Paterson: The Poetry of Everyday Life

I love poetry.

Such a statement might seem obvious to anyone who knows me. I graduated from Milligan University with a degree in English and many of my days were spent reading and analyzing poetry. And although I liked poetry, it was usually my least favorite text to study in class. I was always more excited to discuss a novel, an essay, or a piece of critical theory, than I was poetry. Simply put, I preferred reading Michel Foucault over William Blake. 

Despite my tastes, there was always something about poetry that mystified me. It had this intangible quality that I was desperate to grasp, and which I often felt eluded me. Naturally, this left me feeling lost in some class discussions, unable to feel like I could contribute meaningfully to the conversation. But my goal here is not to reminisce on all the days I didn’t talk in class. In all honesty, I don’t have any goal or motive, other than to say that my love and appreciation for poetry did grow over time. However, this love did not come from reading a Norton Anthology of English Literature (as great as those collections may be). Rather, it came from watching movies.

Films about poets and poetry are nothing new. Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969), and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) are some famous examples of films that explore the power of poetry. Moreover, some filmmakers were inspired to imbue their films with a sense of cinematic poetry through certain shot composition and editing choices (the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick come quickest to mind here). However, perhaps no film has succeeded in capturing the beautiful intersection between poetry and everyday life, at least for me, as Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson. Before I dive into the narrative of Paterson, I’d like to tell a brief personal story.

In the spring of 2022, me and six of my closest college friends took a trip down to Florida for Spring Break. To date, the trip remains one of the best vacations I’ve ever had. We stayed at a condo owned by an aunt of one of my friends, who was out of town for the week. Our days were spent lounging either at the beach or the condominium’s pool, and our nights were spent inside the condo, where we made dinner, played games, and enjoyed the fun afforded to unsupervised college kids. During this trip, I also spent some of my free time working on a poem that I had been inspired to write during our first day in Florida, when we visited St. Augustine.

While it would be inaccurate to say I devoted all my free time to the poem, it was always in the back of my mind. I was especially motivated to write it because I was hoping to submit it to my school’s annual literary magazine, which one of my friends who made the trip to Florida happened to be the editor of for the semester. Since we were both English majors we shared a love for certain books, poems, and films (the previously mentioned Dead Poets Society being one such film). With our similar tastes in mind, I had recommended Paterson to him, proclaiming it to be one of the best films I had seen. We decided to watch it one night during the trip and as we settled in for the movie’s opening credits, I was filled with a very specific anxiety one feels when they have decided to share something personal with their friends.

Paterson follows the week in the life a man named Paterson, who lives in Paterson, New Jersey (a clearly poetic irony). The character of Paterson—played expertly by Adam Driver—is a New Jersey Transit Bus Driver who enjoys writing poetry in his free time, and who follows a very routine and ordered daily life: He wakes up beside his wife, eats breakfast, goes to his job as a city bus driver, eats a lunch packed by his wife, finishes his shift, walks home, takes their dog for a walk, drinks one beer at his favorite bar, walks home again, falls asleep beside his wife, repeat. Monday through Friday, his schedule remains unaltered. Paterson’s life and routines are so simple—so ordinary—that to see it depicted as the subject of a film is quite startling. One’s initial reaction is that it’s impossible for this to be the plot of a movie. Surely, something more conventionally thematic must occur. Paterson will have an affair, right? Is something going to happen to his wife? Will their dog get stolen?

But no, nothing typically exciting or devastating happens to Paterson. The most dramatic element of the film has to do with Paterson’s poetry, which is brilliantly woven into the film. While we watch Paterson go about his life, his poetry will often appear on-screen, accompanied by his reading of it. Occasionally, we see and hear the same poem two or three or different times, its form slightly different, Paterson’s voice more assured. 

I instantly fell in love with Paterson’s internal readings and revisions of his poems because it shows that poetry, like life, isn’t easy. Poetry—and life—takes practice. Along the way in life there will be many (seemingly) mundane moments and encounters. What do we do with them? What poetry will we discover in those fleeting interactions? When something goes awry, how do we revise? I could go on with examples but I’m sure you get the picture. There is much more about Paterson that I could write about, but I wanted to limit myself to this specific element of the film because I find it to be one of the most fascinating components of the film, and because I’d prefer not to spoil the whole film. As much as I love film essays, reading about a movie just isn’t the same as watching a movie.

Before I finish, I’d like to go back to my personal story from earlier, where my past self was anxiously sitting on a couch in a condo in Florida, hoping my friends would find as much enjoyment in Paterson as I do. Thankfully, my anxiety dissipated about halfway through the movie when my friend’s future wife, who had joined us for the viewing, simply said, “This movie is really good.” From that point on I was fully relaxed, and I was able to get lost in the poetic rhythm of Paterson. I think of that Spring Break trip as a very poetic time in my life. A series of days where I thought about little else except being with my friends and experiencing the beauty that life had to offer. I have no doubt that it still would have been one the best trips of my life even if we hadn’t watched Paterson. But would I have been able to find beauty even in the most mundane parts of the trip: driving, shopping, cleaning? I don’t think so. I needed poetry for that.

__________

If you’d like to help support Dawson reach his fundraising goal, you can do that here.