Poetry world

Although Henry David Thoreau wrote little poetry, I find his essays and journal to be inspirational. He advised in his journal that we should �Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.�

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, � the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, � advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, � dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man�s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams and like them in this cold month I am protecting my buds from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

         

Jim Jarmusch�s new film is Paterson. which opened this week in the U.S. but received good reviews last May at the Cannes film festival.

Director Jarmusch came to New York in the 1970s and wanted to be a poet. He was diverted by music and filmmaking, but poetry has not left him. In his film Only Lovers Left Alive, one character is Christopher Marlowe, and in Dead Man one is William Blake.

"Well, when I became a teenager I started reading French symbolist poets � translated, of course. And I discovered Baudelaire � and, consequently, Rimbaud � and I started looking at American poets; Walt Whitman first. And then, when I escaped Akron, Ohio, where I was born, and eventually ended up in New York. I got to study in the New York school of poets and I got to study with Kenneth Koch, a great poet of the New York school and David Shapiro. Ron Padgett, who wrote the poems for our film and David Shapiro, who was my teacher, they both edited a book called the Anthology of New York Poets in 1970. I didn�t discover it until the mid-1970s, but it was kind of a bible for me. "

But in his newest film, we follow a guy called Paterson was born and still lives in Paterson, New Jersey. He drives the #23 bus which has his name on its side.

Among other things, Paterson, New Jersey is a poetry city. This "Silk City" was known for that elegant fabric during the latter half of the 19th century. It was and still is an immigrant city. It has a large Hispanic population and many immigrants from the Arab and Muslim world. (It has the second-largest Muslim population in the United States.)

The Great Falls

You may know that the Lou Costello half of the comedy team Abbott and Costello grew up there. You may know the Great Falls of the Passaic River, now a National Park.

Paterson is also the subject of William Carlos Williams' epic poem Paterson. The city shows up in the poetry of another native son, Allen Ginsberg.

In Allen's friend's novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac's protagonist Sal Paradise lives with his aunt in Paterson. (Kerouac's own hometown was another mill town with a waterfall, Lowell, Massachusetts. New Jersey's Junot Diaz uses Paterson. It is the setting of John Updike's novels In the Beauty of the Lilies and is renamed "New Prospect" in his novel The Terrorist.

I worked at Passaic County Community College in Paterson for five years and for me the city is a poetry place. Besides Williams and Ginsberg, it breathes poetry today through the work of poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan on the page and in everyday life.

Maria sings of her hometown in all of her twenty-one books of poetry. She also helps make Paterson  the beating heart of poetry for the state as the Founder and Executive Director of the nationally known Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review which comes from the Center and sponsors the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prizes.


The Paterson in the new film, played by Adam Driver, seems to take William Carlos Williams' poem and its aesthetic of finding beauty in the everyday to heart. He awakens and talks to his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), drives his NJ Transit bus, walks his dog and writes his poems. The work of contemporary poet Ron Padgett inspires and is the prose poetry of the character Paterson.

LOVE POEM by Ron Padgett

We have plenty of matches in our house. We keep them on hand always. Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip, though we used to prefer Diamond brand. That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches. They are excellently packaged, sturdy little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone, as if to say even louder to the world, ''Here is the most beautiful match in the world, its one and a half inch soft pine stem capped by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious and stubbornly ready to burst into flame, lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love, for the first time, and it was never really the same after that. All this will we give you.'' That is what you gave me, I become the cigarette and you the match, or I the match and you the cigarette, blazing with kisses that smoulder toward heaven.

This poetry finds meaning and beauty from simplicity and routine. The film too is described as  subdued and undramatic. It may be an antidote to the superhero, violent, explosions of most films today. It may be just too simple and quiet for today's audience.

As we follow Paterson for a week, small changes in that routine seem large. Paterson's wife is also an artist but her creativity has no pattern. One day she is learning to play an instrument, or redecorating the house, designing clothing, or baking cupcakes. She builds. He strips things down to essentials.

Paterson seems quiet and gentle, but this veteran in one scene disarms an armed man. In a quiet world, small sounds seems louder.




Even in the film's trailer and clips, I see Paterson's old warehouses and factories that I know pretty well. This was a birthplace city of American industry set in a place chosen by founding father Alexander Hamilton to harness the power of the Great Falls. We see unpublished but prolific poet Paterson at the Falls too, as Ginsberg, Williams, Gillan and many other poets have done.

He is not much of a talker, but he is a listener, and that is important work for a poet.