Paterson: William Carlos Williams's Image ofthe City

Adam R. McKeeFLORI DA STATE U N IVERSITY

A city is a multi-purpose, shifting organization, a tent for many functions, raised

by many hands and with relative speed. Complete specialization, final meshing, is

improbable and undesirable. The form must be somewhat noncommittal, plastic

to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens.

-Kevin Lynch, fhe Image of the City,91 .

l'm in process of writing a book, the book I have contemplated doing for many

years-prose and verse mixed: "hterson"-an account, a psychological-social

panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man hterson.

-William Carlos Williams to Robert McAlmon, I August 1943. (5L216).

-T", idea behind the poem Paterson was somethingWilliam Car-

I los Williams contemplated for almost twenty years during the

I prime of his poetic career. As noted in the 1943 letter to Robert

McAlmon, Williams's poem would also become the primary literary output of the

last twenÇ years of his life as it was published in five books from 1946 to 1958

(though the original plan was for four books only), and remaining unfinished at

the time of his death in 1963 as indicated by the presence of notes for a sixth

book. This magnum opus has drawn much critical attention, leading Paul Mariani

to call the poem "the most radically experimental and successful long poem writ-

ten in our time" (233). However, much of the critical attention paid to the text has

underplayed or disregarded the central thematic characteristic of the text: how to

best represent the form and image of the modern urban environment and its so-

cial spaces. The view of the urban form and the question of how best to represent

Wíll¡am Carlosw¡ll¡ams Review, vol.31 no.2, Fall 2o'14 OTexasTech Unìversity Prss 141

not only the city, but the distinctively American city, becomes the central motive

for Williams. Miguel Carrasquiera, borrowing from Peter Halter, notes that Wil-liams "saw in the city'the chaotic energies of the metropolis, its intoxicating

promises and bitter disillusionments, its enchantments and sobering disenchant-

ments'. ln Williams's mind, the city provides endless possibilities of success to itsinhabitants" (1 19) and that Williams saw the city as "a dynamo of blossomingstrength and of fertile renewal" (1 19). William Sharpe finds parallels in the abilityto capture the form of l%terson as city with the form of Paterson as poem, noting,

"Williams then radically reassesses the nature of the city poem (and all poetry).

Paterson shows that the goal of the city poet should not be to dominate the multi-plicity of his unwieldy subject, to make order out of its confusion, but rather toliberate his urban materials from the imposition of form and language" (65).

Due to the fact that each of the first four books of Paterson employs a major

physical location of the city as its primary setting, this study will be limited to adiscussion of these sections of the long poem. Additionally, it is apparent that the

form Williams employs reflects the cacophonous and open nature of the city.

What is less apparent is the manner in which these items work together with the

text. William Sharpe refers to Paterson as "a wrlting whose energy resists domina-

tion" (80) and states that Williams's "city becomes a syntax, a way of mind, a

disjointed and elliptical style" (83). Alba Newmann, drawing upon Deleuze and

Cuattari's concept of the rhizome, finds Paterson as, "not only an invitation orguide, it is an enactment; it ¡s a text that shifts, flows, and falls, that breaks off and

starts again, that'somersaults'and escapes" (54). Kevin McNamara argues that

Williams "moved Paterson toward a representation of a city as an open nexus of

overlapping communities with different histories, interests, and even languages"

(147).William R. Klink,focusingonthegeographical featuresof thepoem, argues

for a reading of the way in which Paterson has "affected the changes to the locale

of Paterson itself" (173). These issues are all reflected in the way each book ofPaterson takes a particular space as the central organizing feature, pulling to-

gether history, language, and geography to produce the seemingly chaotic form.

These critics, while certainly interested in the way in which Williams portrays

space and the urban in Paterson, do notfocus extensive attention on the specific

value of the landmark to a complex cognitive sense of the urban space in the

poem. This essay will examine the way in which Williams works through issues ofsocial space (specifically his reading of social monuments and landmarks) and the

way in which the text of Paterson reflects a complex understanding of social

space. One scholar who helps in understanding the value of the landmark to a

cognitive understanding of the urban environment is Kevin Lynch, and key to this

essay is illustrating the ability of Williams to imagine the mental image of the

urban environment in a process that shares affinities with Kevin Lynch's theories

on what he calls "imageability" in his 1960 text The Image of the City.

