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makennananana's review against another edition
3.0
one of my favorite movie is “Paterson”, so then i was inspired to try to read some William Carlos Williams. The simple things that a writer or artist can derive by their surroundings is so interesting. i enjoyed the imagery and story telling about this little town!
mehitabels's review against another edition
3.0
"You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken."
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken."
tonyv379's review against another edition
4.0
WCW's awesome use of onomatopoeia to create the imagery and cadence of the falls was the most memorable aspect of this epic poem. Pat Methany does something similar in the track "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls" from the album of the same name. He always reminded me as a "street" poet, one whose eyes and ears were of the people and places he so expressed about so perfectly.
cryo_guy's review against another edition
3.0
“No ideas but in things.”
“But, creature of the weather, I
don't want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.”
Well friends, this is a complicated work. It isn't that it has a range of registers from the mundane to the pretentious. It isn't that it is a vast project itself-to set a poem to the pulse of a country, a poem that is a man, a city, a man and a city as one. And it isn't just that WCW himself is so present in the poem, a not uncontroversial person himself, which obligates one to look at his position, his relationships, and his ideas of what poetry is and what this particular poetic project is. It's all of that stuff together. I'm gonna give a quick overview of what I thought of the chapters (books 1-5), then I'll say whatever else occurs to me and that'll be that. This work is dense so I think a lot more could be said, but it's also dense in a way that's unappealing at times and so while on the one hand I might feel bad about not giving this intricate poem recognition for all its nuances, on the other it's a lotta sound and fury, lotta words.
Book 1-I love books 1 and 2. Because I stopped and started Paterson and then lost it so stopped and started from the beginning again, I am most familiar with these. But my familiarity isn't the entirety of why I liked them better. This book deals with the “city” aspect of the titular man and the city. It has historical anecdotes mixed in with varieties of stanzas about the city and, presumably, a man in and observing the city. Nature plays a role as a female counterpart to the city. The falls as the main feature of the city embodies that role in grand and awful mystery, beauty and violence. Reminds me of the Greek female chthonic deities and monsters. There's something to be said here about the hubris of man in the face of nature. Also at play are some personal letters written to WCW.
Book 2- Book 2 flows really well from book one where we focus more on the “man” and the city stays as a backdrop. There are less historical anecdotes and they are replaced by a greater percentage of personal letters. The letters are almost all from Marcia Nardi, a young poet who develops some kind of Platonic mentor relationship with WCW. Nardi's letters came to be the most compelling thing to me about the entire work (in fact, I have strange visions of rewriting the entire thing and only including her letters). She begins in her letters to tentatively broach her relationship with WCW asking for advice on her poetry in the most timid, but articulate of ways. But soon that mildness gives way to conflict: WCW has refused to respond to her letters and this pains her in ways she can hardly explain. As time passes, she writes more letters, realizing she can explain her pain, but only after she's lost part of what made it real-her desire for friendship from WCW. And in the end, she acknowledges that this is such a great sorrow that it still affects her, that her anger is not even anger anymore, that it was always a false anger; it is merely a glaring cover for the deeper sadness she feels from being rejected-And let's be perfectly specific here, being rejected by a friend who had taken the time to cultivate a meaningful relationship but had decided to dismiss it as easily as he had taken to it.
Part of her struggle with WCW is one intimately tied to their respective ideas of poetry and life. It isn't just that WCW decides for unstated reasons to cease correspondence, but she accuses him of not having lived a day in his life, of living in the ephemeral world of privilege and making literature of life:
“You've never had to live, Dr. P----not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to life—and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I've been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)
But living (unsafe living, I mean) isn't something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake. Or else it doesn't happen. And when it does, then one must bring, as I must, one's life to literature; and when it doesn't then one brings to life (as you do_ purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only—and also, alas, the ego of the literary man which most likely played an important part in the change of your attitude toward me. That literary man's ego wanted to help me in such a way, I think, that my own achievements might serve as a flower in his buttonhole, if that kind of help had been enough to make me bloom.
But I have no blossoms to bring to any man in the way of either love or friendship. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want that introduction to my poems. And I’m not wanting to be nasty or sarcastic in the last lines of this letter. On the contrary a feeling of profound sadness has replaced no the anger and the indignation with which I started to write all this. I wanted your friendship more than I ever wanted anything else (yes, more, and I’ve wanted other things badly) I wanted it desperately, not because I have a single thing with which to adorn any man’s pride--but just because I haven’t.”
