically and economically.
Recorded at a political and economic turning point for the USA, Michael Symmons Roberts tests today's Paterson against the place Williams knew, and asks if the poet's warnings about the effects of modernization and technology were prescient, or merely nostalgic. Walking the same streets, visiting the same districts, calling at the same buildings, this programme opens up a great 20th-century poetic masterwork and at the same time create a new dramatic work, reportage and documentary - a new 'Paterson'.
William Carlos Williams wasn't from Paterson. He was an outsider. Michael is also a different kind of outsider who, like Williams is interested in the bigger picture - the state of the nation, looking through the intimate lens of small-town America to comment on it
Paterson is a mid-sized industrial town in New Jersey, USA. In 1963, the great American poet William Carlos Williams published his masterwork. It had taken him almost three decades to write and consisted of five books of poetry, reported speech, fragmentary reflection and conversations with other Patersonites, including Williams's fellow poet Allen Ginsberg. It is a truly epic piece of work, still regarded as a jewel of modernist writing.
Williams knew the city intimately, not just as a poet, but as a father, a friend, a doctor working in the community. Turning his back on the grand abstractions and international perspectives of his fellow modernists Eliot and Pound, Williams dug into what he called 'the local'.
Paterson is a poetic monument to, and personification of, the city of Paterson, New Jersey, which was Williams's hometown. Its three driving themes are Paterson the Man, Paterson the City, and Identity. At the heart of the poem is an in-depth questioning of the burgeoning process of modernization and its effects.
A half century on, the town of Paterson has a population just under 150,000. It has large communities of Puerto Ricans, Bangladeshis and a Muslim population substantial enough to warrant Muslim holidays for all the town's public schools.
As with many American cities, recession, unemployment , crime and social unrest in Paterson have grown in recent years.
All of this is explored in A Traveller's Guide to Paterson.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xrq9n
January 23, 2008
William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New Directions, 1963)
To hear the staff at New Directions tell it, Paterson is the be-all and end-all of the American long poem; there is no work being done today that is not influenced in some way by Williams' milestone of American verse. And there may be some truth in that statement, but it neglects to address the question of whether Paterson is, in fact, a good poem; after all, the album title tells us ten million Elvis fans can't be wrong. Well, guess what, folks? Ten million Elvis fans ARE wrong.
Paterson is the magnum opus of a man who forgot that one of the ways that poets are divided are those who are obsessed with the art of poesy, and those obsessed with its craft. Ninety-five percent or so of modern poets are of the "art" school, and few pay any attention to craft at all, which is why there is so much painfully bad high-school-angst poetry in the world. Maybe one percent know how to balance the art and the craft, and from that one percent come the finest poets in the English, or in any, language, folks like Ira Sadoff, David St. John, and Debra Allbery. The rest are of the "craft" school, and get so wrapped up in the construction that they forget the one great rule, that poetry is language elevated. Paterson is a testament to craft, and it forsakes art altogether.
This was not an unconscious thing. Williams was a staunch proponent of the idea that the way to make poetry more accessible to the people was to try and fit the natural rhythm and flow of human speech into the rhythms of poetry, be they strict forms or the internal rhythms of free verse; Williams dips into both here, and more often than not he's trying to fit the squarest of pegs into the roundest of holes. He also throws in long prose passages that, while they contribute to a greater understanding of Paterson as Williams sees it, are not poetry in any sense of the word.
All that said, the collection approaches brilliance more times than it misses the mark. There are snippets where Williams' writing is so powerful as to take the breath away, where he approaches the genius of the early years of his career, and the stuff sounds just as good as "The Red Wheel-Barrow" or "This Is Just to Say." In other words, it would have made a great collection of poems, but as one long piece, it falls somewhat short.
If nothing else, it does state the greatest rule of poetry as succinctly as ever before or ever since: "no ideas but in things." If only Williams had listened to himself just a tad more. ***
To hear the staff at New Directions tell it, Paterson is the be-all and end-all of the American long poem; there is no work being done today that is not influenced in some way by Williams' milestone of American verse. And there may be some truth in that statement, but it neglects to address the question of whether Paterson is, in fact, a good poem; after all, the album title tells us ten million Elvis fans can't be wrong. Well, guess what, folks? Ten million Elvis fans ARE wrong.
Paterson is the magnum opus of a man who forgot that one of the ways that poets are divided are those who are obsessed with the art of poesy, and those obsessed with its craft. Ninety-five percent or so of modern poets are of the "art" school, and few pay any attention to craft at all, which is why there is so much painfully bad high-school-angst poetry in the world. Maybe one percent know how to balance the art and the craft, and from that one percent come the finest poets in the English, or in any, language, folks like Ira Sadoff, David St. John, and Debra Allbery. The rest are of the "craft" school, and get so wrapped up in the construction that they forget the one great rule, that poetry is language elevated. Paterson is a testament to craft, and it forsakes art altogether.
This was not an unconscious thing. Williams was a staunch proponent of the idea that the way to make poetry more accessible to the people was to try and fit the natural rhythm and flow of human speech into the rhythms of poetry, be they strict forms or the internal rhythms of free verse; Williams dips into both here, and more often than not he's trying to fit the squarest of pegs into the roundest of holes. He also throws in long prose passages that, while they contribute to a greater understanding of Paterson as Williams sees it, are not poetry in any sense of the word.
All that said, the collection approaches brilliance more times than it misses the mark. There are snippets where Williams' writing is so powerful as to take the breath away, where he approaches the genius of the early years of his career, and the stuff sounds just as good as "The Red Wheel-Barrow" or "This Is Just to Say." In other words, it would have made a great collection of poems, but as one long piece, it falls somewhat short.