Lynch's semlnal work remains a crucial study of the individual's ability to

imagine and order their urban surroundings, and his work centers on the ability ofresidents in Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles to accurately describe their cities

in verbal interviews and sketches. His purpose is to explore what can be done by

future city designers to increase the "imageability" of urban areas. Lynch defines

this central concept as "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high

probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer" (9). This mental im-

age, he notes, "is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory ofpast experience" (4). While Lynch is primarily interested in the way in which citi-zens navigate their urban surroundings, his terminology is valuable to an under-

standing of any mental image a citizen has of his/her urban environment. The city

images in Lynch's study are then broken into five types of elements: paths, edges,

districts, nodes, and landmarks (46), elements that exist apart from each other but

often work together.

Furthermore, these elements can be seen as essential characteristics Íor any

mental image of the ciry and nodes and landmarks appear to be most important

in relationship to Williams's Paterson. Lynch defines nodes as "the strategic spots

in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and

from which he is traveling" (47) and landmarks as "another type of point-reference,

but in this case the observer does not enter w¡thin them, they are external. They

are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store, or moun-

tain" (48). For Lynch, Iandmarks can be intensely linked to history or can become

a synecdoche for an entire city, much as he classifies the Duomo as "the symbol

of Florence" (92). Under closer examination, lt is apparent that this ability toconstruct a mental image of the city and its close connection with nodes and

landmarks can provide the reader of Paterson with a more in-depth and complex

approach to Williams's deployment of the urban as form and subject.

Despite the fact that Lynch's work was published in the'l 960s, his influence

on contemporary urban studies remains strong due to his role in the development

of cognitive mapping. While Lynch's application of terminology to a citizen's

mental map of their city is important, what has been more valuable is the way in

which Fredric Jameson utilized Lynch's theories. One scholar to subsequently pick

up both Lynch and Jameson is Edward Soja in Postmodern Ceographies: Ihe Re-

assert¡on of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989) who draws on Jameson's dis-

cussion of Lynch in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"

which originally appeared in New Left Review in 1984.

Central to Soja's discussion of Los Angeles near the end of the book is his use

-)

of Lynchean terms. soja states that, "[n]earry ar the randmarks of the new LA cBDhave been built over the past fifteen years and flashiry signify the consoridation ofLos Angeles as a worrd ciTy" (238). The key "randmark,,here for soja is the Bo-naventure Hotel. He writes, "[b]ack to the centre, shining from its circurar turretsof bronzed glass, stands the Bonaventure Hotel, an amazingry storeyed architec-rural symbol of the splintered labyrinth rhat stretches sixty mires around iï" (243)before arguing that, "[e]verything imaginabre appears to be avairabre in thismicro-urb but real places are difficurt to find, its spaces confuse an effective cog_nitive mapping, its pastiche of superficial reflections bewilder co-ordination andencourage submission instead,, \243_4). Soja, in similar fashion to Jameson, uti_lizes Lynch's terminology to discuss the way in which the postmodern citizenfinds difficulty in cognitively mapping their surroundings.

Book One: The Falls

Paterson: Book one (1946): The Delineaments of the ciants, takes the creat pas_

saic Falls on the Passaic River as its central physical landmark. williams describesthe geography of the Falls (and the poet) early in the poem:

Paterson lies in the valley under the passaic Faljsits spent waters forming the outline of his back. Helies on his right side, head near the thunderof the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,his dreams walk about the city where he persistsincognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. (p 6)

williams splits the city of paterson and the surrounding countryside of carretMountain into male and femare and throughout the poem the femare remainsequated with nature and the male with the urban.rThe city and paterson (a mannamed Dr. Noah Faitoute paterson) are arso equated throughout, as wiiliamsnotes in lwanted to write a poem, "[w]hen rspeak of paterson throughout thepoem, r speak of both the man and the city" (g3), merging the identity orman andcity together in an inseparable relationshrp.

The Falls remain the dominant feature throughout Book one, functioning as alandmark in Lynch's words by serving to ilrustrate the city of paterson through an"external" reference system. The importance of the randmark in Lynch is cruciaras "[l]andmarks, the point references considered to be external to the observer,are simple physical elements which may vary widely in scale. There seemed to be

a tendency for those more familiar with a city to rely increasingly on systems of

landmarks for their guide" (78). The landmark of the Falls dominates the first book

of Paterson as the preeminent physical space in the city. Lynch refers to this as

dominance throughout his book, defining it as, "the reading of the whole as a

principal feature with an associated cluster. This quality [... ] allows the neces-

sary simplification of the image by omission and subsumption. Physical charac-

teristics [ . . . ] seem to radiate their image conceptually to some degree, spreading

out from a center" (106). As evidence of the Falls' dominance, much of the fol-

lowing three books of the poem, while also taking landmarks and nodes as their

primary settlngs, often still define themselves spatially in reference to the Falls. At

this point it becomes evident that the Falls is the central organizing feature for the

poem. For example, Book Four notes,

Branching trees and ample gardens gave

the village streets a delightful charm and

the narrow old-fashioned brick walls added

a dignity to the shading trees. lt was a fair

resort for summer sojourners on the¡r way

to the Falls, the main object of interest (P 194; emphasis added)

and later,

ln the early days of Paterson, the breathing

spot of the village was the triangle square

bounded by Park Street (now lower Main St.)

