Paterson (Revised Edition)

Preface

A STATEMENT BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

ABOUT THE POEM PATERSON

BOOK I

BOOK II

BOOK III

BOOK IV

BOOK V

Appendix A
:
BOOK VI

Appendix B
:
A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Appendix C
:
ANNOTATIONS AND TEXTUAL NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume completes the new editions of William Carlos Williams’ poetry begun with the
Collected Poems: Volume I
, 1909—1939 (1986), and
Collected Poems: Volume II
, 1939—1962 (1988).

When Williams’ plans for
Paterson
began to take final shape in the early 1940s, he conceived of the poem as having four books, although he eventually published five, and in the last years of his life even started preliminary work on a sixth. The five books of
Paterson
were originally published in separate volumes, in limited editions, in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958, and as they sold out they were reprinted, starting with Books I and II in 1949, in the publisher’s popularly priced New Classics series. For this reprint the text was entirely reset. Book III was added in 1950 and Book IV in 1951. The five books of
Paterson
were first published together, with the fragments of the sixth, in 1963, and this edition was itself rearranged with the fifth printing in 1969 for a reprint that reduced the total pagination by forty pages.

Throughout the printing history of the reprints, changes were made to various parts of the text, sometimes through error, sometimes apparently in response to directions by the poet, and in the case of the fifth book—for which the reprint appeared posthumously—in response to the large number of differences noticed between the poem’s transcription of its prose sources and the language of those sources themselves, many of which had become available in research collections.

In preparing this edition I have studied the known manuscripts, galleys, and page proofs of the poem, as well as its various printings, and detail the general editorial procedures guiding my decisions in Appendix B, “A Note on the Text.” I outline the principles governing the annotations at the head of Appendix C. I have provided information on the sources of the prose and some of the other allusions in the poem, where these are known to me, and my indebtedness to earlier scholars and annotators of the poem is recorded in the acknowledgments.

In general, I have avoided citing Williams’ comments on particular lines and passages in the poem since, unlike his observations on the shorter poems, these remarks were numerous and many have been widely published in interviews with the poet and in other sources. John Thirlwall, the assiduous recorder of many of Williams’ comments on his work in the 1950s, published an extended essay on
Paterson
reproducing material from his meetings with the poet, in
New Directions
17
(1961): 252—310. However, I have included some of Williams’ comments on his sources where these seemed particularly helpful, contributed to the background information on the poem’s composition, or had not previously, to my knowledge, been published. I have included the introductory material on the poem that Williams published with the first editions. In addition, at the conclusion of this Preface I reproduce some extended comments by the poet on Books I—IV, and some subsequent remarks he made concerning Book V.

My hope for the annotations and textual notes is that they illustrate the relationship of the poem to its sources, provide a sense of the later stages of the poem’s evolution, and demonstrate the ways in which its text reflects the intentions, the circumstances, and the mechanics of its composition. The reader interested in the evolution of
Paterson
as recorded in the poems that Williams published outside of his long poem needs to consult the
Collected
volumes. In a number of his comments on
Paterson
Williams noted as some of its antecedents his early poem “The Wanderer” (
Collected Poems: Volume
1, 27—36 and 108—117), which contains a section on Paterson, and his 1927 prose/poetry sequence “A Folded Skyscraper” (pp. 273—277). In 1927 Williams published in
The Dial
an 85-line poem titled “Paterson” (pp. 263-266), parts of which were subsequently reworked into the published Book I. In the
New Directions 2
anthology of 1937 Williams published “Patterson
[sic]
: Episode 17” (pp. 439-443), which contains many lines incorporated into the finished Book III, and includes the oppressed but vital negro woman, the gang rape, and the “beautiful thing” refrain that are three central features of that book.

But much of Williams’ work on
Paterson
in the late 1930s and early 1940s went into a concept of the poem that he eventually rejected, a long series of short lyrics many of which were gathered into the manuscript “Detail & Parody for the poem Paterson” that Williams sent to his friend and publisher James Laughlin in March 1939. A version of this arrangement is now in the SUNY Buffalo collection (D4). During these years Williams published some of the poems arising from this conception of
Paterson
in magazines, and did not subsequently reprint some of them. These poems can be found among the first ninety-five pages of the
Collected Poems, Volume II.
In 1941 Williams published a fifteen-poem sequence titled “For the poem
Paterson
” in his pamphlet
The Broken Span
(see Volume II, pp. 14—22), but only the three lines serving as a headnote to the poems, beginning “A man like a city and a woman like a flower,” appeared in
Paterson
as he finally conceived it.

Despite his struggles, Williams seems to have always felt close to the point of solving his formal difficulties. He told James Laughlin in 1942 that he would have the poem ready for the Spring 1943 list, but the book that he then did offer Laughlin was
The Wedge
(1944), which contains many poems pulled from the now-abandoned “Detail & Parody” concept. In April 1943 Williams published a short poem titled “Paterson: The Falls” (Volume II, 57—58), which outlined a work in “4 sections” and detailed a number of the central themes and features that subsequently appeared in the poem. But he wrote to Laughlin on December 27, 1943, “That God damned and I mean God damned poem
Paterson
has me down. I am burned up to do it but don’t quite know how. I write and destroy, write and destroy. It’s all shaped up in outline and intent, the body of the thinking is finished but the technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date. I flounder and flunk.” In April 1944 he told Laughlin the poem was “near finished,” and nine months later that it was “nearing completion.” By May 1945 Book I was at the printer, but in September, on receiving the galleys, Williams was so dissatisfied he felt he must “slash it unmercifully ... I wish I had the guts to say to burn the whole
Paterson
script.” Book I, delayed by the extensive galley revisions, finally appeared the following June.

