Paterson: Book II, Chapter I, p. 45

Walking (Fig. 6B)

Feet bear
especially heels
weight

heavy heat
still, bare
on hardwood.

less, however,
Fig. 6B
when walking

one imagines
point between
hip foot

there rolls
except ground.

One waits
on another
the great

catch up
move spool
for worth.

Meaning through
the foot
roll up

numbers or
Fig. 6B
nothing noting

joints’ ligaments
stretch bear
weight.

Some Technical Housekeeping

I've added an updated page to archive.org with our songs on it. However, you no longer need to go over there. Just click on the flash player on the right.

A New List! Paterson: Book Two, Chapter I

* NOTE * Paterson: Book Two, Chapter I spans pages 41 to 61 in the 1995 New Directions edition of the complete Paterson, editor Chris MacGowan.

To the festivities! A new and incredibly awesome list of titles is ready! Proceed with jubilation:


Paterson: Book Two, Chapter I
(Catastrophe of the Falls)


1. Dr. Paterson's Walk from the Cliff; or, Two White Towers [p. 43-61]
2. (so close are we to ruin every day!) [p. 45]
3. Walking (Fig. 6B) [p. 45]
4. Unrequited; or, Exiling One's Self From One's Self / Another Letter Unanswered [p. 45]
5. "How Do I Love You? These!" / Preceding Whispered Voices [p. 45]
6. An American Occupation [p. 46]
7. The German Singing Societies of Paterson Present: "Not On This Ground!" [p. 46]
8. "A Great Crowd, A Great Beast!" or, McNulty has a Plan [p. 46]
9. Pecking Order [p. 46]
10. Imagination; or, Pheasants in Flight [p. 47-48]
11. Chapultapec! Grasshopper Hill! [p. 47-49]
12. M.N. to W.C.W. / W.C.W. [never] to M.N. [p. 45, 48]
13. combating sleep/------------/the sleep [p. 49]
14. Officer Goodridge's Encounter; or, The Little Critter That Had Caused So Much Fun, 1939 [p. 49]
15. A New Mind, A New Measure [p. 50]
16. Lovers in the Park [p. 50-52, 54-55, 58-61]
17. Imagined Indians / the Ground Spoke [p. 52]
18. MountMt.GarrettMt. [p. 52-53]
19. The Bitch and the Man in the Park [p. 53]
20. Musty: A Love Story [p. 53-54]
21. "A Great Crowd, A Great Beast!" or, Voices Lifted in Voices [p. 54]
22. The Quaking of the Great City / The Capital of Call and Response [p. 55-56]
23. Hungarian Metronome; or, Time Over the Falls [p. 55]
24. A Song for Nothing [p. 55]
25. Eisenstein's Heavenly Man! [p. 57-58]
26. (Priapus!) [p. 58]
27. 3000 Years, 3000 Lovers [p. 58-61]
28. Desire and the Evangelist [p. 59]
29. Rush Over the Falls: A Good Dream [p. 59-60]
30. A Town Spread, A River Accepted [p. 60]
31. A Horn, A Trumpet! / Meaning Therein [p. 61]
32. To Be Good Dogs. [p. 61]
33. NO DOGS ALLOWED AT LARGE IN THIS PARK [p. 61]

So, the new rules: any response is a valid response, and any post is a responsive post. What do you guys think so far?

Another Quick Update: A Substitution of Centers

So, Conversely and I have decided that we are returning, so to speak, to the Paterson Project: instead of just fleshing out the musical aspect of the original project, we will be continuing that work (which is pretty arduous, for a variety or reasons, not the least of these being that neither Conversely nor I are particularly talented musicians) AND we will be beginning a poetic dissection and flowery-offshoot-eruption-(can i say eruption?)-re-creation of Paterson: Book II, Ch. 1. We are working on titles for this section now, and, man, we are excited. First of all, the poetic rules are going to change a bit, as the liberty (thank you, George Rogers Clark) to expand from the geographical locus of Paterson, N.J. has been discussed between the two of us and we agree that, NO!, these poems should happen, as much as a poem happens, wherever and whenever we think appropriate. This means little to you, but it is a great and exciting bit of news to us. More important to you is this: similar rules of media and form are also being relaxed, so don't be surprised if songs come before poems or pictures come before songs or whatever whatever whatever. It's all fun times, now.

So, you can probably expect a new list of prospective titles in the next week or so. Until then, I leave you with Conversely's favorite so far:

Poem 5; or, "How Do I Love You? These!"

A New Song Surfaces

Wow. Has it been four months since we last posted something on here? That's awful - and I'm sure that means we've lost our entire readership...so, bummer. BUT, for those of you willing to give us a second (third? fourth?) chance, I have something truly spectacular for you.

Another song.

Our dear, dear (talented) friend Gaston LaValle has recorded another Paterson song, this one based around the second part of the Hatian President/His Women sequence. In my personal opinion, this is the finest song yet released - maybe ever released - and it is well worth your four and a half minutes. To hear it, simply click the following link or, if you're old school, click the link on the right hand side of the page.

CHECK IT OUT NOW!

Also, Conversely and I will begin putting up "lyrics" to correspond with each poem soon, so be on the lookout for that. And if you can't help yourself and you are a huge fan of our sporadic, often self-indulgent updates, we have begun a second Paterson-esque project over at mappedspacetoenactment.blogspot.com. It's a much longer name, so it must be much better, right?

Right?