and Bank Street. Not including the False it

was the prettiest spot ¡n town (1 95; emphasis added)

Throughout Book One, the Falls is the primary source for drawing in the seem-

ingly chaotic and disparate parts of the poem, of holding together what Daniel

Morris calls a "living newspaper" (479). William Sharpe similarly notes that,

"[t]he reader of Paterson's "newsclippings," unless he participates actively in or-

dering the mosaic bits of the townt collective life, will be stunned and confused

by the apparent chaos" (70). Book One draws together historical connections to

the Falls, but the reader must participate in the process of ordering.

This "newsclipping" or "living newspaper" structure to the poem, exceedingly

evident in Section I of Book One, constantly pulls the reader back to the Falls as

the symbol of Paterson. Paterson reveals, perhaps more than other urban poems¡

that the space of the city is a product and in continuar process. Book one makesreference to Ceorge Washington (10), Alexander Hamilton (lO), a record_sizesturgeon caught at the base of the Falls (l I ), Mrs. Sarah Cummi ng (1 4),local dare_devil sam patch (r5), and the discove'y of a body by Leonard sandford at thewheelhouse near the Fats (35) to repeatedry draw the reader toward the rand-mark. Functioning as a "randmark,, in Lynch,s terms, the Fa¡s is here a source ofimageability in that the surroundings are described and rearized in reference to it.The historical associations strengthen the image of the Fails as the ,,symbor,, ofhterson, and Lynch notes that,,lilmage streng"th rises when the landmark coin_cides with a concentration of association. lf the"d¡strnctive buirding is the scene ofan historical event, or if the bright-corored door is your own, then it becomes alandmark indeed" (l or )- The image strength of the creat Fails is obviousry strongthroughout not just Book One, but the eniirety of paterson.

ln addition to the historicar orientation and imageabirity produced by thecreat Falls, it arso engenders the poetic form commensurate with the modern city.Contrary to Marjorie Perloff's assertion that, ,,with the publicatio n of paterson l,the analogy of wiiliams's poetry to avant-garde painting-whether Cubist, Dada,or Surrealist-breaks down,, (i 51), the cacophony and multi_voiced nature of thepoem reflects a coming together of disparate parts rike a Dadaist coilage whireremaining open to modification. John Johnston makes reference to this coilage_like form of paterson, explaining that,

Ii]n addition to this basic mixture of analogy, ,,accounts,,, narrative,

allegorical description, reflection, and argumentation, paterson alsomakes use of symbolism, myth, recurrent metaphor, personification,interior monorogue, montage¡ associative sequencei and blocks of iilus-trative prose, including personal letters to the poet, newspaper stories,as weil as excepts from chronicles, journars, rocar histories, and the rike(213).

This structure resurts in the openness of the poem or, as wiriam sharpe notes,"ltlhe'form' of Paterson, then, is that open ,¡dent¡ty, coalescing around the citymetaphor and the murtipre oppositions it continuaily generates and resorves; butthe poem's structure simurtaneousry acknowredges the impossibirity of its owncompleteness or,finish,,,(s6_6). This multiplicit-y and cacophony are most evi_dent in Williams,s portrayal of language withín paterson.

one of wi'iams's primary goars is to find a succinctry American prose andlanguage for the defiantry American experience of his poem. By the time of the

publication of Book One, Williams's long-standing rivalry with the expatriates

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot was fully realized. His fear that Eliot's The Waste Land

had "returned American poetry to the classroom" and his effort to discover the

"American" in his work led him to state in The Creat American Nove/ (1923) that,

"Europe we must-We have no words. Every word we get must be broken offfrom the European mass. Every word we get placed over again by some delicate

hand. Piece by piece we must loosen what we want. What we will have" (l 175).

Charles Doyle comments on the poem's connection to an American language,

stating that, "lgliven his deep convictions on the need for contact and the'the lo-

cal is the only universal' it is natural that he should have rejected traditional forms

and measure, since these are not local, nor have Americans direct access to theirsources" (1 70). Perhaps the key problem for Williams in Paterson is the way to

:;::*t a language and form which gives access to the American urban experi-

ln the epigraph to Book One, Williams refers to the poem as "a local pride;

spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply toCreek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration" (P 2). This

statement implies the bringing together of disparate elements to find a distinc-

tively American poetics. The Falls represents this "gathering up" of language. Early

in Book One, Williams writes,

the river comes pouring in above the city

and crashes from the edge of the gorge

in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-(What common language to unravel?

