Paterson (poem)

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Paterson is a poem by influential modern American poet William Carlos Williams.

The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book is considered to be Williams' epic. Williams' book In the American Grain is claimed to be Paterson's abstracted introduction involving a rewritten American history. It is a poetic monument to, and personification of, the city of Paterson, New Jersey. However, as a whole the three main topics of the poem are Paterson the Man, Paterson the City, and Identity. The theme of the poem being centered in an in-depth look at the process of modernization and its effects.

[edit] Composition

Williams saw the poet as a type of reporter, who relays the news of the world to the people. He prepared for the writing of Paterson in this way:

I started to make trips to the area. I walked around the streets; I went on Sundays in summer when the people were using the park, and I listened to their conversation as much as I could. I saw whatever they did, and made it part of the poem.^[1]

While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained through his research into the poem. On a worksheet for the poem, he wrote, "Make it factual (as the Life is factual-almost casual-always sensual-usually visual: related to thought)". Williams considered, but ultimately rejected, putting footnotes into the work describing some facts. Still, the style of the poem allowed for many opportunities to incorporate factual information, such as in the letters received by Dr. Paterson.^[2] Williams, in fact, used portions of his own correspondence with the American poets Marcia Nardi and Allen Ginsberg in Paterson.

[edit] References

1. ^ Bollard, Margaret Lloyd (1975). "The "Newspaper Landscape" of Williams' "Paterson"". Contemporary Literature 16 (3): 317. doi:10.2307/1207405. 
2. ^ Bollard (1975), p. 320