A simple poem today about simple things, I couldn’t think of much to write, except brunch and dinner. Aren’t Saturdays meant to be a balance of slow and beautiful … like a diamondback Terrapin ? We had an amazing day but it was the food that punctuated it, in the deliciousness of happy exclamations. There was boiled corn in the salad and that, my friend, can be the sweetest addition to anything that is glazed in a honey, mustard, apple cider vinegar and extra virgin olive oil dressing.
Mango and avocado happily lettuce eat corn cumcumbered in chicken and some flashy tomatoes. Handful nuts, a great salad topping make !
The morning floated by on rain that rose in mist from warm earth; the tea wafted from cups like it was looking for metaphors above the brew.
Shakshouka graced our breakfast table in the spirit of the Maghreb and the little red dish was simply the pillow talk of eggs wondering at the pointillism of yellow and green peppers.
Then time flew by in conversations, that conjured blithely from seasoned laughter until someone called, asking for Jason, but none of us knew anyone called Jason, so we all got serious about planning supper.
Saturday is lazy and daft, but a splendid chef! Salad graced our dinner table in the spirit of gratitude for sharing a meal in the sweetness of mangoes.
Cornucopia poured generously onto that platter, awarding us a rainbow in July ! Colour ... is what it must feel to be alive
Before ShakshoukaAnd Shakshouka, After.
I am grateful for all the people that make my life beautiful and make me smile. I hope the weekend brings happiness to everyone !
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he-neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automatons. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires — unroused.
~ Paterson, by William Carlos Williams [1]
It was Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson, that alerted me to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. He wrote ‘Paterson’, a compendium of five books arranged around the themes of three major symbols—man-city, river, and mountain, or feminine principle, a major work which is about the city of Paterson in New Jersey and the lives of its residents. Williams himself, was a resident of Rutherford, New Jersey.
Today was the perfect day to take in the falls and seek sustenance at one of the many Turkish restaurants in town. This post is a work in progress and I may add to it in the future, given that there are too many themes I wish to weave into this one and I really know, I shouldn’t. So I’ll go with the short version today.
The Great Falls, PatersonAbout Great Falls Park
Paterson the movie is about a bus driver named Paterson, played by Adam Driver who also happens to live and work in Paterson N.J and writes poetry. I believe, there couldn’t have been anyone more suitable for the role of a stoic poet, than Adam Driver. It’s a movie that struck me, because of the way Paterson the poet in Paterson the movie, breathes in the city of Paterson to evoke the multi-faceted protean hero of Carlos’s epic poem Paterson, who also wanders over the landscape of the city suggested in the poem, all the while observing, seeking and living his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody.
In this scene of the movie at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, Paterson (Adam Driver) sits watching the falls as a Japanese man (Masatoshi Nagase) takes a seat beside him. He begins talking about poetry after Paterson notices that the man is reading Paterson by William Carlos Williams. [2] Photo ~ screenshot of the movie trailer.The movie is replete with red brick buildings; here is an image of one I shot today
It is Ron Padgett though, who wrote four original poems for the movie [3]. A winner of the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School.
When you’re a child you learn there are three dimensions: height, width, and depth. Like a shoebox. Then later you hear there’s a fourth dimension: time. Hmm...
Another One by Ron Padgett for Paterson the movie
It’s what Williams Carlos Williams says in his book length poem, that appears strangely prescient of Paterson the poet in the movie, “Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists, incognito’. Paterson is driven by routine, he finds comfort in it, a day that is spent working at his job driving a bus and writing poetry. His wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) on the other hand, lights up their existence in a kaleidoscopic fashion, even as they love and support each other through their stark differences. Alissa Wilkinson at Vox actually called it one of the best films of 2016 and even devoted an article to the philosophical musing of its poet protagonist [4]. It was Williams who wrote, “— Say it, no ideas but in things- nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident- split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained —secret— into the body of the light!” It is a rapper, Method Man, who Paterson hears in a laundromat practicing in front of a spinning washer, that mutters to himself the words of Carlos Williams , “No ideas but in things, no ideas but in things.” Williams was a poet of the imagist movement that strove for clarity in language and precision in descriptions, like in the movie, the poet Paterson does too. The author of the article went as far as to posit that Paterson’s life mirrors the dictum of Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience [5]. The movie is about this lived experience, detachedly noticing the tiny details, yet it all is profoundly touching to the viewer as they go through the motions of a poet’s existence. I think Paterson’s love poem would best illustrate this view [6].