I don't know the specifics of what happened between them and to a certain extent I must accept that Nardi is telling her version of the story with a bias toward herself. But it is a compelling version, one that makes me sympathize (or empathize, if you care to draw a distinction. Contrary to popular opinion I happen not to hold that there's a semantic significance to using the two terms distinctly [what is it to console someone without having experienced the same thing or with having done so? Is consolation only substantial when you have experienced x? Is consolation always hollow when you have not? A decidedly useless conversation]) more with her than with WCW. It's an odd feeling to turn on the author you're reading, but the truth is that he is the one who published this book, he is the one who controls this narrative, and he is the one who carries it to course through the end with three more books! Who is this poet who, when accused of turning his own, and in general life's, experiences into literary fluff, turns around a publishes the accusation in full in a literary way surrounded by literary fluff!!?? The surrounding stanzas are no help at all and book 2 ends with the end of Nardi's last letter. The next book picks up the thread of Paterson and moves on to other things albeit more specific other things, but Nardi is never summoned again. Her story is finished and has fit into its niche of book 2. It's just all so contradictory to me, I don't really understand what WCW is trying to do with it. My preoccupation with this contradiction eclipsed most of the rest of the book. So I'll just say that it was profoundly unsettling because I still can't outright condemn him for publishing Nardi's letters which excoriate him from which he doesn't bother to defend himself at all-which to me indicates that he accepts, at least partly, her assessment of what happened. In putting them so prominently in his work he gives a voice to her version of things. But it's his poem, he's the authoritative poet here, would contemporary readers see Nardi's letters and say, “oh well WCW isn't bothering to give his version, but he's so great a poet it doesn't matter, he must be struggling as much as Nardi is but unable to articulate it” or do they say something more like “WCW doesn't give his version precisely because he is so conflicted. He couldn't bring himself to continue correspondence, he couldn't bring himself to see life in a way other than that which he did-much as we are all trapped in our own existences. And afterwards it's no doubt that he saw that in retrospect, but still it was just another tragedy for him to look back upon with a grief-laden heart, with regret for things he can't change: such is the spirit of humanity.” Or maybe yet still in the wider narrative of Paterson, this is one stage in a man's life or a city's life, or a man-city's life; heartbreak is something that happens to all of us and the truth of that soars above any real emotional connection he, Nardi, or we the readers have to any of this stuff at all. I'm not really sure.
But what I can say, is that based on the rest of the poem, Nardi's story is self-contained in book 2 no matter what real events may add to it, and that book 3 moves beyond it in other directions. This is what inclines me to say that WCW is truly turning Nardi's personal suffering into exactly what she accuses him of doing with life. Which is alarming in a way. I just wish that the following books had followed up with this enough to justify Robert Lowell writing:
“Paterson is Whitman's America, grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation. No poet has written of it with such a combination of brilliance, sympathy, and experience, with such alertness and energy.”
I don't exactly disagree with Lowell-there are parts of book 1 and even the historical anecdotes of book 3 that correspond to the emotional force, the pathos and tragedy, of book 2 but so much more of 3-5 is given over to modernist play. The work taken as a whole is a grand project and I'll tell you what I like about the last three books, but this to me was the core of the work-Nardi's suffering turned into literary play. Anyway I think I've made my point. I've set up two competing interpretations of whats going on (potentially even more than that), one of which I can be positive toward WCW about the other of which I absolutely cannot. And so I shall remain here in aporia until I or someone else saves me/myself.
Book 3- Obviously most of my energy for this work came from the first two books, but here's my favorite line from this book:
“Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”
The rest I really didn't get into. It starts with the library so maybe the focusing point is one building in the city but it carries on in such a modernist, Cummings-like play that there wasn't much compelling about it to me except a few vague stanzas about death. DEATH.
Book 4- The poetry of this book also failed to capture me, but was perhaps less fancifully pretentious and modernist. The one saving grace, was the letters from Allen Ginsburg which were not nearly as invigorating and provocative as Nardi's but were at least historically interesting. The problem with AG is of course that he was AG and I'll not get into that right now but I'll admit that I like his poem “America.”
Book 5- Clearly an afterthought and an underdeveloped afterthought, this book was not particularly objectionable. More art-centered pretentiousness. Make of it what you will.