. . . combed into straight lines

from that rafter of a rock's

lip) (P 7)

An attempt to make sense of the noise of the Falls repeats itself several times

throughout the poem as Williams writes, "A false language. A true. A false lan-

guage pouring-a / language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) withoutdignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear" (15), and later, "And stand-

ing, shrouded there, in that din, / Earth, the chatterer, father of all / speech" (P 39).

This confusion of language reflects the cacophony of the urban thatWilliams was

attempting to find a way to represent in poetic form. Kevin McNamara illustrates

this point by explaining the sense of the polyglot in Paterson (city) and by noting

that the immigrant population of the city at this time was three times the national

average (1 67), making a,,common language to unravel,, the primary concern ofthe city poet of Paterson, NJ. Here, the Falls as a landmark becomes a synecdochefor the city and the poem. The subsequent books draw upon the Falls while simul-taneously attempting to further examine the stratified social spaces of paterson

and illustrate the historical production of meaning that had occurred at thesesites.

Book Two: The park

Paterson: BookTwo (1948): "sunday in the park,,takes the Garret Mountain parkof Paterson as its landmark. Dr. paterson travels through the park, adjacent to theFalls, and attempts to make order out of his surroundings. At the beginning thenarrator walks and observes:

Outside

outside myself

there is a worldhe rumbled, subject to my incursions

-a world(to me) at rest,

which I approachconcretely-

The scene's the l%rk

upon the rock,

female to the city

-upon whose body hterson instructs his thoughts(concretely) (43)

It is apparent that the movement of the lines for williams exhibits a sense of pro_gression, but it is equally apparent that the hrk as the central spatial feature ofBook Two is marked from the very beginning. Throughout the first section there isa repetition of "walking-", making the poevnarrator/ paterson (man) a flâneur-like observer and interpreter of experience. The poem describes the ambulatoryexperience of the narrator as "he leaves the path, finds hard going across-field,,(47), or as "3 colored girls, of agel stroll 6y,, (50), and finally as ,,he rejoins thepath and sees, on the treeless / knoll-the red path choking it- / astone wall, asort of circular / redoubt against the sky, barren and / unoccupied. Mount. whynot?" (52)- lt is clear from a reading, even with the momentary breaks in versew¡th letters or commentary on the state of American poetics, that paterson (man)

is walking though carret Mountain Park and observing and interacting with his

surroundings.

Much like "The Delineament of the Ciants," "Sunday in the hrk" contains a

collage-esque form with personal letters, newspaper reports, and historical ac-

counts interspersed in the text of the poem. As with the Creat Falls, there are as-

sociations from the city and surrounding areas pulled into the poem. The section

contains reference to the 1880 shooting of John Joseph Van Houten by william

Dalzell (46), a stir caused by a mink in town on August 20,1878 (49) and Alexan-

der Hamilton,s plans for the region (67-73), all as historical associations to the

area. BookTwo also contains personal experiences of williams in the area, nota-

bly the church scene that occupies the second section. The editor's note states that

John Thirlwall reports that "the sermon was based on one 'Williams heard at Lam-

bert |ower "sometime before the war""' (272), and therefore recalls not only the

historical associations of the Park and surrounding area, but also the individual's

response to the same spaces. This is a highlight of Lynch's theory as he notes that,

"twlhile the complexity of the modern city calls for continuity, it also furnishes a

great delight the contrast and specialization of individual character" (109)- This is

the poem's struggle with the urban, the individual's confrontation of cacophony

and chaos.

The issue of finding an adequate form for the task of describing the American

urban experience is also on display throughout BookTwo, a desire for invention

plays a crucial role in the poem's content. Williams writes:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,

unless there is

a new mind there cannot be a new

line, the old will go on

repeating itself with recurring

dead I i ness:

without invention the line

will never again take on its ancient

divisions when the word, a supple word,

lived in it, crumbled now to chalk (P 50)

This is further evidence of the poet's desire to create a new form in order to con-

vey the specific experience of the modern poet in Paterson. Macaria Neussendor-

fer defines this desire:

Disorientation, isoration, rack of personar identity-paterson does in-deed body forth the complex reality of modern man and his city, and itdoes so in what is perhaps the only form that could give adequate ex_pression to such a mirieu. Discarding the traditionar rogicar, chronorogi-cal or dramatic forms, it moves by way of associated images, themes,and symbols. (t OO)

This desire to discover and invent the urban form is the poet,s primary aestheticdrive throughout the poem: to examine space and to write it. However, this at-tempt at discovery is hindered by the cacophony of the Fails and the surroundingdin of the city, of paterson, two of the very erements that the poetic form attemptsto relate- This leads the poet to free at the end of Book Two, ,,rnvent (if you can)discover or / nothing is crear-wiil surmount / the drumming in your h""d. thur"will be / nothing clear, nothing clear . / He fled pursued by the roar,,(p g5). ïheroar in the park inhibits the poet,s ability to create.

