Paterson (Revised Edition) (23 page)

fast in a jeweled collar.

A hound lies on his back

eviscerated

by the beast’s single horn.

Take it or leave it,

if the hat fits —

put it on. Small flowers

seem crowding to be in on the act:

the white sweet rocket,

on its branching stem, four petals

one near the other to

fill in the detail

from frame to frame without perspective

touching each other on the canvas

make up the picture:

the cranky violet

like a knight in chess,

the cinque-foil,

yellow faced —

this is a French

or Flemish tapestry—

the sweetsmelling primrose

growing close to the ground, that poets

have made famous in England,

I cannot tell it all:

slippered flowers

crimson and white,

balanced to hang

on slender bracts, cups evenly arranged upon a stem,

foxglove, the eglantine

or wild rose,

pink as a lady’s ear lobe when it shows

beneath the hair,

campanella, blue and purple tufts

small as forget-me-not among the leaves.

Yellow centers, crimson petals

and the reverse,

dandelion, love-in-a-mist,

cornflowers,

thistle and others

the names and perfumes I do not know.

The woods are filled with holly

(I have told you, this

is a fiction, pay attention),

the yellow flag of the French fields is here

and a congeries of other flowers

as well: daffodils

and gentian, the daisy, columbine

petals

myrtle, dark and light

and calendulas

The locust tree in the morning breeze

outside her window

where one branch moves

quietly

undulating

upward and about and

back and forth

does not remind me more

than of an old woman’s smile

— a fragment of the tapestry

preserved on an end wall

presents a young woman

with rounded brow

lost in the woods (or hiding)

announced     .     .

(that is, the presentation)

by the blowing of a hunter’s horn where he stands

all but completely hid

in the leaves. She

interests me by her singularity,

her courtly dress

among the leaves, listening

The expression of her face,

where she stands removed from the others

— the virgin and the whore,

an identity,

both for sale

to the highest bidder!

and who bids higher

than a lover? Come

out of it if you call yourself a woman.

I give you instead, a young man

sharing the female world

in Hell’s despight, graciously

— once on a time     .

on a time:

Caw!     Caw!     Caw!

the crows cry!

In February! in February they begin it.

She did not want to live to be

an old woman to wear a china door-knob

in her vagina to hold her womb up — but

she came to that, resourceful, what?

He was the first to turn her up

and never left her till he left her

with child, as any soldier would

until the camp broke up.

She maybe was “tagged” as Osamu

Dazai and his saintly sister

would have it

She was old when she saw her grandson:

You young people

think you know everything.

She spoke in her Cockney accent

and paused

looking at me hard:

The past is for those that lived in the past. Cessa!

— learning with age to sleep my life away:

saying     .

The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,

a choice among the measures     .     .

the measured dance

“unless the scent of a rose

startle us anew”

Equally laughable

is to assume to know nothing, a

chess game

massively, “materially,” compounded!

Yo ho! ta ho!

We know nothing and can know nothing

but

the dance, to dance to a measure

contrapuntally,

Satyrically, the tragic foot.

Jan.4/61     Paterson 6     The intimate name you were known as

to your intimates in that reaks was The Genius, before

your enimies got hold of you

you knew the Falls and read Greek fluently

It did not stop the bullet that killed you - close after dawn

at Weehawken that September dawn

- you waned to or daninize the country so that we should all stick together and make a little money

a rich man

John Jay, James Madison     .     let’s read about it!

Words are the burden of poems, poems are made of wods

1/8/61
the dandelion - tions-tooth - ineffegee

of flence old Hudson Rver work, might as

well have been of Paterson

a crude cheap cheap Jar{???} made to contain

pickeled peaches or eder berries

casually with all the art of domestic

husbandry or the kitchen shelf

a royal bluecurving

on itself to make a simple flour design

to decorate my bedroom wall

come out of itself to be an abstract desigs withou design to be anything but itself for than a chinese poem who drowned embracing the reflection of the moon in the river

- or the image of a frosty{???} elm outlined in {???} gayest of of all pantomimes

Dance, dance! loosen your limbs rom that art which holds you faster than the drugs which hold you fater - dandelion on my bedroom wall.