Reading this book was very interesting-and I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean that reading it was interesting even though it was not always enjoyable. There are many unique things about it that make it an unrivaled work of American poetry. The form, the breadth- you can see how WCW's style evolves over time. He's a prominent figure in the development of American poetry and for that he provides great insight into American poetry of the following decades. And he is not unskilled. I hope that even though I have picked at what WCW has done with Paterson I haven't particularly tarnished his ability. I threw around the word pretentious a lot and it's true I'm using the word pejoratively. But not all pretentiousness is equally bad; some of it I even like. Modernist poetry is one area where it reaches my limit (unless you're Ashbery). The truth is, I'd still like to read some of WCW's other poetry, but I think I'm pretty good and done with this work. His poetic philosophy, “no ideas but in things,” is an admirable one. But somewhere along the line he started to take himself too seriously, as if he alone knew the true nature of poetry and jealously guarded it like some sort of treasure-hoarding fire drake from the north. And well, we all know what happened to that fire drake.
Here are my quotes which are all from Marcia Nardi's letters:
“Despite my having said that I’d never write to you again, I do so now because I find, with the passing of time, that the outcome of my failure with you has been the complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner such as I have never before experienced.
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self–have you ever experienced it? I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you can well understand what a serious psychological injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent day-to-day condition.”
*
“There are people–especially among women–who can speak only to one person. And I am one of those women. I do not come easily to confidences (thought it cannot but seem otherwise to you). I could not possibly convey to any one of those people who have crossed my path in these few months, those particular places of my life which I made the subject of my letters to you. I must let myself be entirely misunderstood and misjudged in all my economic and social maladjustments, rather than ever attempt to communicate to anyone else what I wrote to you about. And so my having heaped these confidences upon you (however tiresome you may have found them and however far I may yet need to go in the attainment of complete self-honesty which is difficult for anyone) was enough in itself to have caused my failure with you to have so disastrous an effect upon me.”
*
“Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note–the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you. It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here. And more importantly, it is the one impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living. But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part….Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances. That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course–but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later. That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you–not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely impersonal fashion.”
“But, creature of the weather, I
don't want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.”
Well friends, this is a complicated work. It isn't that it has a range of registers from the mundane to the pretentious. It isn't that it is a vast project itself-to set a poem to the pulse of a country, a poem that is a man, a city, a man and a city as one. And it isn't just that WCW himself is so present in the poem, a not uncontroversial person himself, which obligates one to look at his position, his relationships, and his ideas of what poetry is and what this particular poetic project is. It's all of that stuff together. I'm gonna give a quick overview of what I thought of the chapters (books 1-5), then I'll say whatever else occurs to me and that'll be that. This work is dense so I think a lot more could be said, but it's also dense in a way that's unappealing at times and so while on the one hand I might feel bad about not giving this intricate poem recognition for all its nuances, on the other it's a lotta sound and fury, lotta words.
Book 1-I love books 1 and 2. Because I stopped and started Paterson and then lost it so stopped and started from the beginning again, I am most familiar with these. But my familiarity isn't the entirety of why I liked them better. This book deals with the “city” aspect of the titular man and the city. It has historical anecdotes mixed in with varieties of stanzas about the city and, presumably, a man in and observing the city. Nature plays a role as a female counterpart to the city. The falls as the main feature of the city embodies that role in grand and awful mystery, beauty and violence. Reminds me of the Greek female chthonic deities and monsters. There's something to be said here about the hubris of man in the face of nature. Also at play are some personal letters written to WCW.
Book 2- Book 2 flows really well from book one where we focus more on the “man” and the city stays as a backdrop. There are less historical anecdotes and they are replaced by a greater percentage of personal letters. The letters are almost all from Marcia Nardi, a young poet who develops some kind of Platonic mentor relationship with WCW. Nardi's letters came to be the most compelling thing to me about the entire work (in fact, I have strange visions of rewriting the entire thing and only including her letters). She begins in her letters to tentatively broach her relationship with WCW asking for advice on her poetry in the most timid, but articulate of ways. But soon that mildness gives way to conflict: WCW has refused to respond to her letters and this pains her in ways she can hardly explain. As time passes, she writes more letters, realizing she can explain her pain, but only after she's lost part of what made it real-her desire for friendship from WCW. And in the end, she acknowledges that this is such a great sorrow that it still affects her, that her anger is not even anger anymore, that it was always a false anger; it is merely a glaring cover for the deeper sadness she feels from being rejected-And let's be perfectly specific here, being rejected by a friend who had taken the time to cultivate a meaningful relationship but had decided to dismiss it as easily as he had taken to it.