Paterson's flight at the end of BookTwo resurts from his troubre in finding ,,the'common language to unraver" and his search for singurar meaning in the modernc¡ty. The result is a continuous gathering and dispersing, a dissorution of the sorip_sistic desire for the citizen to compretery order their surroundings. As Lynch notesseveral times, the city image is differentforeach individuar

"ndi¡, work providesthe basis for understanding the murtipre perspectives emproyed throughout. Thepoet finds himself "[u]nabre to harmonize the cacophony of voices in the park,{hel discovers the futirity of rooking for singre meaning in the,debacre,of its ur_ban multiplicity" (sharpe 74).The resurt is to abandon the search for singurarmeaning, as williams moves towards a cerebration of invention and murtipricity.

Book Three: The Library

Rather than taking a naturar randmark, such as the Fails or the park, as its primaryspatial feature , Paterson Book Three (1949): ,,lhe Library, takes the ,.n"n.n.i" ,,ru._ture of the library as its center. This deviation from the naturar worrd is emphasizedby the quote from ceorge santayana that serves as an epigraph for the Book:

The non-natural aspectof the city putforth in Santayana's quote here is reflected

throughout the poem in the story of the library and the historical importance of

that site.

The location of the old Danforth Free Public Library merges with the insistence

on creation and the gathering up of the multitude throughout the first two books

of Paterson. Williams's speaker writes, "A cool of books / will sometimes lead the

mind to libraries / of a hot afternoon, if books can be found / cool to the sense to

lead the mind away" (96), and the books of the library function as an êscape from

the cacophony of the Falls. However, not only does the library (an accumulation

of language) allow for escape from the deafening roar of the Falls (an untranslat-

able cacophony), but the Danforth Free Public Library of Paterson is a historically

relevant location that functions as a Iandmark throughout the poem. As the edito-

rial note explains, "[o]n February B, 1902, a devastating fire consumed much of

central Paterson, destroying the Danforth Free Public Library (and most of its con-

tents) among other buildings. The following month the Passaic River'which flows

through a large part of the city' flooded. Later in the year a freak tornado struck

the city" (280). fhis destruction becomes central to Book Three as the figure of

Paterson navigates the library and the city's spaces within his mind.

The book illustrates a continuation of the "living newspaper" that the reader

has been accustomed to since Book One. However, this deals more deeply with

Paterson's interactions with and creation of the city within his mind, reminiscent

of the introductory quote by Santayana. Near the beginning of the first section,

Williams writes, "Dead men's dreams, confined by these walls, risen, / seek an

outlet. The spirit languishes, / unable, unable not from lack of innate ability-"(1 00). fhe poet also continues to struggle with the form and his ability to under-

stand and represent his American locale. The confusion over the local, which can

once again be related to the conflicted drive to identify it as divorced from foreign

roots, cont¡nues with the speaker's statement, "Quit it. Quit this place. Co where

all / mouths are rinsed : to the river for / an answer" (.1 11). The first section then

ends with the image of the tornado striking Paterson, underlining the destruction

of the urban by the natural.

The second section moves from the tornado to the "cyclonic fury" (1 1 4) of the

fire that destroyed the library. However, the destructive force of the fire is not en-

tirely portrayed as a negative; it is often celebrated in BookThree for its ability to

alter or transform. The quintessential example of this ability to transform is the

description of the glass bottle. Williams's speaker writes,

Calling the fire good.

So be it. The beauty of fire-blasted sand

Cities, for Oliver, were not a part of nature. He could hardly feel, hecould hardly admit even when it was pointed out to him, that c¡ties area second body for the human mind, a second organism¡ more rational,permanent and decorative than the animal organism of flesh and bone:a work of natural yet moral art, where the soul sets up her trophies ofaction and instruments of pleasure (94; emphasìs added).

that was glass, that was a bottle: unbottledUnabashed. So be it.

