New Zealand-born Robyn Marsack was Director of the Scottish Poetry Library from 2000-2016. After moving to Scotland in 1987, she worked as a freelance editor, critic and translator, and has had a long editorial association with Carcanet Press. Her published work includes studies of Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath. With Andrew Johnston, she co-edited the anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Carcanet, 2009). With Iain Galbraith, she edited Oxford Poets 2013: An Anthology. She lives in Glasgow.
Casual Labour
December, 2016
Writers don’t make good movie subjects, unless their lives are tragically short or very messy. Perhaps that’s true of any artist, because at the centre of their lives is the slow business of making and discarding, of absorbing, of anxieties and exhilaration that may take no corresponding outward form other than looking hard and certain hand movements.So it is refreshing and beguiling to find this understood by Jim Jarmusch in his new film Paterson. I can’t believe that it will find audiences of more than about fifty at a showing – as was the case in the Glasgow Film Theatre when I saw it this week – despite the director’s reputation and that of Adam Driver, who plays Paterson with a dreamy decency that is captivating. Yet I hope that it does win fans and, untethered to a particular year or decade, stays around to gather more viewers and perhaps even send some of them in the direction of William Carlos Williams’s poetry (anecdotal evidence from the Scottish Poetry Library suggests that the latter has already happened).
This is a film about a poetry-writing bus driver called Paterson, living in Paterson, New Jersey. The film unfolds day by day, and its structure – in its repetitions and diversions – is in its filmic way the equivalent of the structure of Williams’s epic Paterson. More predictable, perhaps, than the long poem but satisfying as we wait for things – visual rhymes, we might call them – to recur. (Without giving too much away, watch out for interaction with the mailbox!) Like Paterson, the film uses newspapers to connect with the city’s life and history, although in a condensed form, pointing up the connections of famous people with Paterson in the form of old clippings pinned to a wall in the bar the bus-driver frequents.
How, then, does it manage to suggest his writing life? He has a wife, a dog, a routine and – most importantly – a notebook. He writes in his bus, before the first journey of the day; at lunchtimes sitting by the Passaic Falls; and at home in the basement beside a shelf of books, including WCW’s shorter poems and a collection by Frank O’Hara. The words of his poems appear line by line on the screen, superimposed on the scenes of his city routes or walks. They are read aloud at the same time, with a slight hesitancy, and are not predictable in the direction they take. My one reservation about this way of presenting them is the seeming effortlessness of the writing – there is no crossing out! Keats did say, in his famous letter to Taylor, ‘if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all’ – indeed the film is set in autumn, beautifully mellow in its palette. (Scuffed brick, old weatherboards, peeling advertising and serried traffic lights have a glow that, I suppose, romanticises a down-at-heel city.) Is Paterson the Keatsian poet of ‘Negative Capability’ though, ‘capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’? Not quite.
Paterson is definitely in love with his beautiful wife, and this romantic certainty fuels his poems. But they often start with objects, and here he meets Williams: ‘no ideas but in things’, first offered as a line in a 1927 poem by Williams, recurs in the Paterson volumes of the 1940s with fervour. The first poem we see Paterson writing starts off from a blue matchbox, carefully described. But the idea that there is some obvious connection between what the driver sees or hears en route, and the subject of a poem, is deliberately avoided. One of his poems mentions a child in a yellow raincoat, and we see him glimpsing a child not wearing such a coat. There is room for the imagination.
And there is room to wonder at a capacity for poetry in unlikely people or places: the bus-driver himself, a man of few spoken words; the hip-hop poet rehearsing in a launderette; the ten-year-old girl with her notebook, willing to share her line with its echo of Nashe’s ‘brightness falls from the air’; the Japanese tourist in search of the landscape of Paterson. All this is delivered with tenderness and a refreshing lack of irony.
And what of the poems themselves? In an interview in i-D (24 November), Jarmusch spoke of the New York School as his ’godfathers’: ‘I love these poets because they don't take themselves too seriously, the poems can be funny and exuberant, and they don't proclaim something to the world, they are just speaking to one other person.’ Ron Padgett – who lives in NY and was part of the second wave of the New York School - is credited with the creation of Paterson’s poetry, and I think he has risen wonderfully to the challenge this film posed: to provide ‘good enough’ poems. The audience has to be able to take Paterson’s work seriously – he is not a deluded failure nor an undiscovered genius. He is influenced by Williams and O’Hara, without their discipline or reading; his voice is individual but not distinctive; he stands on a wavering line between poetry and prose. We have to believe that he finds pleasure in his writing, and Jarmusch wants us to share it, even though in the film Paterson doesn’t show his poems to anyone.
When I came home, I reached for the Carcanet edition of Paterson on my shelf, and opened it with serendipitous accuracy at page 9:
Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His
thoughts alight and scatter—
And so they do, in the film’s unhurried homage to the poetry of everyday life.
Robyn Marsack
0 Comments