Williams: 'Paterson'

 William Carlos Williams’s Paterson baffles me. It’s a long poem, but I couldn’t tell you whether it’s an epic. It’s about place — but I’d have a hard time telling you how Williams would have defined his sense of place.

I had wondered what excerpts Charles Tomlinson would include in his Selected Poems.

Paterson includes passages of prose, some of which comes from the police archives. Among those that made Tomlinson’s cut was the tale of how William Dalzell’s garden was trampled during a May Day outing of the German Singing Societies of Paterson. Dalzell was waiting the following year, still outraged and armed, determined to prevent even the slightest intrusion. He shot John Joseph Van Houten. We think tales of road rage and homeowner aggression are stories for our times. But this one was news in 1880.

Williams’s book is like an album of snapshots that somehow give you the history, natural history and social atmosphere of the place. The prose sections remind me of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, which is about the place we call the Americas. It’s a mosaic of anecdotes that somehow make up a much bigger picture.

That’ the prose of Paterson. The real test, of course, is what to say of the poetry, and I’m just not up to it. Williams was trying to find a new way of expressing new things — attitudes, customs and arrangements — that are distinctly modern. He was trying to find a new line, a new form.

 

Without invention nothing is well spaced, 

unless the mind change, unless

the stars are new measured, according

to their relative positions, the

line will not change, the necessity

will not matriculate: unless there is

a new mind there cannot be a new

line, and the old will go on

repeating itself with recurring

deadlines …

 

I’m not sure that he found it, that new mind that invents the new line.

I don’t see the world that way. But I like to read poetry because poets stretch the language, finding new ways to talk about the new ways we find to live.

• Source: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985, p. 280.