If nothing else, it does state the greatest rule of poetry as succinctly as ever before or ever since: "no ideas but in things." If only Williams had listened to himself just a tad more. ***
August 1, 2017
Como boa parte das pessoas que leram este livro no último ano, estou aqui por causa do belíssimo filme do Jim Jarmusch. No Brasil WCW é pouquíssimo conhecido ou editado, sempre à sombra de seus contemporâneos mais célebres Pound e Eliot, WCW trabalhou imagisticamente a poesia e provavelmente tem no longo Paterson a sua obra prima, não só em termos estéticos, como bem sonoros. O grande pulo do gato desta obra é mesclar prosa com poesia, a prosa fica por conta de cartas e notícias sobre a história da cidade de Paterson e tal prosa é vertida em poesia na versão de WCW.
December 30, 2019
Que boa ideia, ler esta edição não bilingue acompanhada de um epub com o texto original.
July 2, 2022
A book-length poem set in a modern city and employing a significant amount of intertextuality, Williams's Paterson looks back to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. With its mythic giant, also named Paterson, who sleeps next to the Passaic and whose "dreams walk about the city where he persists/ incognito" (6), Williams's book looks as well to Joyce's Finnegans Wake (and here's a coincidence: late in the book, Williams writes about Dublin, and it turns out there is a section of the city of Paterson that goes by that name).
Williams's use of intertextuality differs somewhat from that of Eliot and Joyce, however. While those two authors make direct or allusive reference to such literary monuments as the Bible, Greek myths and Elizabethan drama, Williams's intertexts are less obviously literary, and often without immediate relevance for the reader. Along with passages taken from historic writings and from newspaper articles, for instance, Williams includes personal letters, some of which appear to have little to do with the city of Paterson. At his most eccentric, perhaps, Williams includes in his poem a table representing geological readings taken at a site where a hole for a well was drilled. Particularly here (but also in the Phyllis and Corydon passages), Williams' work reminded me of that of Donald Barthelme.
The poetry itself is lyrical, and while not all of it is explicitly about the history and geography of Paterson, much of it is. The Falls, for instance, is a frequent subject of the poem, particularly in Book One. Book Two is set in a park, Book Three in a library and Book Four by the sea. Book Five appears to be about art and poetry. Included as an appendix are fragments for the uncompleted Book Six.
On one level, in Paterson Williams appears to be working out his own ideas about poetry. It is here that he proclaims his poetic manifesto "No ideas but in things" (6). Perhaps the intertexts he employs are among the "things" to which he refers, such that the letters and passages from articles and other texts constitute an instance of "found poetry." More radically, perhaps Williams is trying to answer for himself questions such as What is poetry? and What can a poem include? If Williams, poet and author, writes a grocery list, is that a poem? Does it become part of a poem if it is preceded and followed by passages in free verse? What if he he finds a grocery list that was written by someone else, and he includes it in a poem: Is Williams still the author?
Enough! Let's just agree that Williams is Pierre Menard and be done with it.
Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
Williams's use of intertextuality differs somewhat from that of Eliot and Joyce, however. While those two authors make direct or allusive reference to such literary monuments as the Bible, Greek myths and Elizabethan drama, Williams's intertexts are less obviously literary, and often without immediate relevance for the reader. Along with passages taken from historic writings and from newspaper articles, for instance, Williams includes personal letters, some of which appear to have little to do with the city of Paterson. At his most eccentric, perhaps, Williams includes in his poem a table representing geological readings taken at a site where a hole for a well was drilled. Particularly here (but also in the Phyllis and Corydon passages), Williams' work reminded me of that of Donald Barthelme.
The poetry itself is lyrical, and while not all of it is explicitly about the history and geography of Paterson, much of it is. The Falls, for instance, is a frequent subject of the poem, particularly in Book One. Book Two is set in a park, Book Three in a library and Book Four by the sea. Book Five appears to be about art and poetry. Included as an appendix are fragments for the uncompleted Book Six.
On one level, in Paterson Williams appears to be working out his own ideas about poetry. It is here that he proclaims his poetic manifesto "No ideas but in things" (6). Perhaps the intertexts he employs are among the "things" to which he refers, such that the letters and passages from articles and other texts constitute an instance of "found poetry." More radically, perhaps Williams is trying to answer for himself questions such as What is poetry? and What can a poem include? If Williams, poet and author, writes a grocery list, is that a poem? Does it become part of a poem if it is preceded and followed by passages in free verse? What if he he finds a grocery list that was written by someone else, and he includes it in a poem: Is Williams still the author?
Enough! Let's just agree that Williams is Pierre Menard and be done with it.
Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
May 31, 2025
9/10; life in a book. WCW's prosody is awesome usually but its highest pitches aren't sustained longer than a book or so total. Still, so much to like here: thought, language, design, character, setting, personality, attitude, beauty. Fascinating that WCW includes real letters sent to him from the likes of Allen Ginsburg etc, and responds to a detractor in the pages. Paterson takes in (and engages with) the world/self developing around it, on personal, social, economic, political, and geographical (which is to again say personal, social, economic, and political) fronts, but doesn't get bogged down in anything impersonal. A fun, chatty, emotionally varied, uplifting read. Especially uplifting because of WCW's respect/awe for the powers of imagination in knowledge creation. Paterson is more a process that projects a frenetic, overactive brain than a single artistic vision/pursuit. I don't get it, frankly. But how fun the interpretive tinkering is!
