the dog of his thoughts
has shrunk
to no more than “a passionate letter”
to a woman, a woman he had neglected
to put to bed in the past .
And went on
living and writing
answering
letters
and tending his flower
garden, cutting his grass and trying
to get the young
to foreshorten
their errors in the use of words which
he had found so difficult, the errors
he had made in the use of the
poetic line:
“ . the unicorn against a millefleurs background, . ”
There’s nothing sentimental about the technique of writing. It can’t be learned, you’ll say, by a fool. But any young man with a mind bursting to get out, to get down on a page even a clean sentence — gets courage from an older man who stands ready to help him — to talk to.
A flight of birds, all together,
seeking their nests in the season
a flock before dawn, small birds
“That slepen al the night with open yë,”
moved by desire, passionately, they
have come a long way, commonly.
Now they separate and go by pairs
each to his appointed mating. The
colors of their plumage are undecipherable
in the sun’s glare against the sky
but the old man’s mind is stirred
by the white, the yellow, the black
as if he could see them there.
Their presence in the air again
calms him. Though he is approaching
death he is possessed by many poems.
Flowers have always been his friends,
even in paintings and tapestries
which have lain through the past
in museums jealously guarded, treated
against moths. They draw him imperiously
to witness them, make him think
of bus schedules and how to avoid
the irreverent — to refresh himself
at the sight direct from the 12th
century what the old women or the young
or men or boys wielding their needles
to put in her green thread correctly
beside the purple, myrtle beside
holly and the brown threads besides:
together as the cartoon has plotted it
for them. All together, working together —
all the birds together. The birds
and leaves are designed to be woven
in his mind eating and . .
all together for his purposes
— the aging body
with the deformed great-toe nail
makes itself known
coming
to search me out — with a
rare smile
among the thronging flowers of that field
where the Unicorn
is penned by a low
wooden fence
in April!
the same month
when at the foot of the post
he saw the man dig up
the red snake and kill it with a spade.
Godwin told me
its tail
would not stop wriggling till
after the sun
goes down —
he knew everything
or nothing
and died insane
when he was still a young man
The (self) direction has been changed
the serpent
its tail in its mouth
“the river has returned to its beginnings”
and backward
(and forward)
it tortures itself within me
until time has been washed finally under:
and “I knew all (or enough)
it became me . ”
— the times are not heroic
since then
but they are cleaner
and freer of disease
the mind rotted within them .
we’ll say
the serpent
has its tail in its mouth
AGAIN!
the all-wise serpent
Now I come to the small flowers
that cluster about the feet
of my beloved
— the hunt of
the Unicorn and
the god of love
of virgin birth
The mind is the demon
drives us . well,
would you prefer it to
turn vegetable and
wear no beard?
— shall we speak of love
seen only in a mirror
—no replica?
reflecting only her impalpable spirit?
which is she whom I see
and not touch her flesh?
The Unicorn roams the forest of all true lovers’ minds. They hunt it down. Bow wow! sing hey the green holly!
— every married man carries in his head
the beloved and sacred image
of a virgin
whom he has whored .
but the living fiction
a tapestry
silk and wool shot with silver threads
a milk white one horned beast
I, Paterson, the King-self .
saw the lady
through the rough woods
outside the palace walls
among the stench of sweating horses
and gored hounds
yelping with pain
the heavy breathing pack
to see the dead beast
brought in at last
across the saddle bow
among the oak trees.
Paterson,
keep your pecker up
whatever the detail!
Anywhere is everywhere:
You can learn from poems
that an empty head tapped on
sounds hollow
in any language! The figures
are of heroic size.
The woods
are cold though it is summer
the lady’s gown is heavy
and reaches to the grass.
All about, small flowers fill the scene.
A second beast is brought in
wounded.
And a third, survivor of the chase,
lies down to rest a while,
his regal neck
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
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.
Appendix A
BOOK VI (c.1961)
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
1/8/61the 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
Appendix B
A Note on the Text
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.
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