Urban Library
"Patterson"
from Urban Library
25 June 2008
William Carlos Williams, 1946-58
A bit of the city on the Passaic
Roz Chast’s illustration on the cover of The New Yorker that arrived today (June 30, 2008) tries to approach the central idea of Patterson: a man’s life can be coterminous with his city. In Chast’s cartoon, the typically frazzled, bewildered character forms Manhattan, with the subway lines running through his body instead of arteries, veins, and tendons (Central Park is a green, rectangular stomach). Naturally, this is enervating and the man, as many the New Yorker, is fried.
William’s great work, written in five books over two decades or so, is something like this and just about everything more. I have always thought film then literature as most effective in communicating multiple realities, but as it turns out, Patterson proves me wrong. Poetry does it, so effectively, and Patterson, as a product, does as Williams says, showing “the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” It is fragmented, torn; it is the physical stuff and the metaphysical; it is time and history; it is memory. It is now, the pure pounding, sensuality of life and decay. And William’s poem has it: geology, history, news, observations, time, movement, despair. It is, indeed, Patterson, New Jersey, an 18th century city with a kind of German skyline, perhaps the only New Jersey city to reveal geology, a physical beauty. And there are mountains nearby.
But it is William’s life exposed, his loves, letters, his patients, neighbors, his own despair. Anyone who feels place so keenly will get it.
Dear Doctor: In spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Patterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county in the world.
It’s a letter from Allen Ginsburg. I mention it only because poetry is most powerful when it exposed itself so firmly. So here are these unknown poets and their virtually unknown city.
Quit it. Quit this place. Go where all
mouths are rinsed: to the river for
an answer
for relief from “meaning”
A tornado approaches (We don’t have
tornados in these latitudes. What, at
Cherry Hill?)
It pours
over the rooftops of Patterson, ripping,
twisting, tortuous :
a wooden shingle driven half its length
into an oak
(the wind must have steeled
it, held it hard on both sides)
The church
moved 8 inches through an arc, on its
foundations—
Hum, hum!
Hum, hum indeed, the poet looking down on himself, his city, seeing one.
—NRP