I'll shut up to quote a good passage:
We sit and talk and the
silence speaks of the giants
who have died in the past and have
returned to those scenes unsatisfied
and who is not unsatisfied, the
silent, Signac the rock-shoulder
emerging from the rocks--and the giants
live again in your silence and
unacknowledged desire--
I really recommend this, also WCW's Spring and All. Read his books as books, don't just isolate poems--however collected and chatty and "Doc"-centric the language here can be, the thought patterns give this awesome feeling of watching a feral poet searching for food in writing (vs the domesticated feeling of overly polished books). This is also true of Spring and All in a slightly different way. Gist is, you feel like you really know the guy and his thought from his books. It's this type of consciousness exchange I seek from literature first and foremost, these days at least. No wonder his stuff would crush with me!
(And how surreal it is to read an Osamu Dazai name-drop in here.)
I'll shut up to quote a good passage:
We sit and talk and the
silence speaks of the giants
who have died in the past and have
returned to those scenes unsatisfied
and who is not unsatisfied, the
silent, Signac the rock-shoulder
emerging from the rocks--and the giants
live again in your silence and
unacknowledged desire--
I really recommend this, also WCW's Spring and All. Read his books as books, don't just isolate poems--however collected and chatty and "Doc"-centric the language here can be, the thought patterns give this awesome feeling of watching a feral poet searching for food in writing (vs the domesticated feeling of overly polished books). This is also true of Spring and All in a slightly different way. Gist is, you feel like you really know the guy and his thought from his books. It's this type of consciousness exchange I seek from literature first and foremost, these days at least. No wonder his stuff would crush with me!
(And how surreal it is to read an Osamu Dazai name-drop in here.)
May 25, 2017
Like many before me, I got to know this by watching Jim Jarmusch' movie 'Paterson' (which I really, really loved). This is not the kind of book you try to read in a few days or even weeks, that would be - according to me, that is - daft.
In some ways it feels a bit like a cross between Dylan Thomas' 'Under milk wood' and Belgian poet Paul Van Ostaijen. As you read, your mind begins to hear a continuous chatter of different voices. The feeling like you're walking through a city and you start to pick up pieces of conversation in bars, stations, railway stations, ... Some people talk gossip, some people are worrying about their relationships.
If you try to listen to all these voices at the same time, the result is gobbledygook. But if you pick up this book from time to time, you can come across lines like:
'Love is like a kitten, a pleasant thing, a purr and a pounce. Chases a piece of string, a scratch and a mew/a ball batted with a paw/a sheated claw'
or
'The place sweats of staleness and of rot/a library stench/It is summer!/Stinking summer/Escape from it - but not by running away. Not by 'composition'. Embrace the foulness'
I'll be picking up 'Paterson' a lot in the future.
In some ways it feels a bit like a cross between Dylan Thomas' 'Under milk wood' and Belgian poet Paul Van Ostaijen. As you read, your mind begins to hear a continuous chatter of different voices. The feeling like you're walking through a city and you start to pick up pieces of conversation in bars, stations, railway stations, ... Some people talk gossip, some people are worrying about their relationships.
If you try to listen to all these voices at the same time, the result is gobbledygook. But if you pick up this book from time to time, you can come across lines like:
'Love is like a kitten, a pleasant thing, a purr and a pounce. Chases a piece of string, a scratch and a mew/a ball batted with a paw/a sheated claw'
or
'The place sweats of staleness and of rot/a library stench/It is summer!/Stinking summer/Escape from it - but not by running away. Not by 'composition'. Embrace the foulness'
I'll be picking up 'Paterson' a lot in the future.
June 17, 2013
Truly a sign of disintegration and the triumph of incoherence in literary art. "Paterson" is a horrifying excuse for other people to pass along similar dumpster-style poetry as legitimate. I had to read this for a class after reading the "Iliad," "Odyssey," "Aeneid," and "Divine Comedy." After being filled with such artistic beauty, I was given the worst heaving gag sensation.
July 12, 2017
A brilliant, breakthrough collection. Not my kind of poetry (I prefer more abstract, imagist poetry and not so much the almost narrative style of William Carlos Williams) but I am amazed nonetheless.
May 27, 2023
From an unexpected used bookstore find to the start of a poetry reading group, Paterson will represent for me a more focused effort to better understand poetry. This is a great work to start with, especially having read Leaves of Grass last year, for the story of the narrative poem is both fictive and non-fiction — “no thoughts but in ideas” becomes by Book 3 or 4 “no thoughts but in facts.”
This work recalls Finnegans Wake in its working class industrial model of a town, especially with the river and a man as the land lending form to the poem. Another comparison might be Pale Fire by Nabokov with the blending of poem and prose, albeit William Carlos Williams does so in such tight, fleeting sequences that no one voice dominates. Paterson has polyvocal, multigendered narrative characters evoking the breadth of Paterson the city, and only sporadically featuring Paterson the man.
The progression of four books, and then a fifth and the first fragments of a sixth book, marks a poetic journey across the land:
This work recalls Finnegans Wake in its working class industrial model of a town, especially with the river and a man as the land lending form to the poem. Another comparison might be Pale Fire by Nabokov with the blending of poem and prose, albeit William Carlos Williams does so in such tight, fleeting sequences that no one voice dominates. Paterson has polyvocal, multigendered narrative characters evoking the breadth of Paterson the city, and only sporadically featuring Paterson the man.
The progression of four books, and then a fifth and the first fragments of a sixth book, marks a poetic journey across the land:
The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech—
is, of necessity, my sole concern •
They plunged, they fell in a swoon •
or by intention, to make an end—the
roar, unrelenting, witnessing •
Neither the past nor the future
Neither to stare, amnesic-forgetting.
The language cascades into the
invisible, beyond and above : the falls
of which it is the visible part —
Not until I have made of it a replica
will my sins be forgiven and my
disease cured—in wax: la capella di S. Rocco
on the sandstone crest above the old
copper mines—where I used to see
the images of arms and knees
hung on nails (de Montpellier) •
No meaning. And yet, unless I find a place
apart from it, I am its slave,
its sleeper, bewildered—dazzled
by distance • I cannot stay here
to spend my life looking into the past:
the future's no answer. I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself —
comb out the language or succumb
—whatever the complexion. Let me out!