Part of her struggle with WCW is one intimately tied to their respective ideas of poetry and life. It isn't just that WCW decides for unstated reasons to cease correspondence, but she accuses him of not having lived a day in his life, of living in the ephemeral world of privilege and making literature of life:
“You've never had to live, Dr. P----not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to life—and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I've been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)
But living (unsafe living, I mean) isn't something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake. Or else it doesn't happen. And when it does, then one must bring, as I must, one's life to literature; and when it doesn't then one brings to life (as you do_ purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only—and also, alas, the ego of the literary man which most likely played an important part in the change of your attitude toward me. That literary man's ego wanted to help me in such a way, I think, that my own achievements might serve as a flower in his buttonhole, if that kind of help had been enough to make me bloom.
But I have no blossoms to bring to any man in the way of either love or friendship. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want that introduction to my poems. And I’m not wanting to be nasty or sarcastic in the last lines of this letter. On the contrary a feeling of profound sadness has replaced no the anger and the indignation with which I started to write all this. I wanted your friendship more than I ever wanted anything else (yes, more, and I’ve wanted other things badly) I wanted it desperately, not because I have a single thing with which to adorn any man’s pride--but just because I haven’t.”
I don't know the specifics of what happened between them and to a certain extent I must accept that Nardi is telling her version of the story with a bias toward herself. But it is a compelling version, one that makes me sympathize (or empathize, if you care to draw a distinction. Contrary to popular opinion I happen not to hold that there's a semantic significance to using the two terms distinctly [what is it to console someone without having experienced the same thing or with having done so? Is consolation only substantial when you have experienced x? Is consolation always hollow when you have not? A decidedly useless conversation]) more with her than with WCW. It's an odd feeling to turn on the author you're reading, but the truth is that he is the one who published this book, he is the one who controls this narrative, and he is the one who carries it to course through the end with three more books! Who is this poet who, when accused of turning his own, and in general life's, experiences into literary fluff, turns around a publishes the accusation in full in a literary way surrounded by literary fluff!!?? The surrounding stanzas are no help at all and book 2 ends with the end of Nardi's last letter. The next book picks up the thread of Paterson and moves on to other things albeit more specific other things, but Nardi is never summoned again. Her story is finished and has fit into its niche of book 2. It's just all so contradictory to me, I don't really understand what WCW is trying to do with it. My preoccupation with this contradiction eclipsed most of the rest of the book. So I'll just say that it was profoundly unsettling because I still can't outright condemn him for publishing Nardi's letters which excoriate him from which he doesn't bother to defend himself at all-which to me indicates that he accepts, at least partly, her assessment of what happened. In putting them so prominently in his work he gives a voice to her version of things. But it's his poem, he's the authoritative poet here, would contemporary readers see Nardi's letters and say, “oh well WCW isn't bothering to give his version, but he's so great a poet it doesn't matter, he must be struggling as much as Nardi is but unable to articulate it” or do they say something more like “WCW doesn't give his version precisely because he is so conflicted. He couldn't bring himself to continue correspondence, he couldn't bring himself to see life in a way other than that which he did-much as we are all trapped in our own existences. And afterwards it's no doubt that he saw that in retrospect, but still it was just another tragedy for him to look back upon with a grief-laden heart, with regret for things he can't change: such is the spirit of humanity.” Or maybe yet still in the wider narrative of Paterson, this is one stage in a man's life or a city's life, or a man-city's life; heartbreak is something that happens to all of us and the truth of that soars above any real emotional connection he, Nardi, or we the readers have to any of this stuff at all. I'm not really sure.
But what I can say, is that based on the rest of the poem, Nardi's story is self-contained in book 2 no matter what real events may add to it, and that book 3 moves beyond it in other directions. This is what inclines me to say that WCW is truly turning Nardi's personal suffering into exactly what she accuses him of doing with life. Which is alarming in a way. I just wish that the following books had followed up with this enough to justify Robert Lowell writing:
“Paterson is Whitman's America, grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation. No poet has written of it with such a combination of brilliance, sympathy, and experience, with such alertness and energy.”
