Return to Paterson

Two weeks after watching, I’m still thinking about Paterson the film and the poem. A few notes:

1) Internal rhymes thicken the fabric of the film. Paterson meets several sets of twins (reflections of Paterson the driver and Paterson the city?). When his bus breaks down, several people worry that it might become a “fireball”—the repetition amuses Paterson. He meets a girl poet who has a “secret notebook” just as he does.

2) Williams’s poem too is about poetry. He settles scores with his poetic enemies—Eliot and Pound and others who have sold themselves to formalism and Britishness. “Everything Eliot says is antagonistic to my viewpoint,” he wrote. In the film, Paterson’s main opponent is Laura’s dog, Marvin, who competes for Laura’s affection and ultimately shreds Paterson’s notebook. No accident, perhaps, that Marvin is an English boxer. Paterson aspires to be an American poet like Williams.

3) After his notebook is destroyed, Paterson is listless, vacant. His soul has been shredded. He’s restored to life, begins to hear again the roar of the Great Falls, after a conversation with a Japanese poet. Imagism, of which Williams is one of the great American exemplars, was inspired by the minimalism of Oriental art and poetry. Fitting, then, that a Japanese poet reawakens Paterson to poetry. Fitting too that the Japanese poet’s final word to Paterson is “Aha!” That is precisely the experience that Paterson attempts to capture in his lyrics—the “Aha!” of seeing familiar things in fresh connections and depths.