Forgive me for a moment, I must talk shop, and I'm leaning heavily on the first person here because Schwitters has not been consulted:
As we've said repeatedly, and as recently as the second to last post, this project started as a joke and turned into something that we actually care about. Because of this, I'm not going to post the pictures I took in Paterson here. Check out ulmlls for that. I can't reconcile it in my head because Paterson the city is not Paterson the poem. Nor should it be. The poem doesn't need the "real" city, mainly because the poem is real with or without it.
Nonetheless, I did take--and willingly and excitedly--a trip to Paterson as a kind of pilgrimage. I teared up a little the night we entered. I saw some really totally awesome stuff--an incredible waterfall, a wacky castle, a wackier watchtower, and some cool, crumbling factories (from which I stole a brick). It was an exciting and awesome trip. But I did not find Williams's Paterson; his was in my backpack the whole time, and at no point did I dig it out. There was no reason to--Paterson and Paterson are not the same. Art is not ever accurate mimetic representation, but it is art and that's why it's important.
I don't know what this has to do with our project, other than to say that the city itself, at least for the few poems I've written, isn't what what I'm writing about. I'm not sure it's the poem either, though. And I mostly don't care.
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