Love Poem
We have plenty of matches in our house We keep them on hand always Currently our favourite brand Is Ohio Blue Tip Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches They are excellently packaged Sturdy little boxes With dark and light blue and white labels With words lettered In the shape of a megaphone As if to say even louder to the world Here is the most beautiful match in the world It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem Capped by a grainy dark purple head So sober and furious and stubbornly ready To burst into flame Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love For the first time And it was never really the same after that
All this will we give you That is what you gave me I become the cigarette and you the match Or I the match and you the cigarette Blazing with kisses that smoulder towards heaven
Some articles I found online delved into the poetic aspects quite neatly and I find no need to replicate their insights but here is one that discusses cinematic poetry [7] and another that does a commendable review of the film [8].
S.U.M. Great Falls Power Plant, preserved through the Garden State Historic Preservation Trust Fund
What I noticed as I wound my way through Paterson the place, the poem and the poet, is that the movie turns out to be a smooth confluence of poets, in this case, William Carlos William, Ron Padgett and Paterson. All three poets, one of them virtual, use imagism and are clear in the manner they imbibe their environment to translate it into a satisfying narrative of one that is driven to see the world as it is, bereft of angst or fantasy. Yet, Carlos’ earlier poem alludes to the ennui of an unroused life, in the automatons that walk through it, not noticing the significance of the mundane. I believe Ron Padgett has the last word here in a poem he wrote [9] that would be the kind of poem Paterson would write as a listicle for life, a poem that Carlos Williams would surely attest to as the method of a roused man, his man-city Paterson.
How to Be Perfect BY RON PADGETT Everything is perfect, dear friend. —KEROUAC
Get some sleep.
Don't give advice.
Take care of your teeth and gums.
Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead.
Eat an orange every morning.
Be friendly. It will help make you happy.
Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy.
Hope for everything. Expect nothing.
Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world.
Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.
Make eye contact with a tree.
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Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.
Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball collection.
Be loyal.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance and variety.
......
Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far more defective than you imagined.
When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition.
As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal ones.
Look at that bird over there.
After dinner, wash the dishes.
Calm down.
Excerpted from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect
First City of Innovation founded by Alexander HamiltonThe man himself, Alexander Hamilton
This poem was written ages ago but I thought of publishing it now. In 2007, in Tanzania there were 91,049 kilometres (56,575 mi) of roads, of which including 6,578 kilometers (4,087 mi) were paved (Wikipedia), but according to a 2021 article on Tanzania Invest, the road network in the country currently comprises 86,472 km of roads, of which 12,786 km are trunk roads, 21,105 km are regional roads and the remaining 52,581 km are district, urban and feeder roads. Also, as per the same article, at the end of 2015, the African Development Bank (AfDB) approved USD 346.38m to improve 500 km of roads across the country over the next 5 years. That’s a ton of money for only 500 Km of road.
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An avocation with no name, but he always showed up in the middle of the road, a red arterial all season dirt track, sinuously weaving, around tropical property somewhere in a number 6.79° S, 39.20° E that wore a stifling humid affluence like an afterthought.
He would attempt that, which the public works could not do, for the wealthy pay a pittance in taxes. So he dug those potholes a bit more, then he filled them with the loamy mud of a collective apathy. His hand out now for his stellar work ethic.
Huge wheels clambered over the mounds paid him in amusement and sometimes in an inflated shilling for his social activism. Then he dug some more and filled them less, until the rains washed away all his effort, till he began again and the wheels clambered over the mounds.
Digging, filling, clambering, washing, eroding. The apathetic road still stands like a pulsing artery waiting to chafe again.
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Someplace the roads were never there, there was someone trying to fill potholes as a social service.
It moves with you, in the gas lit streets steeped in the dregs,of fossil excrements, pulsing and biding time, that is measured on smart watches and in weightiness alike, hanging for succour at the teat of kindness, supplicating for the ministrations of Nephthys, seeking resurrection, resurgence into memory belief upon belief of layered lies of the dictates of civilization, obscuring the natural, obliterating the wick of the human candle, dampening the fires of our unbridled humanity.