1/1/61
 As Weehawken is to Hamilton

{???} to Provence we’ll say, he hated it

of which he knew nothing and cared less

and used it inhis scheems - so

founding the country which was to

increase to be the wonder of the world

in its day

which was to exceed his London on which he patterened it

(A key figure in the development)

If any one is important more important than the - point of a dagger - or a poem is: or an irrelevance {???} in the life of a people: see Da Da or the murders of a Staline

or a Li Po

or an obscre Montezuma

or a forgotten Socrates or Aristotle before the destruction of the library of Alexandria ( as note derisively by Berad Shaw ) by fire in which the poes or Sappho were lost

and brings us ( Alex was born out of wedlock )

illegitimately perversion {???} righed though that alone does not a make a poet or a statesman

- Wahington was a six foot four man with a w{???}k voice and a slow mind which made it Inconvenient for him to move fast - and so he stayed. He had a will bred In the slow woods so that when he moved the world moved out of has way.

Paterson 6

Book 6

Lucy had a womb

like every other woman

her father sold her

so she told me

to Charlie

for 3 hundred dollars

she couldn’t read or write

fresh out of

the old country

she hadn’t had her changes yet

I delivered her

of 13 children

before she came around

she was vulgar

but fiercely loyal to me

she had a friend

Mrs. Blackinger

an
#####
Irish woman

who could telll a story

when she’d a bit taken

Paterson
has a textual history that is a suitable parallel to the colorful past of the city that is its focus. But this is also a textual history that immensely complicates the preparation of a new edition. These complications include the serial composition and publication of the poem over twenty years, its author’s declining health over that time, its text being reset serially for a popular edition that its author gave progressively less attention to, and a number of posthumous changes to the text of the poem’s later books.

Until the present edition, the reset text of the popular edition, as repaginated in 1969, has been the only collected text of the poem in print, but this 1969 text is very problematic. From the beginning of the 1950s, even before his first serious stroke, Williams evidently became impatient with checking the entirely reset, collected printings of
Paterson
that New Directions issued as the limited first edition printings of each book became sold out. Mrs. Williams wrote to David McDowell of New Directions on April 5, 1950, that the printers handling the “reprint of Paterson III are pretty much at sea about the whole thing. The spacing — the paging — etc-etc,” and that Williams, “no proof reader … threw it aside saying—‘To hell with it—let it wait until Jim [Laughlin] gets back.’” Mrs. Williams requests that when McDowell next meets with Williams “if the subject comes up—set him straight—if my suspicions are correct—that he should not be concerned with reprints” (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas). Unfortunately, the reset text was no mere reprint, and the spacing and other visual elements of Book III suffered a good deal of corruption in the popular edition.

By the time of Book V in 1958, Williams’ capacity to check his work and that of his typists was quite limited, especially by vision problems. He also experienced increasing difficulty with the act of typing itself. His condition had deteriorated even further when he was forced to abandon work on the projected Book VI in early 1961.

In 1963, the first edition text of Book V was subjected to more than sixty posthumous revisions when reset for the first complete collected
Paterson.
Subsequently the spacing of many passages throughout the 1963 text suffered corruption when in 1969 it was cut and pasted for a reprinting that reduced the pagination by forty pages.

These complications are compounded by the selective degree of attention Williams gave to different parts of individual books. When checking the retyped drafts of
Paterson
, and the stages of its printing, Williams always gave the prose sections of his poem less attention than he did the poetry. The manuscripts show this tendency increasing with the later books. Thus not only does the serial nature of the poem’s composition and publication produce different degrees of authorial attention to the different books in their different printings over time, but during composition the author looked at some parts of his poem more carefully than at others. In fact, most of the textual problems I have faced in preparing this new edition occur in the areas of the poem’s prose, and in the spacing corruptions introduced by the reset printings.

In view of Williams’ limited attention to the reset printings of his poem, for this edition I have taken the first editions of each book as copy text. The design and pagination of this new text are also based on the first editions. At the same time, I have incorporated such revisions of the first edition texts as Williams appears to have authorized, and have made individual decisions on the very small number of changes that occur between the late typescripts and the first printed version. I have also tried to be sensitive to the way that Williams’ compositional process has left its mark on the text of all six books, and have weighed this aspect of the poem in making decisions that also involve considering the more limited degree of authorial involvement in the prose, in the reset texts, and in the first edition of Book V.

My editorial decisions were further complicated by not all the necessary evidence being available, although fortunately the gaps are mostly from material associated with the earlier books. In looking at the wealth of material that is available, I have consulted the manuscripts of the various parts of the poem held by Kent State University, the University of Virginia, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, SUNY Buffalo, and the Beinecke Library at Yale. I have also consulted a number of private archives, including the New Directions files in New York and Norfolk, and the papers of figures in some way connected to the poem, where I was able to track down the family or literary executor. Through these materials much of the history of the poem’s composition can be traced.