I don't exactly disagree with Lowell-there are parts of book 1 and even the historical anecdotes of book 3 that correspond to the emotional force, the pathos and tragedy, of book 2 but so much more of 3-5 is given over to modernist play. The work taken as a whole is a grand project and I'll tell you what I like about the last three books, but this to me was the core of the work-Nardi's suffering turned into literary play. Anyway I think I've made my point. I've set up two competing interpretations of whats going on (potentially even more than that), one of which I can be positive toward WCW about the other of which I absolutely cannot. And so I shall remain here in aporia until I or someone else saves me/myself.
Book 3- Obviously most of my energy for this work came from the first two books, but here's my favorite line from this book:
“Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”
The rest I really didn't get into. It starts with the library so maybe the focusing point is one building in the city but it carries on in such a modernist, Cummings-like play that there wasn't much compelling about it to me except a few vague stanzas about death. DEATH.
Book 4- The poetry of this book also failed to capture me, but was perhaps less fancifully pretentious and modernist. The one saving grace, was the letters from Allen Ginsburg which were not nearly as invigorating and provocative as Nardi's but were at least historically interesting. The problem with AG is of course that he was AG and I'll not get into that right now but I'll admit that I like his poem “America.”
Book 5- Clearly an afterthought and an underdeveloped afterthought, this book was not particularly objectionable. More art-centered pretentiousness. Make of it what you will.
Reading this book was very interesting-and I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean that reading it was interesting even though it was not always enjoyable. There are many unique things about it that make it an unrivaled work of American poetry. The form, the breadth- you can see how WCW's style evolves over time. He's a prominent figure in the development of American poetry and for that he provides great insight into American poetry of the following decades. And he is not unskilled. I hope that even though I have picked at what WCW has done with Paterson I haven't particularly tarnished his ability. I threw around the word pretentious a lot and it's true I'm using the word pejoratively. But not all pretentiousness is equally bad; some of it I even like. Modernist poetry is one area where it reaches my limit (unless you're Ashbery). The truth is, I'd still like to read some of WCW's other poetry, but I think I'm pretty good and done with this work. His poetic philosophy, “no ideas but in things,” is an admirable one. But somewhere along the line he started to take himself too seriously, as if he alone knew the true nature of poetry and jealously guarded it like some sort of treasure-hoarding fire drake from the north. And well, we all know what happened to that fire drake.
Here are my quotes which are all from Marcia Nardi's letters:
“Despite my having said that I’d never write to you again, I do so now because I find, with the passing of time, that the outcome of my failure with you has been the complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner such as I have never before experienced.
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self–have you ever experienced it? I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you can well understand what a serious psychological injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent day-to-day condition.”
*
“There are people–especially among women–who can speak only to one person. And I am one of those women. I do not come easily to confidences (thought it cannot but seem otherwise to you). I could not possibly convey to any one of those people who have crossed my path in these few months, those particular places of my life which I made the subject of my letters to you. I must let myself be entirely misunderstood and misjudged in all my economic and social maladjustments, rather than ever attempt to communicate to anyone else what I wrote to you about. And so my having heaped these confidences upon you (however tiresome you may have found them and however far I may yet need to go in the attainment of complete self-honesty which is difficult for anyone) was enough in itself to have caused my failure with you to have so disastrous an effect upon me.”
*
“Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note–the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you. It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here. And more importantly, it is the one impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living. But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part….Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances. That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course–but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later. That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you–not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely impersonal fashion.”
rltinha's review against another edition
4.0
Que boa ideia, ler esta edição não bilingue acompanhada de um epub com o texto original.
bdilley28's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Normally I’m not a huge poetry fan but this was pretty easy to understand. I liked how it incorporated the history of Paterson with the poet’s experiences living there. Also liked how Paterson the movie took inspiration from the poems in this collection. My copy had also been annotated so that helped me to understand what I was reading.
david_b_clark's review against another edition
5.0
William Carlos Williams's masterwork is the stunning long-poem that is, Paterson. Simultaneously binding the accessible with the dense and difficult, he takes you through Paterson. What Paterson is as a town and as an entity in of itself. With spots of autobiography and epistolary pieces that give the book a very personal taste, it bursts the question how something so particular could be so relatable. A truly American experience.