Drunk on fermented tears
Distilling
Drinking fomented tears
Thirsting
Sick with fermented tears
Vomiting
Surface tension
Tearing
Even feeling
Feels like an indulgence
For us.
shards(2)
Nor can I piece them
back together.
Even so, they have broken
In strange and beautiful
Ways,
Sharper than before.
When the floodgates
of heaven open
and Noah is borne away in his vessel
and the last unpious nephilim sits on a mountaintop
and watches the seething
torrents hissing and
the rising tide crashing against the rocks
and splashing him
with muddy water
rich with furies, the thunder
wrathful
and Noah sequestered, eyes kept safe
from the awesomeness that
God fearing creatures should not see,
that washes all things, living and dying
away,
and the giant laughs and joyfully
skips stones across the rapids
Affirmations
The crucial moments
lack a feedback loop; there is
no one there to tell you if you chose right
or wrong. Only you
and that is still dubious.
All that exists is the action. Don’t ask me
about love or truth—
I am just here
trying to live.
I notice a bright spot
in your eyes and am
drawn to it
like a minnow.
The telephone pole
on the sidewalk
pitted and cracked by the years.
I wish my hand was big enough
to wrap around and
grasp it
Never Forsaken
They say that youth is wasted on the young
and someday I will say that too.
summers are full of love for us
winters
we practice death.
I have walked the shores at night after practice
and gotten lost, both by myself
and with you.
In morning light
the fear becomes naught but a trivial memory
but the ache of loss comes and goes
no matter the hour or season.
My friend,
we are the tide
that never freezes over
but comes apart and together
apart and together again, and never
So tidily.
Deedee
Leo is in the bathroom
painting the walls grey
I am in there taking a piss
he asks me how my new apartment is
–it’s good
we get to talking about how my mom still does my laundry
on the weekends and
how his grown up married sons still live in his house.
with their children
He has a couple cats and a dog, a massive hound
–I had a dog but she died last summer, I tell him
that’s the worst.
His grandfather used to farm pigs
and when he was a kid he named one
and I already know where it’s going,
one night his grandfather said something like
–that pig you named, that’s him right there
on the dinner plate.
So now Leo doesn’t give pigs names
or rather,
he doesn’t want to know them.
Say it! The Shadow of Paterson
Paterson, by William Carlos Williams, is an exercise in superposition. A man is a city, a city a man; at the same time, men are men and the city is just that. The stage is set, from the beginning of the poem, for a collision course between microcosm and macrocosm. The syntax of Paterson is a strange mix that leapfrogs between a free verse poetry anthology and candid history book, with names, dates, letters and other snippets. As such Williams’ treatment of the material can be understood through two separate theories of psychology and literary criticism. Williams characterizes the city as a man, and approaches it like a psychologist, chronicling its historical denizens through the years in such a way that they act as Jungian archetypes. Similarly, this approach is evocative of psychogeography, a theory of geographical representation arising in France in the mid-twentieth century. But despite using tools familiar both to Jungian psychoanalysts and the European psychogeographers, Williams puts his own twist on the tale, which is driven, all the way through, by a singular thesis.
“Say it! No ideas but in things.”(Williams, 9) This is the call to action that echoes throughout the pages of “Book 1: The Dilineaments of the Giants,” the first of Paterson’s six distinct sections; and arguably through all of Williams’ writing. Boiled down, this phrase can be taken as the epitome of the common axiom taught in writing today: “show don’t tell.” In Paterson, Williams takes this method to heart. His work is very much one concerned with concrete facts—the city of Paterson is described in acute detail, paragraphs of unpoetic prose interspersing his more traditional verse. This seems almost like a challenge issued to the reader, and to Williams’ modernist contemporaries, who, even at their most anarchic, still tended to maintain a certain poetic cadence. Even Williams’ verse, a style he coined “variable foot”—short-lined, with austere punctuation and pointed diction—was formulated by Williams as a rejection of traditional esotericism, to be “as simple as speech itself.” (Barry, 343) Paterson is down to earth, practical, almost clinical at times. Take the account of sturgeon fishing at Passaic Falls: “On Sunday, August 31, 1817, one seven feet six inches long, and weight 126 pounds, was captured a short distance below the Falls basin.”(Williams, 11) Notwithstanding its blue-collar trappings, the work is most definitely poetry.
Why? The answer lies in the context. Paterson has been criticized for being inaccessible to some readers; be that as it may, it certainly helps to understand Williams’ other work before diving into it. In his poem “This is Just to Say,” Williams exemplifies a style termed “found poetry;” in that case, a letter he left for his wife; his point being that even something mundane, when contextualized skillfully is transmuted into art. Williams’ use of concrete names, dates, places, and even measurements in Paterson, seemingly pasted from old newspapers and other historical writings, gives the piece a gravity it would otherwise lack and balances out the lighter, sharper touch of his distinctive verse. This juxtaposition is what allows Williams to explore his thesis and drive it home. What idea is he getting at? And what thing? The latter, at least, should be obvious.