(Well, go!) this rhetoric
is real!
August 3, 2016
I took a gander at what other people have been saying about this poem. One of the other reviewers on this site stated:
"Paterson is a testament to craft, and it forsakes art altogether."
Which is considerably more friendly than my review:
"An abysmal waste of time. I liked maybe 5 of 246 pages."
"Paterson is a testament to craft, and it forsakes art altogether."
Which is considerably more friendly than my review:
"An abysmal waste of time. I liked maybe 5 of 246 pages."
March 6, 2023
"Love is no comforter, rather a nail in the skull”
In an era of exiles, one modernist stayed put and came to know, like the knowing of the prophets, the grand loneliness that calls out from the american landscape. This work is beautiful, cutting, and maybe most importantly-solitary.
In an era of exiles, one modernist stayed put and came to know, like the knowing of the prophets, the grand loneliness that calls out from the american landscape. This work is beautiful, cutting, and maybe most importantly-solitary.
July 17, 2018
“No ideas but in things.”
“But, creature of the weather, I
don't want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.”
Well friends, this is a complicated work. It isn't that it has a range of registers from the mundane to the pretentious. It isn't that it is a vast project itself-to set a poem to the pulse of a country, a poem that is a man, a city, a man and a city as one. And it isn't just that WCW himself is so present in the poem, a not uncontroversial person himself, which obligates one to look at his position, his relationships, and his ideas of what poetry is and what this particular poetic project is. It's all of that stuff together. I'm gonna give a quick overview of what I thought of the chapters (books 1-5), then I'll say whatever else occurs to me and that'll be that. This work is dense so I think a lot more could be said, but it's also dense in a way that's unappealing at times and so while on the one hand I might feel bad about not giving this intricate poem recognition for all its nuances, on the other it's a lotta sound and fury, lotta words.
Book 1-I love books 1 and 2. Because I stopped and started Paterson and then lost it so stopped and started from the beginning again, I am most familiar with these. But my familiarity isn't the entirety of why I liked them better. This book deals with the “city” aspect of the titular man and the city. It has historical anecdotes mixed in with varieties of stanzas about the city and, presumably, a man in and observing the city. Nature plays a role as a female counterpart to the city. The falls as the main feature of the city embodies that role in grand and awful mystery, beauty and violence. Reminds me of the Greek female chthonic deities and monsters. There's something to be said here about the hubris of man in the face of nature. Also at play are some personal letters written to WCW.
Book 2- Book 2 flows really well from book one where we focus more on the “man” and the city stays as a backdrop. There are less historical anecdotes and they are replaced by a greater percentage of personal letters. The letters are almost all from Marcia Nardi, a young poet who develops some kind of Platonic mentor relationship with WCW. Nardi's letters came to be the most compelling thing to me about the entire work (in fact, I have strange visions of rewriting the entire thing and only including her letters). She begins in her letters to tentatively broach her relationship with WCW asking for advice on her poetry in the most timid, but articulate of ways. But soon that mildness gives way to conflict: WCW has refused to respond to her letters and this pains her in ways she can hardly explain. As time passes, she writes more letters, realizing she can explain her pain, but only after she's lost part of what made it real-her desire for friendship from WCW. And in the end, she acknowledges that this is such a great sorrow that it still affects her, that her anger is not even anger anymore, that it was always a false anger; it is merely a glaring cover for the deeper sadness she feels from being rejected-And let's be perfectly specific here, being rejected by a friend who had taken the time to cultivate a meaningful relationship but had decided to dismiss it as easily as he had taken to it.
Part of her struggle with WCW is one intimately tied to their respective ideas of poetry and life. It isn't just that WCW decides for unstated reasons to cease correspondence, but she accuses him of not having lived a day in his life, of living in the ephemeral world of privilege and making literature of life:
“You've never had to live, Dr. P----not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to life—and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I've been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)
But living (unsafe living, I mean) isn't something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake. Or else it doesn't happen. And when it does, then one must bring, as I must, one's life to literature; and when it doesn't then one brings to life (as you do_ purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only—and also, alas, the ego of the literary man which most likely played an important part in the change of your attitude toward me. That literary man's ego wanted to help me in such a way, I think, that my own achievements might serve as a flower in his buttonhole, if that kind of help had been enough to make me bloom.
But I have no blossoms to bring to any man in the way of either love or friendship. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want that introduction to my poems. And I’m not wanting to be nasty or sarcastic in the last lines of this letter. On the contrary a feeling of profound sadness has replaced no the anger and the indignation with which I started to write all this. I wanted your friendship more than I ever wanted anything else (yes, more, and I’ve wanted other things badly) I wanted it desperately, not because I have a single thing with which to adorn any man’s pride--but just because I haven’t.”
