If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress,” then Williams’s project in Paterson is not so much comprehensive collage as creation by fire.
The speaker of Paterson piles on disparate elements in much the same way as Pound and Eliot, but he does so in order to strip them away. For this speaker, “To write / is a fire,” so he celebrates the transformative powers of conflagration: “An old bottle, mauled by the fire / gets a new glaze, the glass warped / to a new distinction.” The poem is concerned with the transcendent, that which will not allow itself to be stripped away, but which lives on, transformed by the act of attempted destruction.
The contextual element, too, is a stripping away. Williams interweaves portions of public and private documents into his poem, such as personal letters and snippets of Paterson, New Jersey, history and news.This data, ranging from the stomach-churning to heart-wrenching, deconstructs the place and the speaker that is Paterson. One inserted text, for example, touches on the “deformed and mutilated verses” of Hipponax, which do “the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure,” highlighting the violent and destructive potential of language.
Yet the sense of destruction provided by Paterson’s textual and contextual elements is not enacted merely as a mode of demolition, but rather to clear the way of all that has come before in order to make way for a new kind of poem. The poem’s aim is the “nul” that “defeats it all,” the “death of all / that’s past / all being.”
Williams’s creation by annihilation gives way to the transcendent moments that defy systems past from logic to language, the “lapses of silence” in which he is “aware of the stream that has no language, coursing / beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes / which has no speech” “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– / to seize the moment.”Thus, Williams performs the ultimate act of creation by destroying language in order to transcend it, thereby generating a new tongue, a poetic language of survival.
Indeed, Paterson’s commentary on building–“Take down the walls, invite / the trespass. After all, the slums / unless they are (living) / wiped out they cannot be re- / constituted”–could be the answer to Derrida’s initial misgivings (outlined by Brian McHale in his introduction to The Obligation to the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems) when asked to collaborate with Peter Eisenman on the “Parc de Villette project.” In the end, like Williams, Derrida concludes that architecture is one of the “ultimate tests of deconstruction.”
For, as Williams’s speaker says, in the realms of language, it is death that holds “the missing words, / the words that never get said– / a kindly brother to the poor. / The radiant gist that / resists the final crystallization.” This cannot help but be the case in a work of written art that examines the limitations of language. Williams finds that the stuff of life ever evades language, “events dancing two / and two with language which they / forever surpass,” so he, too, must transcend language. Yet he cannot achieve transcendence until he writes the poem, and he cannot write the poem until he can “Give up / the poem.”