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I didn't connect with this book as much as I might have, were I to have given it a closer reading. I think my literary reading habits are attuned more to prose than to poetry. However, there's quite a lot here that struck me as very good.

Williams uses the technique of interspersing poetry with prose (including lots of 'found prose') to great effect, often making the poetry comment on the prose and vice versa. It seems clear that this 'montage' approach constitutes one of the ways in which Paterson is a response to Eliot's The Waste Land. I use the term "montage" because the many juxtapositions to be found between otherwise disparate texts/text fragments here often feel similar to the intercutting of scenes in a film
Of course, instead of seeing what Williams is doing in terms of montage, we can also think of these juxtapositions as creating a distinctive sort of polyvocal text, and here I'd guess that this is one of the ways in which the book is a response to James Joyce's Ulysses.

I'm one of those people who came to Williams largely because of the impact on me of Jim Jarmusch's film, so I couldn't help but notice that while Paterson the film (in line with some of Jarmusch's best films) focuses on celebrating the quiet lyricism of ordinary life. In contrast, Paterson the book, while containing passages that function in this way, is also filled with violence and brutality, both historical and personal. I don't think I fully grasped what Williams was trying to say by juxtaposing the beautiful and the horrific in the histories of both Paterson the town and Paterson the man, but I found the fact that he does so intriguing enough to make me think that this book deserves a second reading sometime in the future.