Paterson [Paperback]

Many reviewers here objected to the prose passages, which contain letters or stories of historical interest about Paterson and its environs. I found the prose the most interesting part-- probably because it was in plain English. The notes in the back of this latest edition are invaluable in making sense of the sources of the prose and other references.

I've re-read PATERSON and also read some scholarly books on it since I last reviewed it and I still haven't changed my opinion. Late Williams is just too avant-garde for my tastes, dabbling as he did in "field theory" with Charles Olson and the 'tri-verse stanza' -- informal formal verse. The structure of PATERSON is not narrative, no matter how much Williams said otherwise.

Williams says that Paterson is both "a city and a man." Paterson is just a book, one with some good parts and some intentionally baffling parts. I'm sorry to report that I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped.

To hear the staff at New Directions tell it, Paterson is the be-all and end-all of the American long poem; there is no work being done today that is not influenced in some way by Williamsï¿ milestone of American verse. And there may be some truth in that statement, but it neglects to address the question of whether Paterson is, in fact, a good poem; after all, the album title tells us ten million Elvis fans canï¿t be wrong. Well, guess what, folks? Ten million Elvis fans ARE wrong.

Paterson is the magnum opus of a man who forgot that one of the ways that poets are divided are those who are obsessed with the art of poesy, and those obsessed with its craft. Ninety-five percent or so of modern poets are of the ï¿artï¿ school, and few pay any attention to craft at all, which is why there is so much painfully bad high-school-angst poetry in the world. Maybe one percent know how to balance the art and the craft, and from that one percent come the finest poets in the English, or in any, language, folks like Ira Sadoff, David St. John, and Debra Allbery. The rest are of the ï¿craftï¿ school, and get so wrapped up in the construction that they forget the one great rule, that poetry is language elevated. Paterson is a testament to craft, and it forsakes art altogether.

This was not an unconscious thing. Williams was a staunch proponent of the idea that the way to make poetry more accessible to the people was to try and fit the natural rhythm and flow of human speech into the rhythms of poetry, be they strict forms or the internal rhythms of free verse; Williams dips into both here, and more often than not heï¿s trying to fit the squarest of pegs into the roundest of holes. He also throws in long prose passages that, while they contribute to a greater understanding of Paterson as Williams sees it, are not poetry in any sense of the word.

All that said, the collection approaches brilliance more times than it misses the mark. There are snippets where Williamsï¿ writing is so powerful as to take the breath away, where he approaches the genius of the early years of his career, and the stuff sounds just as good as ï¿The Red Wheel-Barrowï¿ or ï¿This Is Just to Say.ï¿ In other words, it would have made a great collection of poems, but as one long piece, it falls somewhat short.

If nothing else, it does state the greatest rule of poetry as succinctly as ever before or ever since: ï¿no ideas but in things.ï¿ If only Williams had listened to himself just a tad more. ***