A Poem of America

PATERSON, BOOK IV (55 pp.)--William Carlos Williams--New Directions ($3).

Since 1946, Poet and Pediatrician William Carlos Williams has been publishing parts of a long poem, Paterson. In between patients and the writing of an autobiography (to appear next fall), gingery Bill Williams, 67, has been letting his eye roam over the industrial area of northern New Jersey and has been thinking about the patterns and meanings of U.S. life. The result is Paterson, a scrapbook of daily life as Americans live it.

In its first three books, the poem had its narrator-hero, "Dr. Paterson," sketching vignettes of the city, mourning over the lost souls who wander through it with "minds beaten thin by waste," and ransacking the town library to find out why men have become walled off from each other. The answer is supposed to come in Book IV.

Book IV begins with a descriptive passage satirically called an "idyl." A young nurse flits between Dr. Paterson and an old dowager who appreciates her massages and hopes for lesbian intimacy. In this final glance at the wasteland of his time, Williams is at his best: he records the inflections of U.S. speech with accuracy and economy. But when he gets around to giving his own recipe for improving U.S. life, what seems to emerge is a shrill cry against "usury," oddly reminiscent of Ezra Pound.

At the end, the poem is redeemed by an elegiac backward look to the early days of Paterson, when "the breathing spot of the village was the triangle square . . . Well shaded by trees with a common in the center where the country circus pitched its tents."

Now & then, Williams hits his lyrical best:

Love is a kitten, a pleasant thing, a purr and a pounce. Chases a piece of string, a scratch and a mew a ball batted with a paw a sheathed claw.

But Book IV is marred by too many dull, prosy flats.

In its entirety, Paterson makes a bold bid for attention as one of the few important long poems written in the aoth Century U.S.; it may evoke comparison with Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Is Paterson a successful poem or an uneven performance, with alternating passages of beauty and incoherence? Well, they're still arguing about Whitman.

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