Start small
Start small and settle, into the comfortable curves the coffee cup idents into your hands And the way the silken vapours depart from liquid homes.
Start small and decide to listen, to the way the drummer double taps the symbols on every 2nd bar and the guitarist lets occasional notes fade into easy silence.
Start small and watch the fat tabby cat pat her feet across the fence as the summer sun casts rippling chequers across the garden.
Start small and notice how the creases by her eyes open like slow curtains A delicate smile sauntering from cheek to cheek.
Start small, and move in Slightly
Closer
Paterson
‘Paterson’ is about a bus driver, called ‘Paterson’, living in Paterson US. It follows a week in his life, Monday to Sunday as he lives his peaceful days, ferrying passengers, waking up next to his eclectic but deeply loving girlfriend and writing poetry into his little notebook.
Paterson, as the film mentions, was the place the poet William Carlos Williams lived and wrote about, a clear homage to his work. Paterson even reads ‘This Is Just to Say’ to his girlfriend in one scene.
Nothing happens in the film, reminiscent of my favourite film of all time, Perfect Days. They are like cousin movies, both shrines on the altar of attention; the value in slowing down and noticing the beauty within the mundane.
The film is steeped with Zen Buddhist undertones (or I suppose that is my lens through which I see the film). For example, his notebook that he diligently writes in is chewed up and destroyed by their Rottweiler. The next morning, his girlfriend consoles him. Paterson replies “It’s ok… it’s like writing on water”.
And aptly, in the ending scene he is given a new notebook by a Japanese man travelling to Paterson to experience William Carlos William’s home. The final shots are him beginning to write again into the blank pages of the notebook’. Beginners mind.
I love the distinct absence of technology in the film. For example, none of the passengers on the bus are looking at phones. No one is blaring music in public, or living in separate realities cacooned by headphones. It’s instead mundane conversation. Two men awkwardly talking about failed romantic advances. Two teenagers talking about anarchy, his co-worker talking about his problems at home.
Paterson refuses to own a phone. The bar owner refuses to put up a TV.
It’s a testament to paying attention. Beauty in the ordinary. Something which our fractured digital landscape does not cultivate.
The movie is contained entirely within this poem by William Carlos Williams (my favourite one).
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
poets as disposable cameras
“poets are the disposable cameras of the world? Poets take photos of our world and some end up blurry or distorted. However, the distortion is a gesture of a world fully lived”
Language is fluid - Emergence Magazine
“A poem shouldn’t attempt to do anything”. I agree. The poet is compelled by words to disappear into the observed.