Paterson Poem Quotes

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end.

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark . and lamps are lit, cats prowl and men read, read–or mumble and stare at that which their small lights distinguish or obscure or their hands search out in the dark. The poem moves them or it does not move them. Faitoute, his ears ringing . no sound . no great city, as he seems to read–

Even the most apparently autobiographical poem cannot help but deploy a persona that, while gesturing towards a flesh-and-bones speaker, remains, paradoxically, no more than a dramatised representation. The illusion of the presence of the poet within a poem is made possible by that poem’s conjuring of the illusion of the present moment. Poems may utilise language in such ways as to gesture towards an immediacy that, in turn, gives rise to the seeming presence of a very real speaker.

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark

That the poem, the most perfect rock and temple, the highest falls, in clouds of gauzy spray, should be so rivaled . that the poet, in disgrace, should borrow from erudition (to unslave the mind): railing at the vocabulary (borrowing from those he hates, to his own disfranchisement) . —discounting his failures . seeks to induce his bones to rise into a scene, his dry bones, above the scene, (they will not) illuminating it within itself, out of itself to form the colors, in the terms of some back street, so that the history may escape the panders . . accomplish the inevitable poor, the invisible, thrashing, breeding . debased city