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.

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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 ...

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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".

About this Poem

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.