I don't know the specifics of what happened between them and to a certain extent I must accept that Nardi is telling her version of the story with a bias toward herself. But it is a compelling version, one that makes me sympathize (or empathize, if you care to draw a distinction. Contrary to popular opinion I happen not to hold that there's a semantic significance to using the two terms distinctly [what is it to console someone without having experienced the same thing or with having done so? Is consolation only substantial when you have experienced x? Is consolation always hollow when you have not? A decidedly useless conversation]) more with her than with WCW. It's an odd feeling to turn on the author you're reading, but the truth is that he is the one who published this book, he is the one who controls this narrative, and he is the one who carries it to course through the end with three more books! Who is this poet who, when accused of turning his own, and in general life's, experiences into literary fluff, turns around a publishes the accusation in full in a literary way surrounded by literary fluff!!?? The surrounding stanzas are no help at all and book 2 ends with the end of Nardi's last letter. The next book picks up the thread of Paterson and moves on to other things albeit more specific other things, but Nardi is never summoned again. Her story is finished and has fit into its niche of book 2. It's just all so contradictory to me, I don't really understand what WCW is trying to do with it. My preoccupation with this contradiction eclipsed most of the rest of the book. So I'll just say that it was profoundly unsettling because I still can't outright condemn him for publishing Nardi's letters which excoriate him from which he doesn't bother to defend himself at all-which to me indicates that he accepts, at least partly, her assessment of what happened. In putting them so prominently in his work he gives a voice to her version of things. But it's his poem, he's the authoritative poet here, would contemporary readers see Nardi's letters and say, “oh well WCW isn't bothering to give his version, but he's so great a poet it doesn't matter, he must be struggling as much as Nardi is but unable to articulate it” or do they say something more like “WCW doesn't give his version precisely because he is so conflicted. He couldn't bring himself to continue correspondence, he couldn't bring himself to see life in a way other than that which he did-much as we are all trapped in our own existences. And afterwards it's no doubt that he saw that in retrospect, but still it was just another tragedy for him to look back upon with a grief-laden heart, with regret for things he can't change: such is the spirit of humanity.” Or maybe yet still in the wider narrative of Paterson, this is one stage in a man's life or a city's life, or a man-city's life; heartbreak is something that happens to all of us and the truth of that soars above any real emotional connection he, Nardi, or we the readers have to any of this stuff at all. I'm not really sure.
But what I can say, is that based on the rest of the poem, Nardi's story is self-contained in book 2 no matter what real events may add to it, and that book 3 moves beyond it in other directions. This is what inclines me to say that WCW is truly turning Nardi's personal suffering into exactly what she accuses him of doing with life. Which is alarming in a way. I just wish that the following books had followed up with this enough to justify Robert Lowell writing:
“Paterson is Whitman's America, grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation. No poet has written of it with such a combination of brilliance, sympathy, and experience, with such alertness and energy.”
I don't exactly disagree with Lowell-there are parts of book 1 and even the historical anecdotes of book 3 that correspond to the emotional force, the pathos and tragedy, of book 2 but so much more of 3-5 is given over to modernist play. The work taken as a whole is a grand project and I'll tell you what I like about the last three books, but this to me was the core of the work-Nardi's suffering turned into literary play. Anyway I think I've made my point. I've set up two competing interpretations of whats going on (potentially even more than that), one of which I can be positive toward WCW about the other of which I absolutely cannot. And so I shall remain here in aporia until I or someone else saves me/myself.
Book 3- Obviously most of my energy for this work came from the first two books, but here's my favorite line from this book:
“Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”
The rest I really didn't get into. It starts with the library so maybe the focusing point is one building in the city but it carries on in such a modernist, Cummings-like play that there wasn't much compelling about it to me except a few vague stanzas about death. DEATH.
Book 4- The poetry of this book also failed to capture me, but was perhaps less fancifully pretentious and modernist. The one saving grace, was the letters from Allen Ginsburg which were not nearly as invigorating and provocative as Nardi's but were at least historically interesting. The problem with AG is of course that he was AG and I'll not get into that right now but I'll admit that I like his poem “America.”
Book 5- Clearly an afterthought and an underdeveloped afterthought, this book was not particularly objectionable. More art-centered pretentiousness. Make of it what you will.
Reading this book was very interesting-and I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean that reading it was interesting even though it was not always enjoyable. There are many unique things about it that make it an unrivaled work of American poetry. The form, the breadth- you can see how WCW's style evolves over time. He's a prominent figure in the development of American poetry and for that he provides great insight into American poetry of the following decades. And he is not unskilled. I hope that even though I have picked at what WCW has done with Paterson I haven't particularly tarnished his ability. I threw around the word pretentious a lot and it's true I'm using the word pejoratively. But not all pretentiousness is equally bad; some of it I even like. Modernist poetry is one area where it reaches my limit (unless you're Ashbery). The truth is, I'd still like to read some of WCW's other poetry, but I think I'm pretty good and done with this work. His poetic philosophy, “no ideas but in things,” is an admirable one. But somewhere along the line he started to take himself too seriously, as if he alone knew the true nature of poetry and jealously guarded it like some sort of treasure-hoarding fire drake from the north. And well, we all know what happened to that fire drake.
Here are my quotes which are all from Marcia Nardi's letters:
“Despite my having said that I’d never write to you again, I do so now because I find, with the passing of time, that the outcome of my failure with you has been the complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner such as I have never before experienced.
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self–have you ever experienced it? I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you can well understand what a serious psychological injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent day-to-day condition.”
*
“There are people–especially among women–who can speak only to one person. And I am one of those women. I do not come easily to confidences (thought it cannot but seem otherwise to you). I could not possibly convey to any one of those people who have crossed my path in these few months, those particular places of my life which I made the subject of my letters to you. I must let myself be entirely misunderstood and misjudged in all my economic and social maladjustments, rather than ever attempt to communicate to anyone else what I wrote to you about. And so my having heaped these confidences upon you (however tiresome you may have found them and however far I may yet need to go in the attainment of complete self-honesty which is difficult for anyone) was enough in itself to have caused my failure with you to have so disastrous an effect upon me.”
*
“Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note–the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you. It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here. And more importantly, it is the one impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living. But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part….Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances. That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course–but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later. That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you–not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely impersonal fashion.”
“But, creature of the weather, I
don't want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.”
