Word: patersons
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...Paterson, Book III, by William Carlos Williams. The third volume of a jumpy but virile four-part poem by a New Jersey pediatrician who versifies between cases (TIME...
...good many years, Poet Williams has also been working on something more ambitious: a long four-part poem about nearby Paterson (pop. 150,000), of which the first three parts are finished. The Williams scheme in Paterson seems simple enough: let the eye rove and write down what it sees. Since the Williams eye is as unpredictable as any man's, the resulting images may be strung together like freight cars in the Erie R.R. yards at Paterson, but all in all they are pretty sharp images. On a Sunday in Paterson's park an old woman -lifts...
Williams has given his poem a narrator-hero: "Dr. Paterson," a man who sees things just about the way Bill Williams does. In Book I he sketches the "elemental character" of the city and paints vignettes of early settlers. In Book II he walks through the park and counts lost souls: lovers who do not love, an evangelist to whom no one listens, the D.P.s of any modern city with "minds beaten thin by waste...
Appalled, Dr. Paterson goes in Book III to the town library, to learn why men have lost the art of living together. He thrashes about in old books, is sickened by the library's "sweats of staleness," but finds no answer to his question. Williams' answer, if he finds one, will come in Book...
...average U.S. reader will not bother to wait; he was bored or scared away from most modern poetry long ago. Nonetheless, there is more than a chance that some people who try Paterson for the first time will like it. Despite a humorlessness and awkwardness that make Williams the Dreiser of U.S. poets, the Williams eye sees with clinical honesty. And among poets too often barricaded behind private mutterings or elaborate mythical references, Rutherford's Dr. Williams keeps poking around outdoors. His notion...