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Title: Paterson by William Carlos Williams ISBN: 0-8112-1298-X Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Probably not worth the effort
Comment: Even for a fan of WCW like myself, this is a tough one to read. Williams is still Williams, but not the Williams of the brevity of "This is just to say". Only die-hard fans should probably attempt this rambling modern epic. Excerpts of the good stuff are readily available, and I recommend them to fans of THE SELECTED POEMS. The closest thing I can compare PATERSON to, in terms of structure and method, is Ezra Pound's CANTOS: a collage of words, formidably difficult to understand, and also unfinished.
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.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Signature Work.
Comment: Williams's Paterson is a long poem. Williams originally intended the poem to be published In five separate books which it was between 1946 and 1958. The poem has been made availabe in one complete volume. In the poem Dr Williams compares his life to the flowing course of the Passaic River; especially its waterfalls. The poem is quite lengthly but well worth the read. I think that the poem Paterson is Williams's signature work. I also recommend Williams's Selected Essays & Selected Poems.
Rating: 3
Summary: Should have been a collection instead of a single piece.
Comment: William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New Directions, 1963)
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 Williams' 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 can'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 'art' 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 'craft' 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 he'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 Williams' 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 'The Red Wheel-Barrow' or 'This Is Just to Say.' 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: 'no ideas but in things.' If only Williams had listened to himself just a tad more. ***
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Title: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939 by William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christoph Macgowan ISBN: 0811211878 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams ISBN: 0811202305 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 June, 1956 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Autobiography of William Carlos Williams by W.C. Williams ISBN: 0811202267 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 June, 1967 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939 by William Carlos Williams, Christoph Macgowan ISBN: 0811209997 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 October, 1986 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams ISBN: 0811209261 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 September, 1984 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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