I suppose I should start with why I picked up my pen again. Or in this case a Pentel p207 and a keyboard. Jim Jarmusch recently did the film Paterson (2016) with Adam Driver. Unremembered by me before watching the film, I had studied William Carlos William’s “Paterson” in college. I didn’t recall that my last college course was Modern American Poetry, probably because I had fixated on the lyricist as the modern poet. (I had started my band LedgeWalker while starting Grad School. The band won at the time.) But, the learning remained, germinating a new poesy. “Must remember to write it down.” JMK
I love the idea that the poet is a poem; is a scribe of events. MindScribe.
“Paterson is a long poem in four parts–that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody–if imaginatively conceived–any city, all the details of which may be to voice his most intimate convictions.”
The people around the writer. The city that triggers the thought that pays attention to its own surroundings and then reflects it back in a cascade of visual words. To paint the city with a man on a bench contemplating his beautiful place in this beautiful place and writing it all down.
