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Davvybrookbook's Reviews > Paterson
Paterson
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From an unexpected used bookstore find to the start of a poetry reading group, Paterson will represent for me a more focused effort to better understand poetry. This is a great work to start with, especially having read Leaves of Grass last year, for the story of the narrative poem is both fictive and non-fiction � “no thoughts but in ideas� becomes by Book 3 or 4 “no thoughts but in facts.�
This work recalls Finnegans Wake in its working class industrial model of a town, especially with the river and a man as the land lending form to the poem. Another comparison might be Pale Fire by Nabokov with the blending of poem and prose, albeit William Carlos Williams does so in such tight, fleeting sequences that no one voice dominates. Paterson has polyvocal, multigendered narrative characters evoking the breadth of Paterson the city, and only sporadically featuring Paterson the man.
The progression of four books, and then a fifth and the first fragments of a sixth book, marks a poetic journey across the land:
This work recalls Finnegans Wake in its working class industrial model of a town, especially with the river and a man as the land lending form to the poem. Another comparison might be Pale Fire by Nabokov with the blending of poem and prose, albeit William Carlos Williams does so in such tight, fleeting sequences that no one voice dominates. Paterson has polyvocal, multigendered narrative characters evoking the breadth of Paterson the city, and only sporadically featuring Paterson the man.
The progression of four books, and then a fifth and the first fragments of a sixth book, marks a poetic journey across the land:
The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech�
is, of necessity, my sole concern �
They plunged, they fell in a swoon �
or by intention, to make an end—the
roar, unrelenting, witnessing �
Neither the past nor the future
Neither to stare, amnesic-forgetting.
The language cascades into the
invisible, beyond and above : the falls
of which it is the visible part �
Not until I have made of it a replica
will my sins be forgiven and my
disease cured—in wax: la capella di S. Rocco
on the sandstone crest above the old
copper mines—where I used to see
the images of arms and knees
hung on nails (de Montpellier) �
No meaning. And yet, unless I find a place
apart from it, I am its slave,
its sleeper, bewildered—dazzled
by distance � 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. Let me out!
(Well, go!) this rhetoric
is real!
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