William Carlos Williams's Paterson

It seems ironic that William Carlos Williams's Paterson includes the line "It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written." After all, some would argue that Paterson itself exhibits this "dangerous" flaw. And yet he provides an effective comeback a few lines later when he instructs the reader to "write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive." Williams therefore makes a careful distinction between careless writing and bad writing. The suggestive but not quite explanatory difference is that careless writing is "green," evoking flora, growth, spring, vigor, and so on.

The question we must ask about Williams is what subject matter and which poetic techniques most frequently ensure we achieve the necessary "greenness." In Paterson the question of subject matter is a deceptively difficult one. Williams is well known for presenting the sensible world to the reader. That is, abstractions don't suffice for Williams; one must work through the objects of the world. His subject matter in this text is the city of Paterson. He takes a Whitmanesque approach, gathering tangible people, objects, actions, and language to construct his complex and variegated city.

And yet it is not as simple as Williams bringing Paterson to the reader. Paterson is a city figured as a human being:

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. (Paterson I.I)

I think it's very important that Williams makes this metaphor: city as man. This relation says something about each term; each is implicated in the other. For instance, the city has dreams that begin in water and continue as people who walk about the city. Conversely, people are filled with the landmarks of the city:

something
has brought him back to his own
mind .
in which falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls - and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated (Paterson III.I)

The natural world flows through the individual as a "rumor" or a "reverberation." The river, with its persistent movement and unceasing roar, represents desire. It is a perpetual source of energy that moves through the subject as well as the city:

Beautiful thing,
my dove, unable and all who are windblown,
touched by the fire
and unable,
a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense
with its reiteration
unwilling to lie in its bed
and sleep and sleep, sleep
in its dark bed. (Paterson III.I)

This passage recognizes the act of repression, forcing the roar of the river to "its dark bed" like a hidden unconscious. Williams's particularly astute observation is that the reverberation is not caused by the falls, but by its "rumor." The river-as-the-unconscious is only understood through the distortions required of it to become conscious.

But if I could pick up on Williams's complex metaphor, I see a sort of shortcoming in the poem. Williams too often accepts anything the river brings to him. That is, using an early notion of Freud's, the unconscious is simply the place where things rest (or percolate) that are not currently in the conscious mind. There is much that is ordinary or mundane in the unconscious. But because it is part of the flux of the river, Williams considers everything important. All of this is a round-about way of saying that Williams includes too much. His attempt to grasp everything tangible leads to a collection of objects of varying quality and intensity. He would have been better to be more selective in his material and more intent in discovering language's ability to pick up on the "rumor" of desire.