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A smartphone is a leash.

This deadpan conviction of a bus driver-poet


called Paterson (Adam Driver) sharpens Paterson, a new film by Jim
Jarmusch that chronicles a week of stifled epiphanies in Patersons life. In its
quietude and devotion to the modern lyric, the movie suddenly seems almost a
revenge piecea flat rejection of digital culture and the imperative to make
placeless films, light on dialogue, to play across the polyglot Internet.
Jarmuschs film instead is narrowly circumscribed in time, place, and idiom,
and emerges as an anti-postmodern poem about American poetry.
Its supremely groovy ars poetica, then, involving two old souls, Paterson
and his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), in an unassuming industrial town
whose name means poetry to just about 250 living people.
And thats the beauty of it; its vitally here. Paterson sets itself hard in
Paterson, New Jersey, the valley under the mighty Great Falls of the Passaic
River that inspired to verse the likes of Allen Ginsberg and the pediatricianpoet William Carlos Williams, whose epic about the city is an animating
spirit of the film.
Jarmusch didnt want to make a film about poetry without a poet on hand,
and fortunately he knew a good one: Ron Padgett. Jim told me he was
thinking of doing a movie that would involve poetry and New Jersey, Padgett
told me, and Jarmusch asked Padgett to be his poetry adviser.
Who could refuse? I just act important, spout off opinions, and go on my
merry way, Padgett thought. But thats not how it worked out. Jarmusch
asked, nonchalantly, to use some of Padgetts existing poems for the films
central characterPadgett agreedand then wondered if his pal might write
something new for the film. Padgett didnt want to write on command, but
somehow he couldnt resist the call: he composed the poems The Run and
The Line. This recent work, which appears in the movie alongside four of
Padgetts oldies, is stunningor rather, as Padgett puts, it is not
embarrassing.
In the film are no ideas but in things. Those things, lovingly longed for by
Jarmuschs nostalgic if digital camera, include 20th-century totems such as
matchbooks, lunchboxes, and dog leashes. Smartphones here are presumably
things toobut things sorely short on ideas. Or maybe they are things so
closely allied with ideas that theyve lost their mineral integrity.
The movie is also about a devilish English bulldog named Marvin. In his
rounds, Paterson leashes, walks, and also despises Marvin, who represents
boisterous competition for the affections of his beautiful wife. But Paterson is
a steadfast man of his place, who does his duty by his wife, his bus, and even
his rival.
The Guardian cited the runic film for its almost miraculous innocence, but I
suspect the film knows, and even holds in non-innocent contempt, more than
its telling. We are given to understand that out of the frame humans as dogs
are leashed by their phones, slaves to an Internet overlord. Only here, in a
shire unmolested by digitization, are they free. This whole film, in fact, may be
as the sassafras leaves are to Williams in Waitingthe pure joy against
which ordinary life seems to crush the spirit.
Ron Padgetts poetry in Patersontogether with Eileen Myless work
for Transparentsets a high-water mark for the representation of poetry in

TV and film. (Amazon Studios, which created Transparent, is also a producer


of Paterson; its worth recognizing Amazons stealth commitment to poetry.)
Whats more, Padgetts simple lyrics are powerful tonic in an age of poltergeist
Twitter dialect and sweetie-pie Instagram filters. Consider Love Poem,
which is anchored around the line We have plenty of matches in our house.
Padgett says the idea for that came in hearing himself say those words, and
thinking What? Im half-moron to say that! Well, I'll just write this poem as
though I'm a moron. And it evolved into a sincere and passionate love poem.
Just as modernist no longer designates the contemporary, colloquial
language may no longer be the actual demotic. (For that, see texts and
Twitter.) But colloquial is what Padgetts work here is, sturdy and wholesome,
and then, in a sly flash, magnificent. Padgetts broader opus has less Williams
to it than it does, well, Padgett. Still, he told me, when he discovered Williams
in high school in the 1950s, I was very attracted to the fact that he could write
in such simple, direct, immediate languagewithout rhyme,
without metaphorand I still thought it was poetry.
In 1964, Padgett even found himself in Paterson, when he and a few friends
including the poets Joseph Ceravolo and Ted and Sandy Berriganrealized
there would be a wait for dinner at Ceravolos Bloomfield house and took off
on a joyride to see the Falls and look for Williamss house in Rutherford. They
spied it and sent Sandy, who was fearless, to scout it out. Williams had been
dead a year or so then.
At the house, they met Williamss widow, Flossie, who gave the eager gang a
tour of everything, pointing out a secretary desk lined with shelves that held
some of the great mans favorite books. On the way out, Padgett told me, I
looked down the driveway in the back of the house. And I saw a red
wheelbarrow. Huh? Really? It was quite thrilling.
The poem Padgett wrote about the visit remains unpublishedit didnt get
through the turnstile, as he put itbut at my insistence, he dug it up from
cold storage. (Its a delight, but by order of the poet, its for my eyes only.)
Love Poem, which unspools across the screen as Paterson, in the busdrivers seat, scribbles in his notebook, is perhaps the most Williamsian poem
by Padgett in the movie. One passage is gloriously thingy:
... 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...
Dying things, such as flames and the matches they consume, and the body of a
young wife, are the most beautiful things in Jarmuschs Paterson sanctuary.
But, being poor, real things, made of ash and clay, they dont ascend to the
Cloud. This is the surprise turn of the film; Patersons unleashedness to the
Internet also leaves him with no cellphone in a bus emergency. And, when the
dog Marvin shreds his notebook, he has no other copies of his poems, no
duplicates, much less Google Docs. Suddenly, even this humble, Wi-Fi-nonenabled bus driver longs for immortality, for proper ambition, for the poets
eternal life. (Marvin: Yeah, well, hes not getting it.)

Paterson goes to sit solemnly by the roaring Great Falls. Maybe in his head are
histhat is, Ron Padgettsace verses about jealous love or human bodies in
space, as in The Run:
I go through
trillions of molecules
that move aside
to make way for me
while on both sides
trillions more
stay where they are.
Or maybe, as happens to so many of us who have lost data to busted silicon or
the family dog, Paterson cant remember a damned thing. But paper is cheap,
and hes given some by a Japanese pilgrim to Williamss mecca. As writers
discover, the next pass, once the first is a ghost, is sometimes better. Say it,
no ideas but in things Williams wrote:
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained
secretinto the body of the light!
Paterson still has his pen. In view of those loud waters, that kid is truly
unleashed and starts to write again.
Source:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91864

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