Poetry Between Patients

PATERSON, BOOKS I & II (113 pp.)--William Carlos Williams--New Directions ($1.50).

PATERSON, BOOK III (51 pp.)--William Carlos Williams--New Directions ($3).

Just off the main street of Rutherford, NJ. (pop. 16,000) stands the clapboard home and office of Dr. William Carlos Williams, M.D., 66, the best-known pediatrician in town. Doctoring is a busy life, but it is not enough for Williams: for over 40 years, on prescription blanks, old envelopes and other odd scraps of paper, he has been jotting down his impressions. A lot of the jottings turned out to be poetry.

Offhand, nobody would take Bill Williams for a poet, much less an avant-garde one. He looks like a doctor, talks like a doctor and slaps his knee like a doctor. Whenever there is a conflict between his medicine and poetry, medicine comes first. A man, says Bill Williams, has to respect his vocation.

But Williams has also respected his literary bent: he has written more than 20 volumes of poetry, fiction and history, all in his "spare" time. His fellow doctors ''used to think I was a little cracked, but they've learned to tolerate me." He admits that his patients often have trouble when they try to read Poet Williams. Says a patient in one scrap of Williams' poems: "Geeze, Doc, I guess it's all right but what the hell does it mean?"

Stubbornly shunning momentary poetic fashions, whether proletarian or metaphysical, he has kept on writing in Williams-style: hard little poems that observe with precision how a housewife looks in the morning, or how The green-blue ground is ruled with silver lines to say the sun is shining.

For a good many years, Poet Williams has also been working on something more ambitious: a long four-part poem about nearby Paterson (pop. 150,000), of which the first three parts are finished. The Williams scheme in Paterson seems simple enough: let the eye rove and write down what it sees. Since the Williams eye is as unpredictable as any man's, the resulting images may be strung together like freight cars in the Erie R.R. yards at Paterson, but all in all they are pretty sharp images. On a Sunday in Paterson's park an old woman --lifts one arm holding the cymbals of her thoughts, cocks her old head and dances! raising her skirts:

La la la la!

Then Williams notices a young man

flagrantly bored and sleeping, a beer bottle still grasped spear-like in his hand.

He has a vivid eye for the park itself:

oaks, chokecherry, dogwoods, white and green, ironwood: humped roots matted into the shallow soil --mostly gone: rock outcroppings polished by the feet of the picnickers . . .

Williams has given his poem a narrator-hero: "Dr. Paterson," a man who sees things just about the way Bill Williams does. In Book I he sketches the "elemental character" of the city and paints vignettes of early settlers. In Book II he walks through the park and counts lost souls: lovers who do not love, an evangelist to whom no one listens, the D.P.s of any modern city with "minds beaten thin by waste;"

Appalled, Dr. Paterson goes in Book III to the town library, to learn why men have lost the art of living together. He thrashes about in old books, is sickened by the library's "sweats of staleness," but finds no answer to his question. Williams' answer, if he finds one, will come in Book IV.

The average U.S. reader will not bother to wait; he was bored or scared away from most modern poetry long ago. Nonetheless, there is more than a chance that some people who try Paterson for the first time will like it. Despite a humorlessness and awkwardness that make Williams the Dreiser of U.S. poets, the Williams eye sees with clinical honesty. And among poets too often barricaded behind private mutterings or elaborate mythical references, Rutherford's Dr. Williams keeps poking around outdoors. His notion:

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark.

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