Modern American Poetry

(^206) James E. Miller, Jr.
about it became more and more the lucky burden of what I wanted to say,”)^8
The ears of the man-city are the rocks that lie under the falls. Williams wrote
in his Autobiography:“The Falls let out a roar as it crashed upon the rocks at
its base. In the imagination this roar is a speech or a voice, a speech in
particular: it is the poem itself that is the answer” (A,p. 392). The first full
description of the falls comes after a prose insert (fragment of a letter from a
frustrated woman poet):
Jostled as are the waters approaching
the brink, his thoughts
interlace, repel and cut under,
rise rock-thwarted and turn aside
but forever strain forward—or strike
an eddy and whirl, marked by a
leaf or curdy spume, seeming
to forget
(P,p. 7)
Here Paterson’s thoughts and, implicitly, the letter’s pleading, are mixed in
the waters that move to the edge to—
fall, fall in air! as if
floating, relieved of their weight,
split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk
with the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks: to a thunder,
as if lightning had struck
(P,p. 8)
“Catastrophe of the descent”: here is the lost history of Paterson that has cried
out in descent only to “hit the rocks,” the deaf ears of mankind. “The language,
the language / fails them / They do not know the words / or have not / the
courage to use them” (P,p. 11). Only in the local may be found the universal:
the lost history of Paterson, the lost history of America, the lost history of
mankind has poured with thunder over those falls, falling on stone ears. The
poet sets himself the task of “combing out” the language of the falls—and that
includes watching, listening, observing language from its every direction as it
pours down on the poet. What is the significance of “insignificant” lives; what