There will be stillness.

Things will allude to things. Like twins.

 

“No ideas but in things,”

said William Carlos Williams.

 

The humor, deadpan

The dreams, real

big

 

No ideas but in characters

says Jarmusch

 

Poetry may be the only salvation

of the mundane.

 

The epic poem Paterson, by William Carlos Williams

shows a washed-up Paterson, New Jersey

 

A Whitman-esque The Wasteland

for the industrial everyman

 

Though the ideas,

abstract.

 

The ideas,

too modernist.

 

The film Paterson, by Jim Jarmusch

is the modern American equivalent

of sitting down

to meditate.

 

A film is a city

and there are no ideas but in characters.

 

​

Paterson is a 2016 film by Jim Jarmusch about a bus driver named Paterson who writes poetry inspired by William Carlos Williams.