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

An old bottle, mauled by the firegets a new glaze, the glass warpedto a new distinction, reclaiming theundefined. (1 I B)

This transformative abirity is seen even further on the foilowing page where thefirerepresents"adefianceofauthority[...]beautyis/adefianceofauthority,,(1 i 9)' Here, also contrary to perroff's insistence on the distanc ing or paterson fromthe avant-garde artistic movements of the .l

920s, Williams embraces a Futurist_like destruction of the past to represent a new ,,American,,

culture.williams opens the third section of Book Three with what appears to be an

answer to this probrem of representing the new. His speaker writes, ,,for ail that isput down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn be-come a black smut, and ail ribraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as aconsequence. / onry one answer: write careressry so that nothing t"hat is not /green wiil survive" (12g). what foilows are some of the most unorthãdox pages ofPaterson, with wirriams mixing historicar accounts of the city within tÅe versesections more often than earrier (rather than breaking the verse sections with his_torical accounts), exhibiting the first true shape poetry in the coilection (p 137),making direct retorts to T. S. Eliot (,,Who is it spoke of April? Some / insane engi_neer' There is no recurrence. /The past is dead,, 11 421), and commenting on theexistence of a true American poetic experience ("American poetry is a very easysubject to discuss for the / simpre reason that it does not exist,, [140]). ïhese ap_proaches exhibit williams's desire for both the American urban form and Ameri_can urban content.

The final section ends with paterson expressing his desire to once again es-cape. He states,

-whatever the complexion. Let

me out! (Well, go!) this rhetoric

is real! (145)

This desire for the present is indicative of Williams's efforts to find both a form and

image of the modern American urban experience. Cert Buelens notes this insis-

tence on the present in Paterson, observing that "Im]eaning must be found in the

present-moment, must be extracted from the rush of water" (257). He argues that

Williams "rejects the idea of a more perfect, mythic, transcendent past [. . . ] that

serves as a challenge to a dreary, real, down-to-earth presenf'(258). This desire

for làterson to escape and find the present moment, after the destruction of the

past in the library fire, manifests itself in the landmark image of the Passaic River.

Book Four: The River

Paterson, Book Four (1 951 ): "The Run to the Sea" returns the focus to the natural

landmarks of Paterson, this time the Passaic River which originates in Mendham,

New Jersey before producing the Falls and outlining the northern border of the

city, traveling toward New York City, and emptying in the Atlantic Ocean. The

form of the poem once again follows the collage format of the first three books,

but the theme of gender comes to the forefront in this section in a fashion reminis-

cent of the sketching of the giant male and female separated from each other at

the Falls. The first section of Book Four documents the relationships between the

women Corydon and Phyllis and the subsequent relationship between Phyllis and

Paterson. However, the distinction between Paterson (man) and Paterson (city) dis-

solves in this section more so than the previous sections. Near the beginning of

the chapter the speaker declares, "Oh Paterson! Oh married man!/ He is the cityof cheap hotels and private / entrances . of taxis at the door, the car / standing in

the rain hour after hour by / the roadhouse entrance" (1 54). tàterson is portrayed

as both man and city simultaneously in a much more tangible way than previous

sections.

Much like the sleeping giant Paterson lying next to the female park earlier inthe poem, the first section of Book Four deals largely with an attempted union:

here between Paterson and Phyllis. Shane Rhodes highlights this connection stat-

ing that "the poem [ . . . ] investigates marriage as a figure of the plurality of mean-

ing" (247), before concluding that "the sexual union of opposites [. . . ] seems to

be the poem's poetic goal" (248). While Rhodes's essay works to prove that the

representation of the American urban experience in both form and content is the

-

Uranium, the complex atom, breaking

down, a ciÇ in itself that complex

atom, always breaking down .

to lead.

But giving off that, to an

exposed plate, will reveal .(177)

Because the city is constantly breaking down, there can be only a momentary

wholeness achieved. Neussendorfer explains that, "[t] he end to be achieved in

Paterson was the embodiment of the idea of a city in a poetic form which would

incorporate the many and the one. Within the city the multiplicity of points ofview, the ever new confrontation of relationships must be conveyed by both form

and content" (99). William Sharpe sums up this connection succinctly, when he

explains, borrowing a line from the poem, that, "[t]he poem, like the city, must

[... ] continually 'begin again, again, here"' (84-5). The third section brings

these new beginnings and the continual historical accounts throughout the poem

to its most prominent position.

