[I]n "Paterson," the social unrest that occasions all strikes is strong -- underscored, especially in the 3rd part, but I must confess that the aesthetic shock occasioned by the rise of the masses upon the artist receives top notice. . . . In Part or Book II . . . there will be much more in the same manner, that is, much more relating to the economic distress occasioned by human greed and blindness -- aided, as always, by the church, all churches in the broadest sense of that designation -- but still, there will be little treating directly of the rise of labor as a named force. I am not a Marxian.

Within three years the S.U.M. was party
to the first American lockout,
and three decades later
to the first American strike.
It was bad for the people, the economy,
and the landscape.

[Williams] remained closer to the original Imagist practice than many of the other poets in Pound's book [the anthology, "Des Imagistes"], including Pound himself. He opposed abstractions (Pound's GIFOA -- go in fear of abstactions -- was an article of faith for him).

This instrument of word order which the Chinese language has developed to the highest consistency and sharpness, might indeed, from a purely logical point of view, be regarded as the only truly adequate means of expressing grammatical relations. For it would seem possible to designate them more clearly and specifically as relations pure and simple, possessing no perceptual base of their own, through the pure relation of words expressed in their order, than by special words and affixes.

[Fenollosa] warred on the copula: "There is in reality no such verb . . . , our very word exist means 'to stand forth.' to show oneself by a definite act.' In the Chinese, 'is' he found 'a splendid flash of concrete poetry.' . . . His great, his unassailable originality stemmed from his conviction that the unit of thought was less like a noun than like a verb, and that Chinese signs therefore denoted processes."

There is a strong, indeed barely repressible, temptation to consider the growing predominance of the formal function of the copula as a process of falling, an abstraction, degradation, or emptying of the semantic plentitude of the lexeme "to be" and of all lexemes which, likewise, have let themselves dwindle or be replaced.

To return to anything like values and clarity we have been forced into vulgarity. This is history. (WCW in The Embodiment of Knowledge)

Williams always did his best work when he did not 'think it out,' when both the theme and the form were discovered in the course of the poem itself. . . . [M]ake a case for the greatness of his poetry when he was not thinking, and were not about to try to strengthen and extend that case.

. . . starved as we live, because we never, never, never, never took a chance among the five or six thousand or million people of our small personal world to know them actually and individually . . .what actually the creature in the next bin is doing or feeling. And all the shyness and all the prudery and all the moral carpings are no more than so much heartburn from our chronic emptiness.
Shall we go upstairs now?

That woman would take a hundred shapes and forms over his lifetime, and Floss, troubled, confused, angry, amazed, would have to chide her husband for falling in love with every two- and four-legged female he met.

Miller had been complaining about the Senate's attempts to block David Lilienthal's confirmation as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a blockage that would have -- in Miller's view -- turned the bomb over to a few powerful industrialists.

[H]er poetic material, is in part the notes of a congressional investigation, an X-ray report and the testimony of a physician under cross-examination. These she uses with something of the skill employed by Pound in the material of his "Cantos." . . . This poem relates to big business and its "innocent" effects on the men in employs. . . . I hope Miss Rukeyser does not lose herself in her unjudicious haste for a "cause" . . .

[WCW] was especially struck by Lowell's ability 'to mention local place names . . .without that jumping out of context which so often occurs to make a work false sounding. . . [to] treat of American things and name them specifically without a sense of bathos.

[WCW] also spotted Melvin Tolson's 'Libretto for the Republic of Liberia' -- followed by Allen Tate's 'Preface' in the July issue of "Poetry" -- and incorporated Tolson's refrain 'Selah!' by the way of praising Tolson's 'cultured intelligence' . . .

[T]he organization of 'Paterson' is musical to an almost unprecedented degree: Mr. Williams introduces a theme that stands for an idea, repeats it over and over in varied forms, develops it side by side with two or three more themes that are being developed, recurs to it time and time again through out the poem, and echoes it for ironic or grotesque effects in thoroughly incongruous contexts.

What knocked me out most on those records was the slurring and division of words to fit the musical pattern, the way the words were put to work for the music.

At best, there is a continual friskiness, the writing is a fugue, comparable to the scene in "Twelfth Night" in which the Clown proves Olivia a fool. . . . His line sense is not only a music heard, but seen, printed as bars, printed (or cut as it were) for the reading. . . . one does not think of line-ends in him but of essential rhythm.

the triad that makes up "Paterson 3": first wind, then fire, then water . . . these become radical metonyms for the 'elements' of language itself

Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction ’and.’ Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives.

Jefferson said it. We should have
a revolution of some sort in America
every ten years. . . .
There has to be a new poetry. . . .
[T]he altered structure of
the inevitable revolution must be
in the poem. Made of it.

Billy Sunday, who [WCW] remembered had been called into Paterson in 1913 to break the back of the long, drawn-out strike by preaching God to the workers and reminding them of their religious duty to return to work. That Billy Sunday had preached at the Hamilton Hotel (ironically recalling the father of all those special interest groups that had crippled Paterson from its inception as a city), and that he'd received $27,000 for his services from the Union Factory Owner's Association, did not escape Williams.

monopolies using religion
to bring a man under an economic yoke
of one sort or another

[M]en are not strong enough to "bat air" with women. That forever proves to me I am not a man; they, men, disgust men and if I must say it fill me with awe and admiration. I am too much of a woman.