Paterson William Carlos Williams Quotes

We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes which has no speech

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of necessity, my sole concern.

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.

Say it! No ideas but in things.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive. ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson. (New Directions; Revised Edition edition April 17, 1995) Originally published 1946.

the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness .

Beautiful thing, my dove, unable and all who are windblown, touched by the fire and unable, a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense with its reiteration unwilling to lie in its bed and sleep and sleep, sleep in its dark bed. Summer! it is summer .—and still the roar in his mind is unabated

Yet there is no return: rolling up out of chaos, a nine months’ wonder, the city the man, an identity—it can’t be otherwise—an interpenetration, both ways. Rolling up! Obverse, reverse; the drunk the sober; the illustrious the gross; one. In ignorance a certain knowledge and knowledge, undispersed, its own undoing.

I asked him, What do you do? He smiled patiently, The typical American question. In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or, What are you doing now? What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation.

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter– Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken as night advances. The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening : which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows, endless and indestructible . Listen! — the pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world—gone!

Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it! Run from it, if you will. So be it. (Winds that enshroud us in their folds—or no wind). So be it. Pull at the doors, of a hot afternoon, doors that the wind holds, wrenches from our arms—and hands. So be it. The Library is sanctuary to our fears. So be it. So be it.—the wind that has tripped us, pressed upon us, prurient or upon the prurience of our fears—laughter fading. So be it.

My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature? That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with poetry—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life. But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the very same ones which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far.

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–

You’ve never had to live, Dr. P—not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested. The very circumstances of your birth and social background provided you with an escape from life in the raw; and you confuse that protection from life with an inability to live—and are thus able to regard literature as nothing more than a desperate last extremity resulting from that illusionary inability to live. (I’ve been looking at some of your autobiographical works, as this indicates.)

A cool of books will sometimes lead the mind to libraries of a hot afternoon, if books can be found cool to the sense to lead the mind away. For there is a wind or ghost of a wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual . to lead the mind away.

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

So be it. ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

So be it.

Unleashed! Alone, watching the May moon above the trees . At nine o’clock the park closes. You must be out of the lake, dressed, in your cars and going: they change into their street clothes in the back seats and move out among the trees . The “great beast” all removed before the plunging night, the crickets’ black wings and hylas wake .

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

My feelings about you now are those of anger and indignation; and they enable me to tell you a lot of things straight from the shoulder, without my usual tongue tied round-aboutness. You might as well take all your own literature and everyone else’s and toss it into one of those big garbage trucks of the Sanitation Department, so long as the people with the top-cream minds and the “finer” sensibilities use those minds and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human beings than the average person, but merely as means of ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of their fellow men, except theoretically—

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

She was married with empty words: better to stumble at the edge to fall fall and be —divorced from the insistence of place— from knowledge, from learning—the terms foreign, conveying no immediacy, pouring down. —divorced from time (no invention more), bald as an egg . and leaped (or fell) without a language, tongue-tied the language worn out . The dwarf lived there, close to the waterfall— saved by his protective coloring. Go home. Write. Compose . Ha! Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is the only truth! Ha! —the language is worn out.

—the descent follows the ascent—to wisdom as to despair. A man is under the crassest necessity to break down the pinnacles of his moods fearlessly — to the bases; base! to the screaming dregs, to have known the clean air .

The language . words without style! whose scholars (there are none) . or dangling, about whom the water weaves its strands encasing them in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged under its flow . Caught (in mind) beside the water he looks down, listens! But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused uproar: missing the sense (though he tries) untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity of his listening .

Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery

The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own of stagnation and death.

Падение, вызванное отчаянием, И без достижений Приводит к новому пробуждению: Которое — возрождение отчаяния. Чего мы не можем достичь, Что запрещено нам любить, Что потеряли мы в ожидании — За этим следует падение.