The Passaic River, a river that Williams found himself drawn to throughout his

life, brings Book Four to a conclusion as it flows into the Atlantic. Kenereth Meyer

accurately calls Book Four "Williams's meta-poetic demonstration of how the

American poet confronts and incorporates cultural memories and echoes even

while he writes a new language of the local" (70). While this statement is true not

simply for Book Four, but for the entirety of Paterson, it is ¡mportant to note the

large amounts of cultural and personal history Williams places towards the end of

Book Four. The section contains references to the murder of Jonathan Crit¡e at

Wagaraw on the Passai c (186-7), Paterson legend Peter the Dwarf (192), letters

from Allen Ginsberg ('l 93), Fred Coodell Jr.'s murder of his six-month-old daugh-

ter (194-5), the 1 850 murders of John S. Van Winkle and his wife (P 197-8), and

the subsequent execution of John Johnson for the crimes (202). The final section

returns to the Falls as a landmark for describing the surrounding urban space. Wil-I iams's speaker states,

Many of the old names and some of the

places are not remembered now: McCurdy's

Pond, Coffle Road, Boudinot Street. The

Town Clock Building. The old-fashioned

Dutch Church that burned down Dec. 14, 1871

as the clock was striking twelve midnight.

poem's true poet¡c goal, it cannot be ignored that the use of marriage as a ,,prurar-ity of meaning" is important throughout the text. yet, for every brtging togetherbrought about by attempted marriage in the poem, there is an equar .""t""br"t¡on orthe inability of union (or the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis mode perloffidentifies) as a vehicre for movement. witiam sharpe correctry identifies thepoem "as a process grounded not in faired myth but ¡n ,ecurrent beginnings, ingatherings and dispersar, in the desirabre duarity of mare and femare who touchbut who are never wholly subsumed,, (S5). A coming together and subsequentmovtng apart, not static unity, is therefore the goal.

These "gatherings and dispersals,, become most evident in Book Four, with thesecond section turning to science in order to continue this discussion. Reinforcingwilliams's constant desire for newness and discovery, his speaker writes:

A dissonance

in the valence of Uraniumled to the discovery

Dissonance

(if you are interested)

leads to discovery

-to dissect away

the block and leave

a separate metal:

hydrogen

the flame, helium thepregnant ash . (l Z5)

Dissonance, or "want of concord or harmony (between things); disagreement,incongruity" (OED), and not marriage ,,leads to discovery.,,fñe gatheîng up iscrucial, but it is onry the first step in the process for wiiliams: th'e gathering upmust be followed by rupture. This process rs commensurate with the experienceof the modern city because, as Lynch states, ,,[w]e

are continuously engaged inthe attempt to organize our surroundings, to structure and identify them,, (90;emphasis added). The poem itserf is this continuous process of coming togetherand attempting to order the ciÇ. The second section contains p"rh"pl the bestexample in Paterson. Williams writes,

Part of Lynch's project throughout the work was to provide a framework for future

city planners to follow to make the city of the "future" more imageable in order

that "the city could be made an animated museum of our society and its hopes"

(1 17). It is quite clear thatWilliams's desires Íor Paterson meet up with Lynch's

theorization of the modern city.

Notes

My thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewer for their comments regarding this essay.

Additionally, I would like to thank Andrew Epstein, Barry Faulk, and Paul Ardoin for their

suggestions throughout this article's composition.

1. While this gender implication may be problematic ¡n its deployment of traditional

gender roles of man as the urban and woman as nature, scholarship finds this a contentious

issue with many nuanced arguments on the use of gender within the poem- This essay gra-

ciously acknowledges these arguments white moving towards an argument about physical

space and landmarks. For more information see, Linda A. Kinnahan's Poetics of the Femi-

nine: Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina, Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser.

Cambridge: Cambridge t¿P, 1994, and Ann Mikkelsen's "'The Truth about Us': Pastoralism,

Pragmatism, and Paterson" in American Literature 75.3 (2OO3): 601-627.

Works Cited

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of Reality in American Poetry (1 930-1960).' English Studies 3 (1992):248-263.

Carrasquiera, Miguel. "Representations of the City in William Carlos Williams." The Image

of the City in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers [from the] 2003 Con-

ference [of the] Society for the lnterdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery (2003):

116-122.

Doyle, Charles. William Carlos Williams and the American Poem. New York: St' Martin's

Press, 1 982.

Johnston, John H. The Poetand the C¡ty: A Study ¡n lJrban Perspectives. Athens: U of

Ceorgia P, 1984.

Klink, William R. "William Carlos Williams's Paterson: Literature and Urban History." Urban Affairs Quarteily 23.2 (1987):171-186.

Lynch, Kevin. The lmage of the City. Cambridge: Mll 1960.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Willìams: The Poet and His Critrcs. Chicago: American Li-

brary Association, 1 97 5.

McNamara, Kevin R. urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cl¿res. Stanford: Stan-

ford UB 1996.

Meyer, Kenereth. "Wiiliam CarlosWilliams, Paterson, and the Cultural Uses of Pastoral."

William Carlos Williams Review 25.1 (2005):63-78.

Collet, Carrick, Roswell ColçDickerson, Ogden, pennington . .

