Paterson

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 automations. 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 things— 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 gray 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- (What common language to unravel? . . .combed into straight lines from that rafter of a rock's lip.) 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. ............................ ............................ On Friday, the twelfth of October, we anchored before the land and made ready to go ashore . There I sent the people for water, some with arms, and others with casks: and as it was some little distance, I waited two hours for them. During that time I walked among the trees which was the most beautiful thing which I had ever known. • knowledge, the contaminant Uranium, the complex atom, breaking down, a city in itself, that complex atom, always breaking down to lead. But giving off that, to an exposed plate, will reveal And so, with coarsened hands she stirs And love, bitterly contesting, waits that the mind shall declare itself not alone in dreams • A man like you should have everything he wants not half asleep waiting for the sun to part the labia of shabby clouds . but a man (or a woman) achieved flagrant! adept at thought, playing the words following a table which is the synthesis of thought, a symbol that is to him, sun up! a Mendelief, the elements laid out by molecular weight, identity predicted before found! and Oh most powerful connective, a bead to lie between continents through which a string passes Ah Madaih! this is order, perfect and controlled on which empires, alas, are built But there may issue, a contaminant, some other metal radioactive a dissonance, unless the table lie, may cure the cancer . must lie in that ash . Helium plus, plus what? Never mind*, but plus a woman, a small Polish baby-nurse unable . Woman is the weaker vessel, but the mind is neutral, a bead linking continents, brow and toe and will at best take out its spate in mathematics replacing murder Sappho vs Elektra! The young conductor gets his orchestra and leaves his patroness with child. les idees Wilsoniennes nous gdtent . the vague irrelevances and the destructive silences inertia As Carrie Nation to Artemis so is our life today They took her out West on a photographing expedition to study chiaroscuro to Denver, I think. Somewhere around there. the marriage was annulled. When she returned with the baby openly taking it to her girls' parties, they were shocked — and the Abbess Hildegard, at her own funeral, Rupertsberg, 1 179 had enjoined them to sing the choral, all women, she had written for the occasion and it was done, the peasants kneeling in the background . as you may see ... ................................. ................................. All the professions, all the arts, idiots, criminals to the greatest lack and deformity, the stable parts making up a man's mind — fly after him attacking ears and eyes: small birds following marauding crows, in ecstasies . of fear and daring The brain is weak. It fails mastery, never a fact. To bring himself in, hold together wives in one wife and at the same time scatter it, the one in all of them . Weakness, weakness dogs him, fulfillment only a dream or in a dream. No one mind can do it all, runs smooth in the effort: toute dans V effort The greyhaired President (of Haiti), his women and children, at the water's edge, sweating, leads off finally, after delays, huzzahs, songs for pageant reasons over the blue water . in a private plane with his blonde secretary. Scattered, the fierceness of knowledge comes flocking down again— souvenir of childhood, and daring eyes who carried her head, as the mind might wish, at the best, to be carried. There was Lucille, gold hair and blue eyes, very straight, who to the amazement of many, married a saloon keeper and lost her modesty. There was loving Alma, who wrote a steady hand, whose mouth never wished for relief. And the cold Nancy, with small firm breasts You remember? a high forehead, she who never smiled more than was sufficient but whose broad mouth was icy with pleasure startling the back and knees! whose words were few and never wasted. There were others — half hearted, the over-eager, the dull, pity for all of them, staring out of dirty windows, hopeless, indifferent, come too late and a few, too drunk with it — or anything — to be awake to and more — shining, struggling flies caught in the meshes of Her hair, of whom there can be no complaint, fast in die invisible net — from the back country, half awakened — all desiring. Not one to escape, not one « a fragrance of mown hay, facing the rapacious, die "great". In 1926, influenced by his reading of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, William Carlos Williams wrote an 85-line poem titled Paterson, which won the Dial Award. His aim then was to do for the town of Paterson what James Joyce had done for Dublin2. In 1933, he continued in this vein with the prose poem Life along the Passaic River. In 1937 he wrote the poem Paterson. Paterson is an epic poem written by the American poet William Carlos Williams, published in five volumes between 1946 and 1958 and considered his great work. Its title comes from the town of Paterson in New Jersey, where the poet officiated as a doctor for forty years, while living in the neighboring town of Rutherford. It is composed of five books and fragments of a sixth book. He draws inspiration from works such as the Cantos of his friend Ezra Pound and the poem The Bridge by Hart Crane, while adding a documentary dimension. This epic poem, titled Paterson, is the most famous of a series of earlier poems with the same title or subject. The poem starts from the Passaic falls, in the heights of Paterson, to go to the sea and New York, passing through an entire urban landscape, including the park (book 2) and the library (book 3). Verse and prose alternate, in a montage technique. Each versified passage gives a scene or image of the city, while the prose passages are composed of a wide variety of materials: newspaper articles, history books, tracts, personal letters from the author or other people , etc., most of the time without the origin of these materials being specified. There are notably, in book 4, two important letters from Allen Ginsberg, future cantor of the Beat Generation, and of whom William Carlos Williams was a mentor.