The city of Paterson becomes real, not due just to names and dates, but because Williams makes it real, by treating it like a person. This follows the precepts of psychogeography, a practice pioneered by the Situationist Guy Dubord and demonstrated by the English historian Peter Ackroyd: “While the physical and political structure of London may have mutated down the ages, as torrents of men and women coursed through its streets, yet their individuality is as nothing, set beside the city’s own enduring personification.” (Self, 11) Williams takes a similar approach to Paterson, New Jersey. The poem begins: “Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls/its spent waters forming the outline of his back.”(Williams, 6) The use of the gendered possessive—“his”—on the backend of the sentence is the lynchpin. From this perspective, the inhabitants of Paterson become the qualities that define its macrocosmic psyche. “Williams’ city at once combines…the Jungian animus and anima which energize not only individual human lives, but the life of cities as well.” (Gratto, 6) These archetypes are the animating spirit of life itself, and pop up in Paterson at every juncture. Williams defines these archetypes early on: “A man like a city and a woman like a flower/—who are in love.” (Williams, 7) For Williams, the feminine energy (anima) is a natural principle, ubiquitous, and pervasive for those with the wherewithal to find it. Conversely, there is “only one man—like a city.” (Williams, 7) Right off the bat, Williams has pitted the principles against each other, the male taking the form of the individual, the industrial, the astute; the female taking on the form of natural bounty, beauty, receptiveness. While these two qualities may be intertwined (in love), they are also opposed, a necessity inherent in their respective images. This notion is further developed as Williams introduces the image of the mountain as a backdrop to the city: “against him…facing him, his arm supporting her.”(Williams, 8) The mountain is feminine in nature, broader in the scope of her domain than the city, and more glamorous, but also with a touch of Freud’s uncanny, somewhat alien. “Her monstrous hair/spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into/the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run/and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.”(Williams, 8) Notice how the wood-duck, protected by the feminine mountain, is male. In this way, the anima is given a nurturing quality, even as she subtly threatens the male position.
Paterson’s verse is often placed in such proximity to his standard composition that they get at the same idea from different ends of the spectrum. “Not that the lightnings/do not stab at the mystery of a man/from both ends—and the middle…to destroy him at home.” (Williams, 14) This passage is followed by the story of Sarah Cumming, “consort of the Rev. Hopper Cumming,” who fell to her death over the edge of Passaic Falls. The distraught Rev. Cummings is stopped from diving after her by a young man, who Williams describes, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, as “a guardian angel.”(Williams, 15) In this, the anima and animus have their union rent by a more devilish, elemental force of nature. Mercifully spared from his own heroics or not, Rev. Cumming is not heard from again in Paterson.
If Rev. Cumming is the animus and the father, and Mrs. Cumming the anima, mother, and maiden, then Sam Patch is their prodigal son; the ego, hero and trickster figure of Book 1. Patch becomes the folk hero of Paterson through his inciting incident—diving into the falls that once killed Mrs. Cumming to retrieve a rolling pin that threatens to topple the new bridge being drawn across the river, reminiscent of the Jungian hero’s “descent into the underworld.”(Hopcke, 113) He is a trickster in his motivation—the irreverent, frivolous desire to show up the builder of the bridge: “Now, old Tim Crane thinks he has done something great; but I can beat him.” (Williams, 17) His action wins him national acclaim, and he tours the country performing greater and greater leaps, becoming a caricature of himself. He asserts his mastery of nature by procuring a fox and a bear as accessories to his travels, Williams stating that “He threw his pet bear once from the cliff overlooking the Niagara rapids and rescued it after, down stream.” (Williams, 17) This bravado takes Patch all the way to the Genesee River, where he aims to perform a leap of 125 feet. After failing to make a grand speech, Patch’s immutable confidence falters in the deciding moment, his body flailing in the silent air, and he is consumed by the water. Sarah Cumming; the anima, Williams’ personification of nature, is taken without warning or mercy. Sam Patch, the brash conquistador of that very same nature, is taken as the persona he has bought into is shattered by a stronger fact. Both are usurped and destroyed, without comprehending where they went wrong.
Jung used the shadow archetype to symbolize the unconscious mind, the frightening receptacle of all things unknown and shunned in the psyche; a bottomless reservoir of mystery. In Paterson, for the character of the city, the shadow is articulated by water—for its denizens, Williams calls it silence or language. These terms are used interchangeably, with the same descriptors, and all have to do with sound. Take the first paragraph: “He [Paterson] breathes and the subtleties of/his machinations/drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring/river/animate a thousand automatons.” (Williams, 6) The downfall of Sarah Cumming and Sam Patch is their mistaking of the anima, or the spark, for the life force itself. Patch believes he has mastered this, illustrated by his taming of the bear, a stand-in for the anima—but the tamed bear is a diminished simulacrum of the real, wild thing. When blindsided by the true, unknowable nature of the quality he seeks to undermine—the “sound, hard to interpret,” (Williams, 17)—Patch falls apart: “The word had been drained of its meaning.” (Williams, 17) This is similarly hinted at following the demise of Mrs. Cumming: “A language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear. At least it settled it for her. Patch too, as a matter of fact.” (Williams, 15) In her removal from the domineering masculine, the true wildness of the anima is unleashed. “Divorce (the/language stutters)/unfledged/two sisters from whose open mouths/Easter is born—crying aloud,/Divorce!”(Williams, 22) and: “a flower within a flower…laughs at the names by which they think to trap it.”(Williams, 22) Told in this way, the killing of Mrs. Cumming becomes a liberation.