The part of town called Dublinsettled by the first lrish ímmigrants. lfyou intended residing in the old town youddrÌnk of the water of Dublin Spring. Thefinest water he ever tasted, said Lafayette (.96_97).

Here the collage aspect of the city is exceedingry apparent, and after this amass_ing of history and names, the poem moves down through the passaic to the coast-line where Dr. Paterson encounters the sea. The speaker notes, ,,Waken from adream, this dream of / the whore poem . sea-bound, / rises, a sea of brood /-thesea that sucks in all rivers, / dazzred, red / by the sarmon and the shad .,, (199). Thepoet stops at the sea and, "Crimbing the / bank, after a few tries, he picked / somebeach plums from a row bush and / sampred one of them, spitting the seed out, /then headed inland, foilowed by the dog" (zoz).At the end of the-poem, patersondecides to return to the American urban rocation of the previous two hundredpages. He rejects escape for an acceptance ofthe localized urban experience: thepresent, the now. This leaves the poem open, as evidenced by the fact that wir_liams would publish paterson Book Five in i 95g and was working on a sixth bookwhen he died in 1963- sharpe finds this indicative of the movement throughoutPaterson, noting tha! "[t]he open-ended form, shaperess as the city it seeks toreplicate, finds closure onry with the end of the poet,s rife, (84). rn this sense, pa-terson is a document iilustrating "-the ruthress, restress, endress activity of a cityin the western worrd" (Neussendorfer i 06). rhe open form of the poem is directryrelated to the image of the city within paterson.

Throughout this articre it has been apparent that wiiliams,s paterson can bebetter understood when examined in rerationship to theories of the city as a men_tal and physical form such as those set forth in Lynch,s work. Neussendorfer, theonly scholar to find a link between wiiliams and Lynch,s work, notes that theopening paragraphs of The rmage and the city appear to be analogous to pateßon(98), and Lynch opens his work by noting that,

Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplacethe sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a constructionin space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course oflong spans of time. City design is therefore a temporal art, but it canrarely use the controiled and rimited sequences of other temporar artslike music. (1)

"The Dissonance is Discovery": Marie Curie,Social Credit, and the New Measure

Jen Hedler PhillisUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICACO

Money: Uranium (bound to be lead)

throws out the fire

-the radiumt the credit-

Money sequestered enriches avarice, makes

poverty: the direct cause of

disaster .

while the leak drips

Let out the fire, let the wind go!

Release the Camma rays that cure the cancer

. the cancer, usury. Let credit

out . out from between the bars

before the bank windows (Pl 81-82)

-lFn, middle section of Book Four of Paterson-in which Wil-

I liams praises the curative powers of both radium and Social

I Cre¿it-tras been largely ignored by the critical tradition

around the long poem. Hugh Kenner, who reviewed the edition of Books One to

Four of Paterson in the August 1952 issue of Poetry, completely effaces the Social

Credit material, describing the middle section of Book Four as "devoted to the

heroism of the Curies" (282). What attention it has received is almost always neg-

ative. Joseph Riddell explains that Book Four has been subject to "the most con-

sistent critical disapprobation" of all the sections of Paterson (237). )oel Conarroe

calls the sequence the "least successful poetic unit in the book," and compares it

William Carlos w¡lliams Rev¡ew, vol. 31 no- 2, Fall 201 4 @ Texas Tech University Press 159

Morris, Daniel. "william carlos williams: paterson." A Companion to Modernist Literatureand Culture. Eds. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar- Oxford: Wiley_Blackwell, 2008: 47 8485.

Neussendorfer, Sister Mäcaria. "william Carlos williams' ldea of the city.,, Ed. John Engels.

Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill publishing Company, 1971 .

Newmann, Alba. "Paterson: Poem as Rhizome.,, William Carlos Williams Review 26.1(Spring 2006): 51 -73.

Perloff, Marjorie . The Poetics of lndeterminacy: Rimbaud to cage. Evanston: NorthwesternuP, 1981.

Rhodes, shane. "Matrimony of the Sign: The ldea and the Thing in william carlos wil-li ams's Pate rson." S agetr¡e b 1 8.2 -3 (2002): 243-56.

sharpe, william. "'That complex Atom': The City and Form in william carlos williams,sPaterson." poesis 6.2 (1985): 65-93.

soja, Edward w. Postmodern ceographies: The Reassertion of Space in cr¡t¡cal soc¡al The-ory. London: Verso, 1 989.

suliam, Sara. "'And confluent oceanflowing Rivers with TheirTributaries and TransoceanCurrents':.James Joyce in America. The Case of William Carlos Williams !, Joyce inProgress: Proceedings of the 2008 James Joyce Craduate Conference in Rome(2009\:220-235.