Even while working on Book IV Williams began to consider a fifth book, noting to himself on a typescript now filed at the Beinecke Library (Za 189) “maybe even a 5th Book of facts—Recollections.” In October 1952, just over a year after the publication of Book IV, he published a twenty-four-line poem “Paterson, Book V: The River of Heaven,” but reported to Laughlin in 1954 that the poem had “got side-tracked. It turned into something else”—that “something else” being his well-known poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”
Paterson V
eventually appeared in 1958, on Williams ’ seventy-fifth birthday. Writing to Laughlin within the week to thank him for the publication party, Williams hinted at a possible
Paterson VI
, but the increasing handicaps produced by his periodic strokes left the four sheets Williams typed out in late 1960 and early 1961 as all there was to be of a sixth book.

With the fourth (1968) and subsequent printings of the collected
Paterson
New Directions printed the first three pages of Chapter 58 from Williams’
Autobiography
by way of an introduction to the first four books of the poem. The interested reader will find in that chapter a helpful supplement to the comments by Williams following this Preface. I reproduce below a statement by the poet from a New Directions press release marking the publication of Book IV in June 1951 that appeared two weeks before the publication date. Following the statement is the “Author’s Note” that introduced the poem in all the New Classics and subsequent printings of the collected
Paterson.
(For the substantially similar version that appeared with Book I in 1946 see page 253.) Williams’ comment on Book V that follows the “Author’s Note” is part of a letter he wrote to Robert MacGregor, vice-president of New Directions, on May 16, 1958 (New Directions archives), that was reprinted on the dust jacket of the first, 1958, edition of Book V. A shorter version was printed when Book V was reset and joined the collected
Paterson
in 1963. I reprint the version on the dust jacket of the first edition.

C. M.

May 31, 1951

I have no recollection when it was that I first began thinking of writing a long poem upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city. From something Vivienne Koch discovered among my notes it may be that 1925 was the year when I first made any record of the notion. Certainly by 1927 when I was given
The Dial
’s award following their publication of the poem “Paterson” my thoughts on the general theme I wanted to treat were well along.

Having decided what I wanted to do I took my time deciding how I should go about the task. The thing was to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him. This seemed to me to be what a poem was for, to speak for us in a language we can understand. But first before we can understand it the language must be recognizable. We must know it as our own, we must be satisfied that it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a language like all languages, a symbol of communication.

Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details. New York was too big, too much a congeries of the entire world’s facets. I wanted something nearer home, something knowable. I deliberately selected Paterson as my reality. My own suburb was not distinguished or varied enough for my purpose. There were other possibilities but Paterson topped them.

Paterson has a definite history associated with the beginnings of the United States. It has besides a central feature, the Passaic Falls which as I began to think about it became more and more the lucky burden of what I wanted to say. I began to read all I could about the history of the Falls, the park on the little hill beyond it and the early inhabitants. From the beginning I decided there would be four books following the course of the river whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it: the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls and the entrance at the end into the great sea.

There were a hundred modifications of this general plan as, following the theme rather than the river itself, I allowed myself to be drawn on. The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking and my search, as I looked about, became to struggle to interpret and use this language. This is the substance of the poem. But the poem is also the search of the poet for his language, his own language which I, quite apart from the material theme had to use to write at all. I had to write in a certain way to gain a verisimilitude with the object I had in mind.

So the objective became complex. It fascinated me, it instructed me besides. I had to think and write, I had to invent the means to get said, in the pattern of the terms I employed, what appeared as called for. And I had to think hard as to how I was going to end the poem. It wouldn’t do to have a grand and soul satisfying conclusion because I didn’t see any in my subject. Nor was I going to be confused or depressed or evangelical about it. It didn’t belong to the subject. It would have been easy to make a great smash up with a ‘beautiful’ sunset at sea, or a flight of pigeons, love’s end and the welter of man’s fate.

Instead, after the little girl gets herself mixed up at last in the pathetic sophisticate of the great city, no less defeated and understandable, even lovable, than she is herself, we come to the sea at last. Odysseus swims in as man must always do, he doesn’t drown, he is too able but, accompanied by his dog, strikes inland again (toward Camden) to begin again.

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. Part One introduces the elemental character of the place. The Second Part comprises the modern replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes—all that any one man may achieve in a lifetime.

In a letter to New Directions, Dr. Williams, now 75, commented on the making of
Paterson, Five
, as follows: “Were I younger, needless to say, it would have been a different poem. But then it would not have been written at all. After
Paterson, Four
ten years have elapsed. In that period I have come to understand not only that many changes have occurred in me and the world, but I have been forced to recognize that there can be no end to such a story I have envisioned with the terms which I had laid down for myself. I had to take the world of Paterson into a new dimension if I wanted to give it imaginative validity. Yet I wanted to keep it whole, as it is to me. As I mulled the thing over in my mind the composition began to assume a form which you see in the present poem, keeping, I fondly hope, a unity directly continuous with the Paterson of
Pat. I
to
4.
Let’s hope I have succeeded in doing so.”