Paterson is very much a masculine perspective, but this is not the poetry of a young man. Indeed, Williams took up the work late in his career, at sixty-three, after almost a decade’s hiatus from writing verse. Thus the “self” of the story, the first-person narrator, is not the impetuous animus present in the desperate Reverend and the doomed Patch. He is Jung’s wise old man; still filled with the desires of the hero but no longer governed by them, aware of his role: “The giant in whose apertures we/cohabit, unaware of what air supports/us.” (Williams, 24) Williams, however, also applies this treatment to the giant—Paterson—himself: “Silence speaks of the giants/who have died in the past and have/ returned to those scenes unsatisfied/…and the giants/live again in your silence and/ unacknowledged desire—” In this, the pscyhogeographical approach is subverted, the permanence of the city called into question. At the same time, the city and the man become one as the city is the manifestation of the individual unconscious, the individual a manifestation of the city’s unconscious. This is Conunctio, Jung’s “union of opposites,” (Hopcke, 124) and the alchemical incorporation of the masculine into the feminine: “…to/go to bed with you, to pass beyond/ the moment of meeting, while the/currents float still in mid-air, to/ fall—/ with you from the brink, before/ the crash—” (Willaims, 24) This is different from the stifling attempt of the animus’ dominion over the anima. Instead, Williams combines the receptivity of the feminine with the industry of the masculine, evidenced by his interspersion of radical verse and lawful prose. While seeming discordant on the surface, the components act in tandem, driven by an underlying current that they are in harmony with. “I am aware of the stream/ that has no language, coursing/ beneath the quiet heaven of/ your eyes.”(Williams, 24)
It sounds like the wrong image to use, but Paterson is like a river. On the surface, the images are too jumbled to see through, reflecting and bouncing off of each other. Looking at it closely can quickly become overwhelming. But one has only to dive into the poem headfirst and experience it directly, to feel where it’s going—which is, after all, what Williams’ thesis is all about. Talking about it will only get you so far. Williams was an artist of intense sensitivity and insight, qualities that allowed him to tap into those avenues of psychology shared by Jung. He was also an artist of grueling and often paralyzing precision and a harsh critic, both of his contemporaries and of himself; hence why Paterson took so long for him to write (in fact never completing the sixth installment). It comes as little surprise that these contradictions found themselves at home in Williams’ lifelong daytime profession—that of a physician. At the end of it all, Paterson, the psychoanalysis of a city, is just as much an autobiography; looking at the heart of the matter from outside and in. Trying to stab at the mystery of a man from both ends, and the middle.
Works Cited
Barry, Nancy K. “The Fading Beautiful Thing of Paterson.” Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 35, No. 3, William Carlos Williams Issue (1989): 343-363.
Gratto, Joseph Micheal. “William Carlos Williams and the Anlytical Psychology of Carl G. Jung.” Emory University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (1983).
Hopcke, Robert H. A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Boston: Shambala Publications, 1999.
Self, Will. Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2003.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1946.
Phase Shift
Leaving this place that I
have nominally despised
for years, to me
twenty-six percent of my life — there
is a strange sadness to it.
Remembering shared tea over
thermodynamics exams,
and Jason falling asleep on our chair between classes,
totally burnt out. You always assume
that a Carnot cycle is ideal,
but it never really is. That’s just how you have to
approach the problem to find an answer.
Maybe I’m not making sense. In real life,
there are so many little accumulations of loss
that drag energy from a system
over time.
That was two years ago now,
and they’re all gone, cast across the country
like dice. And soon, me as well.
Entropy has given my dorm a stale smell,
so I crack the window and turn back
to the work that remains. The energy
comes and goes,
until someday it just goes. Not worth
trying to solve, but
important to note. There’s still time.
But it troubles me,
the exponential passage of it.
Object permanence
Sometime in February;
I was twenty and working in Syracuse.
Drove all the way up to Bethel
in Maine, to see you.
You twenty-one
and working fourteen-hour days,
and mostly hating it. Just two young men living.
We met at the pub there
called the Rooster or something;
you made a big show about me forgetting my ID,
even though I had it in my wallet,
and the old man served us beer anyway with a sly grin.
Us talking loudly
in ignorance of the tables around us, for hours.
I’ve never been happier to see someone.
Trying to get across whatever it was I was trying to say,
my voice wavering with the effort,
and realizing just how different we are
and how wonderful that is. The shine in your eyes.
These things remain.
Parting, you gave me a cigarette from your breast pocket
and a big long hug,
and I drove back in my old Volvo, still mostly drunk, for hours,
a blizzard whipping through the northeast like stars
in my high beams.
Stopping to do donuts in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere,
and cracking my bumper on the curb. No one to witness my idiocy.
I found the cigarette at the bottom of a box on my bookcase,
crushed almost flat, last time I was home.
Wishing I had it now.
Writing 