Well friends, this is a complicated work. It isn't that it has a range of registers from the mundane to the pretentious. It isn't that it is a vast project itself-to set a poem to the pulse of a country, a poem that is a man, a city, a man and a city as one. And it isn't just that WCW himself is so present in the poem, a not uncontroversial person himself, which obligates one to look at his position, his relationships, and his ideas of what poetry is and what this particular poetic project is. It's all of that stuff together. I'm gonna give a quick overview of what I thought of the chapters (books 1-5), then I'll say whatever else occurs to me and that'll be that. This work is dense so I think a lot more could be said, but it's also dense in a way that's unappealing at times and so while on the one hand I might feel bad about not giving this intricate poem recognition for all its nuances, on the other it's a lotta sound and fury, lotta words.
Book 1-I love books 1 and 2. Because I stopped and started Paterson and then lost it so stopped and started from the beginning again, I am most familiar with these. But my familiarity isn't the entirety of why I liked them better. This book deals with the “city” aspect of the titular man and the city. It has historical anecdotes mixed in with varieties of stanzas about the city and, presumably, a man in and observing the city. Nature plays a role as a female counterpart to the city. The falls as the main feature of the city embodies that role in grand and awful mystery, beauty and violence. Reminds me of the Greek female chthonic deities and monsters. There's something to be said here about the hubris of man in the face of nature. Also at play are some personal letters written to WCW.
Book 2- Book 2 flows really well from book one where we focus more on the “man” and the city stays as a backdrop. There are less historical anecdotes and they are replaced by a greater percentage of personal letters. The letters are almost all from Marcia Nardi, a young poet who develops some kind of Platonic mentor relationship with WCW. Nardi's letters came to be the most compelling thing to me about the entire work (in fact, I have strange visions of rewriting the entire thing and only including her letters). She begins in her letters to tentatively broach her relationship with WCW asking for advice on her poetry in the most timid, but articulate of ways. But soon that mildness gives way to conflict: WCW has refused to respond to her letters and this pains her in ways she can hardly explain. As time passes, she writes more letters, realizing she can explain her pain, but only after she's lost part of what made it real-her desire for friendship from WCW. And in the end, she acknowledges that this is such a great sorrow that it still affects her, that her anger is not even anger anymore, that it was always a false anger; it is merely a glaring cover for the deeper sadness she feels from being rejected-And let's be perfectly specific here, being rejected by a friend who had taken the time to cultivate a meaningful relationship but had decided to dismiss it as easily as he had taken to it.
Part of her struggle with WCW is one intimately tied to their respective ideas of poetry and life. It isn't just that WCW decides for unstated reasons to cease correspondence, but she accuses him of not having lived a day in his life, of living in the ephemeral world of privilege and making literature of life:
“You've never had to live, Dr. P----not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to life—and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I've been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)
But living (unsafe living, I mean) isn't something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake. Or else it doesn't happen. And when it does, then one must bring, as I must, one's life to literature; and when it doesn't then one brings to life (as you do_ purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only—and also, alas, the ego of the literary man which most likely played an important part in the change of your attitude toward me. That literary man's ego wanted to help me in such a way, I think, that my own achievements might serve as a flower in his buttonhole, if that kind of help had been enough to make me bloom.
But I have no blossoms to bring to any man in the way of either love or friendship. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want that introduction to my poems. And I’m not wanting to be nasty or sarcastic in the last lines of this letter. On the contrary a feeling of profound sadness has replaced no the anger and the indignation with which I started to write all this. I wanted your friendship more than I ever wanted anything else (yes, more, and I’ve wanted other things badly) I wanted it desperately, not because I have a single thing with which to adorn any man’s pride--but just because I haven’t.”
I don't know the specifics of what happened between them and to a certain extent I must accept that Nardi is telling her version of the story with a bias toward herself. But it is a compelling version, one that makes me sympathize (or empathize, if you care to draw a distinction. Contrary to popular opinion I happen not to hold that there's a semantic significance to using the two terms distinctly [what is it to console someone without having experienced the same thing or with having done so? Is consolation only substantial when you have experienced x? Is consolation always hollow when you have not? A decidedly useless conversation]) more with her than with WCW. It's an odd feeling to turn on the author you're reading, but the truth is that he is the one who published this book, he is the one who controls this narrative, and he is the one who carries it to course through the end with three more books! Who is this poet who, when accused of turning his own, and in general life's, experiences into literary fluff, turns around a publishes the accusation in full in a literary way surrounded by literary fluff!!?? The surrounding stanzas are no help at all and book 2 ends with the end of Nardi's last letter. The next book picks up the thread of Paterson and moves on to other things albeit more specific other things, but Nardi is never summoned again. Her story is finished and has fit into its niche of book 2. It's just all so contradictory to me, I don't really understand what WCW is trying to do with it. My preoccupation with this contradiction eclipsed most of the rest of the book. So I'll just say that it was profoundly unsettling because I still can't outright condemn him for publishing Nardi's letters which excoriate him from which he doesn't bother to defend himself at all-which to me indicates that he accepts, at least partly, her assessment of what happened. In putting them so prominently in his work he gives a voice to her version of things. But it's his poem, he's the authoritative poet here, would contemporary readers see Nardi's letters and say, “oh well WCW isn't bothering to give his version, but he's so great a poet it doesn't matter, he must be struggling as much as Nardi is but unable to articulate it” or do they say something more like “WCW doesn't give his version precisely because he is so conflicted. He couldn't bring himself to continue correspondence, he couldn't bring himself to see life in a way other than that which he did-much as we are all trapped in our own existences. And afterwards it's no doubt that he saw that in retrospect, but still it was just another tragedy for him to look back upon with a grief-laden heart, with regret for things he can't change: such is the spirit of humanity.” Or maybe yet still in the wider narrative of Paterson, this is one stage in a man's life or a city's life, or a man-city's life; heartbreak is something that happens to all of us and the truth of that soars above any real emotional connection he, Nardi, or we the readers have to any of this stuff at all. I'm not really sure.
