From a Roseate Past

"And there rises
a counterpart, of reading, slowly, overwhelming
the mind; anchors him in his chair. So be
it. . . .
Texts mount and complicate them-
selves, lead to further texts and those
to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it.
Until the words break loose or--sadly
hold, unshaken. Unshaken! So be it. For
the made-arch holds, the water piles up debris
against it but it is unshaken." (Book 3, Part 3)

I picked up a pile of random secondary sources on the poem Paterson yesterday at the library. I'm not sure how many I will get into. I opened one today to a grim but apt description of Paterson as "a city known to itself only as a place of processing raw material and dumping the by-products, material and human" (Duffey 69). We can think, though, that while industry performs this operation in an unwholesome way, that the counter project of the poem Paterson, as well as our own activities--exalted and mundane--are precisely this processing, with hopefully an element of recycling, so the trash heap does not grow beyond human reckoning. In the spirit of recycling, here is a clip not used from an older journey to Paterson.
Recently, I talked to an art group about their like-minded experiments in Paterson, and so while posts will continue to operate an their accustomed distant, recycling remove, I plan to join them in full immersion come June.