Paterson: William Carlos Williams’s Image of the City

A city is a multi-purpose, shifting organization, a tent for many functions, raised by many hands and with relative speed. Complete specialization, final meshing, is improbable and undesirable. The form must be somewhat noncommittal, plastic to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens.

—Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 91.

I’m in process of writing a book, the book I have contemplated doing for many years—prose and verse mixed: “Paterson”—an account, a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson.

—William Carlos Williams to Robert McAlmon, 8 August 1943. (SL 216).

The idea behind the poem Paterson was something William Carlos Williams contemplated for almost twenty years during the prime of his poetic career. As noted in the 1943 letter to Robert McAlmon, Williams’s poem would also become the primary literary output of the last twenty years of his life as it was published in five books from 1946 to 1958 (though the original plan was for four books only), and remaining unfinished at the time of his death in 1963 as indicated by the presence of notes for a sixth book. This magnum opus has drawn much critical attention, leading Paul Mariani to call the poem “the most radically experimental and successful long poem written in our time” (233). However, much of the critical attention paid to the text has underplayed or disregarded the central thematic characteristic of the text: how to best represent the form and image of the modern urban environment and its social spaces. The view of the urban form and the question of how best to represent not only the city, but the distinctively American city, becomes the central motive for Williams. Miguel Carrasquiera, borrowing from Peter Halter, notes that Williams “saw in the city ‘the chaotic energies of the metropolis, its intoxicating promises and bitter disillusionments, its enchantments and sobering disenchantments’. In Williams’s mind, the city provides endless possibilities of success to its inhabitants” (119) and that Williams saw the city as “a dynamo of blossoming strength and of fertile renewal” (119). William Sharpe finds parallels in the ability to capture the form of Paterson as city with the form of Paterson as poem, noting, “Williams then radically reassesses the nature of the city poem (and all poetry). Paterson shows that the goal of the city poet should not be to dominate the multiplicity of his unwieldy subject, to make order out of its confusion, but rather to liberate his urban materials from the imposition of form and language” (65).

Due to the fact that each of the first four books of Paterson employs a major physical location of the city as its primary setting, this study will be limited to a discussion of these sections of the long poem. Additionally, it is apparent that the form Williams employs reflects the cacophonous and open nature of the city. What is less apparent is the manner in which these items work together with the text. William Sharpe refers to Paterson as “a writing whose energy resists domination” (80) and states that Williams’s “city becomes a syntax, a way of mind, a disjointed and elliptical style” (83). Alba Newmann, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, finds Paterson as, “not only an invitation or guide, it is an enactment; it is a text that shifts, flows, and falls, that breaks off and starts again, that ‘somersaults’ and escapes” (54). Kevin McNamara argues that Williams “moved Paterson toward a representation of a city as an open nexus of overlapping communities with different histories, interests, and even languages” (147). William R. Klink, focusing on the geographical features of the poem, argues for a reading of the way in which Paterson has “affected the changes to the locale of Paterson itself” (173). These issues are all reflected in the way each book of Paterson takes a particular space as the central organizing feature, pulling together history, language, and geography to produce the seemingly chaotic form.

These critics, while certainly interested in the way in...