But what I can say, is that based on the rest of the poem, Nardi's story is self-contained in book 2 no matter what real events may add to it, and that book 3 moves beyond it in other directions. This is what inclines me to say that WCW is truly turning Nardi's personal suffering into exactly what she accuses him of doing with life. Which is alarming in a way. I just wish that the following books had followed up with this enough to justify Robert Lowell writing:
“Paterson is Whitman's America, grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation. No poet has written of it with such a combination of brilliance, sympathy, and experience, with such alertness and energy.”
I don't exactly disagree with Lowell-there are parts of book 1 and even the historical anecdotes of book 3 that correspond to the emotional force, the pathos and tragedy, of book 2 but so much more of 3-5 is given over to modernist play. The work taken as a whole is a grand project and I'll tell you what I like about the last three books, but this to me was the core of the work-Nardi's suffering turned into literary play. Anyway I think I've made my point. I've set up two competing interpretations of whats going on (potentially even more than that), one of which I can be positive toward WCW about the other of which I absolutely cannot. And so I shall remain here in aporia until I or someone else saves me/myself.
Book 3- Obviously most of my energy for this work came from the first two books, but here's my favorite line from this book:
“Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”
The rest I really didn't get into. It starts with the library so maybe the focusing point is one building in the city but it carries on in such a modernist, Cummings-like play that there wasn't much compelling about it to me except a few vague stanzas about death. DEATH.
Book 4- The poetry of this book also failed to capture me, but was perhaps less fancifully pretentious and modernist. The one saving grace, was the letters from Allen Ginsburg which were not nearly as invigorating and provocative as Nardi's but were at least historically interesting. The problem with AG is of course that he was AG and I'll not get into that right now but I'll admit that I like his poem “America.”
Book 5- Clearly an afterthought and an underdeveloped afterthought, this book was not particularly objectionable. More art-centered pretentiousness. Make of it what you will.
Reading this book was very interesting-and I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean that reading it was interesting even though it was not always enjoyable. There are many unique things about it that make it an unrivaled work of American poetry. The form, the breadth- you can see how WCW's style evolves over time. He's a prominent figure in the development of American poetry and for that he provides great insight into American poetry of the following decades. And he is not unskilled. I hope that even though I have picked at what WCW has done with Paterson I haven't particularly tarnished his ability. I threw around the word pretentious a lot and it's true I'm using the word pejoratively. But not all pretentiousness is equally bad; some of it I even like. Modernist poetry is one area where it reaches my limit (unless you're Ashbery). The truth is, I'd still like to read some of WCW's other poetry, but I think I'm pretty good and done with this work. His poetic philosophy, “no ideas but in things,” is an admirable one. But somewhere along the line he started to take himself too seriously, as if he alone knew the true nature of poetry and jealously guarded it like some sort of treasure-hoarding fire drake from the north. And well, we all know what happened to that fire drake.
Here are my quotes which are all from Marcia Nardi's letters:
“Despite my having said that I’d never write to you again, I do so now because I find, with the passing of time, that the outcome of my failure with you has been the complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner such as I have never before experienced.
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self–have you ever experienced it? I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you can well understand what a serious psychological injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent day-to-day condition.”
*
“There are people–especially among women–who can speak only to one person. And I am one of those women. I do not come easily to confidences (thought it cannot but seem otherwise to you). I could not possibly convey to any one of those people who have crossed my path in these few months, those particular places of my life which I made the subject of my letters to you. I must let myself be entirely misunderstood and misjudged in all my economic and social maladjustments, rather than ever attempt to communicate to anyone else what I wrote to you about. And so my having heaped these confidences upon you (however tiresome you may have found them and however far I may yet need to go in the attainment of complete self-honesty which is difficult for anyone) was enough in itself to have caused my failure with you to have so disastrous an effect upon me.”
*
“Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note–the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you. It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here. And more importantly, it is the one impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living. But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part….Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances. That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course–but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later. That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you–not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely impersonal fashion.”
Read
March 8, 2023I didn't connect with this book as much as I might have, were I to have given it a closer reading. I think my literary reading habits are attuned more to prose than to poetry. However, there's quite a lot here that struck me as very good.
Williams uses the technique of interspersing poetry with prose (including lots of 'found prose') to great effect, often making the poetry comment on the prose and vice versa. It seems clear that this 'montage' approach constitutes one of the ways in which Paterson is a response to Eliot's The Waste Land. I use the term "montage" because the many juxtapositions to be found between otherwise disparate texts/text fragments here often feel similar to the intercutting of scenes in a film
Of course, instead of seeing what Williams is doing in terms of montage, we can also think of these juxtapositions as creating a distinctive sort of polyvocal text, and here I'd guess that this is one of the ways in which the book is a response to James Joyce's Ulysses.
I'm one of those people who came to Williams largely because of the impact on me of Jim Jarmusch's film, so I couldn't help but notice that while Paterson the film (in line with some of Jarmusch's best films) focuses on celebrating the quiet lyricism of ordinary life. In contrast, Paterson the book, while containing passages that function in this way, is also filled with violence and brutality, both historical and personal. I don't think I fully grasped what Williams was trying to say by juxtaposing the beautiful and the horrific in the histories of both Paterson the town and Paterson the man, but I found the fact that he does so intriguing enough to make me think that this book deserves a second reading sometime in the future.
