Two Poems of Place: Williams’ Paterson and Marlatt’s Steveston

Two Poemsof Place: Williams' Paterson and Marlatt's Steveston Chris Hall We live only in one place at a time but far from being bound by it, only through it do we realise our freedom. Place then ceases to be a restriction, we do not have to abandon our familiar and known to achieve distinction but far from constricting ourselves, not searching for some release in some particular place, rather in that place, ifwe only make ourselves sufficiently aware of it. do join with others in other places. 1 William Carlos Williams' poem Paterson (1946-58) invokes place, namely the city of Paterson, New Jersey, with an epic poetic effort that results not onlyin the construction of a long poem, but in a book that is itself akin to an environment. The poem would seem to fulfill Williams' advice that through place "we ... do join with others in other places." In their involvement with place. with the American environment, the movement, the rhythms and processes of the poetry partake directly of life, embody an energy and energy of movement that is an evocative collage of modern American landscape, society and history. Working as a complex, multi-layered construct, the kernel of Williams· heroic effort is the search for a new poetic language and "measure," the deliberate abandonment of traditional English prosody, and the wish for a distinctly American idiom, line and voice, the "rhythm in the American Grain." 2 Paterson is, finally, a "watershed" poem, a key work in the formation of a subsequent "postmodern" poetics.J A postmodern concern with place, environmental process and the energy inherent within these processes, is found as well in Daphne Marlatt's Steveston (1974).In what she refers to as a "cycle'' of poems (as opposed to one long poem),-!Marlatt fuses human situation with landscape in a poetic record and evocation of the Canadian fisheries town, Steveston, on the delta of the Fraser River,British Columbia. A comparison of Marlatt's Stel'eston with Williams' Paterson is suggestive of the influence of Williams' writing on a generation CanadianReviewof American Studies, Volume 15.Number 2.Summer 1984.141-157 142 ChrisHall of young Canadian West Coast poets, in particular those associated withthe journal Tish, in the early 1960s.This West Coast movement included Daphne Marlatt. 5 But while some striking similarities emerge from an analysisofthe two poems, particularly at the levels of poetic technique and open (organic) form, in terms of overall structural organization there are distinct differences. Williams'Paterson is organized initially around the concept of a man-city, the city-as-a-man,which has its correspondence in woman imaged asa flower, or several flowers: Aman likea city and a woman like a flower -who are in love.Twowomen. Three women. Innumerable women,each like a flower.6 This city-man is a man of many parts, and the poem ispeopled with a number of dramatis personae who include, most importantly, Dr. Paterson, Noah Faitoute Paterson, and at first the poet himself. These personae function as vehicles for a unified speech and action, implicitly heroic in their attempted articulation. On a mythological level the city-man is the geological giant lying,on hisright side,on the bank of the Passaic River facing Garret Mountain, and with the torrential noise of the Passaic Falls sounding in his ear. The "subtleties of his machinations" draw power from the Falls and "animate a thousand automatons," the populace of the city. Garret Mountain is hisfemale counterpart and opposite, the Passaic River running between them. Garret Mountain as female also elides with the park of Book Two of Paterson, which, it is suggested, isthe resting place for her head. The female principle Williams associates with dream (p. 8), so that the park may be said to embody the dreams of the Paterson community (Book Two, "Sunday in the Park," isan ironic comment on modern American culture). Dividing his poem into five books (although Williams originally conceived the poem as four books, and the work is, in any case, open-ended in form), further subdivided into numbered parts, this conceptual framework allows Williams to feed into his poem a variety of informations from a variety of sources...