Paterson by William Carlos Williams

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.

Paterson, New Jersey is a cool place. At the edge of the great swathe of suburbia between New York City and Philadelphia, a place that--don't tell my wife I said this--feels clogged with Panera Breads and mattress stories, Paterson seems to me a real place with a real identity. Some might consider it a little rough and tumble these days, as cities who once relied on dead industries sometimes are, but it boasts a booming immigrant population, and its downtown still retains some of the striking manufacturing buildings of its earlier incarnations. In its heart is an immense waterfall that looks like something imported from the Adirondacks; these Great Falls of the Passaic were the engine of America's first industries, as dreamed by Alexander Hamilton. I've only been there once, but to stand at the falls felt to me like being at the intersection of nature, industry, immigration, urbanism--like being at center of something essentially American.

And all that is before you even consider that William Carlos Williams, one of the great American poets of the 20th century, lived there, and made the city of Paterson the subject of an epic poem composed over the course of decades. Williams' Paterson wears some of its influences on its sleeve, namely--and I think I'm repeating familiar knowledge here, though it is clear enough from the poem itself--the free verse and democratic fervor of Walt Whitman and the mythmaking of James Joyce. Williams, if I recall correctly, wanted to do for humble Paterson what Joyce did for Dublin.

But that's not exactly right, I think, Joyce used the vernacular of myth and history to turn Dublin into more than what it was, but Williams' long epic seems to collapse the scale of Paterson, rather than to enlarge it: the city, he tells us, serves as a metaphor for the poet himself: an agglomeration of parts that somehow has an essence of its own, a collective organism. At the heart of the poet is the falls itself, a representation of the churning and ever-changing mind, which "unseen / tumbles and rights itself / and refalls--and does not cease, falling / and refalling with a roar, a reverberation / not of the falls but of its rumor / unabated." In the first couple of books--Paterson is made of five, the first in 1946 and the last in 1948--the poet walks through Paterson itself, watching lovers and children, stirring up street preachers and grasshoppers, and the effect is of a man walking through himself. The city shrinks to the man, but the man expands to the city. Paterson becomes, at times, a kind of identity-formation on the page:

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.

To this point, Paterson is punctuated with all sorts of prose material, from newspaper clippings about Paterson to historical anecdotes to letters from Williams' own correspondents, including his housekeeper and a young and star-struck Allen Ginsberg. The letters are unattributed, unless you have an edition like this one that scrupulously records Williams' sources. For a poet like Williams, who is so attuned to the music of vernacular speech, the letters are rich and musical, but for a reader like me they are often baffling, like looking over the shoulder of a man on the train, seeing his correspondence without context. They, like so much of the poem, seem to mean less than is desired, to point mostly to the reader's own inability to read them. Paterson is often seen as a response to Eliot, who thought that poetry ought to be entirely impersonal. Williams is right, I think, that that's a silly way to think about poetry, but much of Paterson felt to me like a locked box. "Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it's all right," one imagined speaker says, "but what the hell does it mean?"

The poem's later books move far away from Paterson as a city; we are in Paris, perhaps, with Marie Curie, discovering uranium and unintentionally giving birth to the atom bomb. They become quite death haunted: "Though he is approaching / death," Williams writes, "he is possessed of many poems." I was quite touched by the tender hopefulness of this passage:

We shall not get to the bottom:
death is a hole
in which we are all buried
Gentile and Jew

The flower dies down
and rots away    .
But there is a hole in the bottom of the bag.

It is the imagination 
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole
we escape    .    .

I liked, too, an extended riff on the famous unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters in Manhattan, a work of art that is familiar to me in a place that is quite dear. (Not least because my wife and I had an early date there, now nearly ten years ago.) "The Unicorn / has no match," Williams writes, "or mate    .    the artist / has no peer," like "Death / has no peer." The artist is unique like the unicorn, like death; he creates the uniqueness of himself on the page, as he creates the city by walking through it, the city that is not the same as it was a moment ago, anchored by the falls where water moves thousands of gallons by the second. I left Paterson wishing that the waterfall would stop for a moment, and the poem and the poet reveal more of themselves, but there's no stopping it.