Williams uses the technique of interspersing poetry with prose (including lots of 'found prose') to great effect, often making the poetry comment on the prose and vice versa. It seems clear that this 'montage' approach constitutes one of the ways in which Paterson is a response to Eliot's The Waste Land. I use the term "montage" because the many juxtapositions to be found between otherwise disparate texts/text fragments here often feel similar to the intercutting of scenes in a film
Of course, instead of seeing what Williams is doing in terms of montage, we can also think of these juxtapositions as creating a distinctive sort of polyvocal text, and here I'd guess that this is one of the ways in which the book is a response to James Joyce's Ulysses.
I'm one of those people who came to Williams largely because of the impact on me of Jim Jarmusch's film, so I couldn't help but notice that while Paterson the film (in line with some of Jarmusch's best films) focuses on celebrating the quiet lyricism of ordinary life. In contrast, Paterson the book, while containing passages that function in this way, is also filled with violence and brutality, both historical and personal. I don't think I fully grasped what Williams was trying to say by juxtaposing the beautiful and the horrific in the histories of both Paterson the town and Paterson the man, but I found the fact that he does so intriguing enough to make me think that this book deserves a second reading sometime in the future.
September 2, 2022
I never know how to review a book of poetry. I learned in the preface that the five books that make up Paterson were originally published in separate volumes in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and that through the various printings of the work, the text changed. In this 1992 edition, all five books were collected, and the editor studied all the manuscripts, galleys, and proof pages to decide which versions to include. Anyway, Paterson is a city near me in New Jersey, and also near where William Carlos Williams lived. Its main geographical feature is the Great Falls on the Passaic River, which looms above the city, and the books of the poem metaphorically follow the course of that river as it meanders through northern New Jersey and then ultimately out to the sea. The poetry is both about the city of Paterson but also about Williams's life and the history of the whole region. No wonder it is such a masterpiece! This edition, edited by Christopher MacGowan, has lots of interesting footnotes and explanatory material. I first read this poem in my teens before I ever moved to New Jersey and became familiar with these places. My own experiences and the notes helped make it so much more.
July 26, 2025
I liked the movie more... sue me.
Read
November 6, 2020I wanted to read this because it dealt with Paterson, a city in my home state.
Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with poetry. Maybe I could read a sonnet and understand what is going on, but I do not think I am ready for this level of poetry.
I just don’t get it.
And for that reason, I’m not even going to attempt to rate this book.
Maybe I will return to it when I am more well read.
Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with poetry. Maybe I could read a sonnet and understand what is going on, but I do not think I am ready for this level of poetry.
I just don’t get it.
And for that reason, I’m not even going to attempt to rate this book.
Maybe I will return to it when I am more well read.
March 10, 2017
I’ll confess, for a poet who seemed consumed by making poetry, especially long form poetry more accessible to the common reader, Paterson I find pretty difficult. A great example would be the following passage:
“Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity—it can’t be
otherwise—an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.” (12)
I really don’t know what that means. Clearly Williams influenced a whole generation of American poets, and his words do ring with imagery. My trouble is that often I perceive poesy instead of meaning. In fairness, this could be a problem on my end. My favorite lines from this classic of American literature are below.
“A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.” (4)
“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.”
“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
See my other reviews here!
“Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity—it can’t be
otherwise—an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.” (12)
I really don’t know what that means. Clearly Williams influenced a whole generation of American poets, and his words do ring with imagery. My trouble is that often I perceive poesy instead of meaning. In fairness, this could be a problem on my end. My favorite lines from this classic of American literature are below.
“A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.” (4)
“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.”
“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
See my other reviews here!
May 30, 2017
In graduate school, I took a seminar on T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (great class from the legendary U of Illinois prof Chuck Sanders), that posited American poetry as a battle between the two poets' models. I fell strongly on the Williams side, responding to his love for ordinary American speech--heightened, of course--and his embrace of multiplicity: the voices of working people, Indians, Negroes (I'll use the terms from the time here), winnowed through an early feminist sensibility that's much more incisive and precise than I'd remembered. Williams intended Paterson as his masterpiece, a sort of answer to Eliot's "Waste Land." Like Eliot and Joyce in Ulysses, Williams relies on myth--in this case the myth of Paterson's landscape as the body of a sleeping giant, to structure his epic. He incorporates newspaper articles, letters, bits and pieces of overheard conversation, into the poem. It's a stunning piece.
The problem is that--and here the point of reference is, sadly, Pound's Cantos--Paterson starts very well and then loses energy. Book 1 remains absolutely breathtaking in its directness--"no ideas but in the things!" Book 2 retains most of the power. After that, it's hit or miss and I'm more relieved than not that he never completed Book 6.
Still, for the current of American poetry I love most deeply, the only comparably important source--wellspring's a better word--would be Whitman's Song of Myself.
The problem is that--and here the point of reference is, sadly, Pound's Cantos--Paterson starts very well and then loses energy. Book 1 remains absolutely breathtaking in its directness--"no ideas but in the things!" Book 2 retains most of the power. After that, it's hit or miss and I'm more relieved than not that he never completed Book 6.
Still, for the current of American poetry I love most deeply, the only comparably important source--wellspring's a better word--would be Whitman's Song of Myself.
June 23, 2009
I've only just come back to this after college this month (in order to teach it: I always get closer to a book when I have to teach it since I'm forced to pay attention and make my thoughts clear to myself) and wowsers: the concept of man-city metaphor, describing one by means of the other, is nothing new but WCW does something else: the man IS the city and vice versa. The poem switches back and forth mid-phrase, mid-word, so that it's not a metaphor but a character dreaming a city dreaming its dreamer.
If experimental poetry invents new realities or new ways of conceiving of what we perceive, then WCW is still the most oneiromantic (hey, Rooney) poet out there.
If experimental poetry invents new realities or new ways of conceiving of what we perceive, then WCW is still the most oneiromantic (hey, Rooney) poet out there.
November 7, 2010
"You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken."
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken."
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