Re: Paterson

I've always wanted to drive a '58 Chev. Dad had one, and I used to sit in his lap between Herbert and Swift Current, pretending to steer, but that's not the same. Some day, I hope, I'll drive one for real.

Opening Paterson today was a little like taking that wheel (for real). Here, it seems, is a text right where I want to be:

1
"Paterson is a long poem in four parts--that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody--if imaginatively conceived--any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions" ("Author's Note").

2
":a local pride"

3
"For the beginning is assurdly
the end--since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities"

4
and the famous
"no ideas but in things"--

and so on, all live leads to/from my Hillsdale material. I didn't know until today that we can see some bp in Williams, some similarities of longpoem poetic, including the explict and ongoing working out of how the poem we are reading can be written.

So, the beginning of that and more McFadden, a chuckle per page. Also Kerrisdale Elegies to see how Bowering wrote his city district (the Rilke elegies less useful for my purposes here but of course always instructive for intensity of vision).