/lit/ - Literature

400 pages per hour, mon œil. I can’t stand this guy.

>>12244524
>n-no translations are good
>i-it's you who's a monolingual subhuman
>gifting a native speaker translated works is sane and logical

How come there's no TURGID posting anymore? What have you homosexuals done to my /lit/?

What is his endgame? Why is a Jew so adamant in defending Western tradition?

It wasn't about a "great poet", it's about whether he's a poet at all, whether it's possible to participate in the tradition and artform as a person both removed from it and contained by it, whose participation is doubtfully authentic. The situation is late modernity: a poet bus driver named Paterson in Paterson who idolizes William Carlos Williams; he is the subject of "ordinary" life made poetry by a greater predecessor, and so his creative act is like a mere extension of that poetic invigoration of this world in which he's placed.

It's the real source of the threat of fraudulence in his poetry, rather than something social like that he is only a bus driver; it's that his poetry is largely things he sees and hears on the bus in Paterson, Williams' Paterson, that he is dealing in someone else's symbolic world, reducing himself to conduit for another poetry than his own. His dilettante girlfriend decides to be a musician because she saw a musician on youtube, and becomes one by buying the same brand of instrument as them; elsewhere in the film, the two of them are put on the same (un)creative level when she spontaneously comes up with a clever remark he had thought of earlier and was excited to repeat to her.

His inactivity throughout the movie, that is, his exclusively reactive nature, demonstrates this ongoing failure to contend with this overwhelming influence, to so much as submit or make copies of his work, as if not to disrupt this constant and paralyzing flow of what has come before through him. The girl poet, the only other one in the film, appears to him like a miracle, a source rather than a repetition (the other "creative" in the film: an actor who 'really' threatens to kill his girlfriend with a prop gun), and whose work is without the context that traps his - she turns out in the end to have a twin, demonstrating her (potential) breakout from the shadow state of mirroring Paterson in Paterson finds himself.

At the end of the film, he meets its only other reader, a man reading Paterson in Paterson. This is what allows the ending, where he gets a new notebook and writes a new poem, possibly his own: the man asks him whether he's a poet, which he denies calling himself a bus driver, and the man remarks this is like a poem by Williams; but then he goes on to reference Dubuffet, O'Hara, Ginsberg, and refers to Williams as a doctor. He re-situates the former superstructure of the poem within the town the two are in, and presents it the counter influences of other poets (counter by nature of another poem's possibility). He himself is a poet, he reveals, but only in another language: "translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on"; Paterson is similarly limited, he must acknowledge, by his subordination to another poet, demuring to life in its symbol the bus driver.