Signing off for now,
T. Az

Paterson: Book Four, Chapter III, p. 202

**this poem is a collaborative effort between Conversely and T. Azimuth Schwitters. It also marks the end of the main poetry sequence of the Paterson Project. Both the music and song-writing portions of the project are still active (although mostly unrecorded!), as are our hopes for beginning another poetry project, which we will share with you shortly. Lastly, if you were to look at the "Listing" page, you might notice we never wrote a poem for "The Bitch and the Man from the Sea." We suggest you simply do not look at the "Listing" page. Signing off, T. Az.**

Ends (Oh, Passaic!)

These ends are always so redundant, what with their gymnastics and linguistic representations of pictorial representations of mathematic representations of an impossibly simple natural phenomenon.

Oh, Passaic, why do we bother? Your course—our chorus—is, of course, not quite the ends we’d like it to be.

Your path explodes, vomits, if we’re that kind of poet—which, truth be told, we are, because we all are; otherwise, we say again (though in a slightly different context), why bother?—out and away from silk and graffiti and awkward, painful teenage fucking in the ruins of the somewhat less than pure products of America but nonetheless products, and ones Hamilton would have swooned over at that.

We’d hoped, oh Passaic, that our ends would be in shoring, in snuggling among stones, these same stones and bricks, never to splinter, never to drift apart, never to rot. But for what life is there that which is still?

And for this reason we find ourselves thoroughly discouraged. Oh, Passaic—what is all this spreading out? Standing in the spray of your mouth, trudging through the sand and the slop of the city, wading into the whole and rippling present. The present! This is no gift! This is where we come to wear away and break and crumble for our own first time over and over again, dissolving into new stories for not only new and different verse, but, what’s worse, a whole new chorus.

And each time we hope for a monument, that for once what we seek will not be fixed in decay, and will not spread out into the brackish waters and rust away. It seemed so solid, once, this history.

We had carefully cut new pieces with a dull and rusty blade to fill in those missing from our jigsaw puzzle memories, a box mostly empty but from which we were compelled to use all that’s there. Oh, you God damned Passaic and I mean God damned Passaic we shuffled along your floor, scooping your muck and molding it and squeezing it flat, holding it out in our hands, cutting palms to shreds with these wretched old blades, and carefully—so carefully—carving new puzzle pieces from your bed that fit perfectly—so perfectly—with the old ones.

This thing, this thing, it is the only thing. We will not find, at the end of our days a monument or memory, but instead this thing, floating briefly, just visible in the current, one among so many, dissolving quickly in the sticky film at the ocean’s surface. What has moved? What has moved us, lost, but to the memory which too is lost.

Do not pull us apart, oh, Passaic! Let us fill! Stay the bursting! Together, we will find the others, we will borrow their pieces, the brackish waters can heal our hands and we will touch, we will lock our fingers together, Swedenborg’s angels will have nothing!—no nothing!—on us! Light will burst from our hands, a glowing ball of healing palms pressed together, blood will flow through the wounds and our hands, locked together as the young couple looking for a place with a little privacy lock theirs together, and our skin will heal, our skin will heal our skin will heal and our skin will lock our hands together and we will let our fingers free and twist them about but our palms—our palms—will remain fused and forever aglow.

But here, our present, we’re tossed out to sea and our work, our careful work, is destroyed, ripped apart in a spiral of Passaic and Atlantic, and we somersault out onto the shore, weeping anew our hands are healed but separated from the others and the sea is sleeping a tired mother and we are weeping and hungry and we drag ourselves away from it all only to find we are young and full of energy and so tired and our slates are wiped clean except for all these used puzzle pieces and we strive and strive for the more that we can have the more monuments we can make the rot that will not rot the drivel that will grow into the monument that we can flow through and in and live on and on without the pain of our own birth, shredded and squeezed from the ocean.

To be one—to simply, perfectly, be one, is all we’ve asked, oh Passaic. Our verse and song, let it be one, just one, our hands on fire.

A thousand choruses. Spreading out, a thousand verses. At once, a thousand voices, a thousand more.

An iron bridge stands over the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. From here we dive, gloriously, Olympian, into the muddy foam.

Paterson: Book Four, Chapter III, p. 199

*adult content disclaimer*

Seeds, or Ideas Spilled by the River Into the Sea

You want to talk about seeds? How’s this:

Two nights ago, rain fell in the middle of the Paterson, New Jersey night for just over an hour and a half. After it funneled down defunct gutters and cascaded over the twist-torn corners of tar-flat roofs, it splattered down on brown-grey piles of week-old frozen winter shit and knocked loose bled-grey newspapers, fast-food bags, crushed packs of cigarettes, and a used condom caked in the crease between sidewalk and storefront and carried them in a flash-flood stream to the park adjacent to the S.U.M. building. There, in the dying-dead carcass of Hamilton’s America, three dry-cold weeks of detritus slipped into the crawling current of the long-spoiled Passaic and made their way, soggy and broken, to an estuary on the Hudson and out to the Sea. If you want poetry, look at the condom: coagulated, left-over semen in a flimsy-yellow bit of latex sank in the current and rolled hesitantly across the riverbed, sending over the course of an hour its contents in sporadic pollen-bursts of wasted spunk into the filth of that long-named River in this yet-named night.

Paterson: Book Four, Chapter III, p. 193

The Memory of the River

Is it absurd to believe the bottom
is reachable to hands desperately
stretched and seeking it? To see in the strain
grains of soft sand wet and clinging downwardly
to current- and finger-traced lines of a body
unmoved (unmoving) in motions passing
on and through the stilled silence of its whole?
To reach for this ever, albeit now
more exhaustedly? To float still, silent,
inverted yet over the quiet floor,
holding against for a moment the flow
of all that is pressing, urgent, spoken ---
So much water passes, spreads out, in waves
while so little catches, in fingers, and stays.