William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), like his friend Ezra Pound, never finished his magnum opus, a poem as impossibly ambitious as the Cantos, but richly invested in the present world. It was published over a period of a dozen years (1946-1958) in five books, the sixth left incomplete. The first book was welcomed by the great American poet-critic Randall Jarrell. He called it 'the best thing Williams has ever written' - 'how wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most delicate lyricism of perception ...
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William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), like his friend Ezra Pound, never finished his magnum opus, a poem as impossibly ambitious as the Cantos, but richly invested in the present world. It was published over a period of a dozen years (1946-1958) in five books, the sixth left incomplete. The first book was welcomed by the great American poet-critic Randall Jarrell. He called it 'the best thing Williams has ever written' - 'how wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most delicate lyricism of perception and feeling with the hardest and homeliest actuality should ever have come into being! There has never been a poem more American.' He was disappointed with the books that followed. But he was expecting an American epic while Williams was delivering something more original, Whitmanesque, an evocation of a New Jersey community (Paterson), a great American river (the Passaic) that powered its mill wheels, a confluence of human and natural worlds in conflicts and harmonies. It is a great poem about humankind and the environment it finds, exploits but cannot dominate. The style has been called documentary, but that hardly does justice to its subtleties of tone and its American patterns of sound. Williams trained as a physician and practised as a doctor all his life. His double vocation produced a poetry different in kind from the erudite and culturally knowing and allusive work of his contemporaries. Its subtleties are of another kind.
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I first read William Carlos Williams's (1883 -- 1963) long poem "Paterson" about forty years ago when I was taken both with city life and with the possibility of combining an active, demanding career with a life of creativity and art. (Williams was a physician as well as a poet.) Williams's poem is in five books published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958 and is set in the once thriving inustrial city of Paterson, New Jersey. The poem's main character also is named Paterson. Book 3 of "Paterson" won the 1950 National Book Award for Poetry.
The memory of "Paterson" long stayed with me, and it 2017 I couldn't wait to see the Jim Jarmusch directed film which, as is the poem, is set in Paterson New Jersey and features a character named Paterson, played by Adam Driver. Paterson drives a bus through the streets of Paterson, lives a life of routine, and is a poet in the style of Williams and his language of the everyday. Paterson and his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) combine the struggles of life with love and with efforts to create and to find meaning in the everyday, The film suggests the presence of art in daily life for those who look. The movie "Paterson" is replete with allusions to Williams's poem. Williams would have loved it.
I thought of both the poem and the movie recently when reading a friend's review of the poem. I watched the film again, and I struggled with and reread "Paterson" for the first time in many years. The poem and its themes have stayed in my memory but the specifics are difficult. The book is a collage. Sections of Williams's poetry in its long, broken free verse lines alternate with prose passages. The prose passages include materials from the city of Paterson's long history dating to Alexander Hamilton's founding of the city as a center for indunstry and even before. There are also extensive prose passages about daily life in Paterson and about Williams's relationships with other people, including women and other poets seeking advice or help. Among these poets is a young Allen Ginsberg. The book has a contrapuntal structure as the sections of poetry alternate with and comment upon the prose passages. It can also be intense and obscure.
Paterson is a walker the the book takes him to the celebrated Great Falls on the Passaic River, which was the source of the city's industrial energy and to the adjacent parks where he wanders and observes. Paterson also wanders through the city streets and rides the bus and reflects on the city's history and its industry in silks, weapons, and railroad manufacturing and the many labor strikes over the years. Paterson also reflects upon his own life, especially his relationships to women,love and sexuality in consummation and divorce, and upon his writing and its purpose.
As a modernist writer, Williams's motto was "no ideas but in things", a phrase which appears in "Paterson". The poem itself, the work of the imagination, is itself its own reality. The poem "Paterson" with its combination of city and person is its own subject. The poem shows how individual life and communal life, in the form of the city, are fused together in imagination. The indivdual Paterson comes to see and to love his life in terms of the city of Paterson.
I remember my struggles with the poem and why it has stayed with me over the years. I thought of the movie "Paterson" which in its quiet way captures something of the spirit of Williams' poem. I was grateful for the opportunity to revisit Paterson.
