Paterson (Revised Edition)

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.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

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

PREFACE

“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance

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

from mathematics to particulars—
divided as the dew,
floating mists, to be rained down and
regathered into a river that flows
and encircles:
shells and animalcules
generally and so to man,
to Paterson

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

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.

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

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.

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.