For verisimilitude, 'Paterson' borrows verse with MN connection

A new movie about a fictional bus-driving poet is set in New Jersey, but most of its poems have a Minnesota connection.

The film "Paterson" is about Paterson, a bus driver who writes poetry in Paterson, N.J., a town immortalized by William Carlos Williams' epic poem called — you guessed it — "Paterson."

Serving as an adviser on the film was the real-life poet Ron Padgett, whose work is published by the Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press.

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is known for such quirky indie delights as "Down by Law" and "Ghost Dog," as well as music documentaries, including the recent "Gimme Danger" about the Stooges. Padgett is a nationally known poet, translator and teacher. He had known Jarmusch socially for a while when, out of the blue, the director pitched him an idea.

"He called me up and said that he was contemplating a new film about poetry in New Jersey, and I said something like, 'Well there's a box-office killer right there,'" Padgett recalled with a laugh.

Jarmusch asked him to be the poetry adviser. After Padgett agreed, the director asked if he could use some of his poems in the film. Padgett agreed again, and says he was honored. Then Jarmusch came back and asked if he'd consider writing new poems especially for the film.

"I said, 'Oh, no, Jim, that's way too scary, too much pressure. I can't take it!' And he said, 'Well, what we have is fine, but ... if ....' So I hung up and then I thought, 'Why not take the challenge? What am I, such a big chicken? Come on!'"

And so he wrote four poems, three which ended up in the movie.

When you're a child
you learn
there are three dimensions:
height, width, and depth.
Like a shoebox.
Then later you hear
there's a fourth dimension:
time.
Hmm.
Then some say
there can be five, six, seven...

I knock off work,
have a beer
at the bar.
I look down at the glass
and feel glad.

There doesn't seem to be much of a story to the movie. Paterson is played by Adam Driver. He goes to work every day, drives his bus and catches snippets of his passengers' conversations. He writes poetry during his breaks, and then goes home to his wife and his bulldog, Marvin. Each night he takes Marvin for a walk and stops at the bar for one beer. Then he returns home to sleep. He gets up the next morning and does it again. He never shares his poems with anyone except his wife.

Don't be fooled, Padgett says.

"If you relax into the flow of this movie, you realize there's a lot going on," he said. "It's just that it's quiet."

"Paterson" is about people being in the world, Padgett said. And it's about poems in the world, too. He said that while some of his poems are personal — the first one in the film was originally written as a love poem to his wife — he doesn't feel a sense of ownership. He was delighted at how Driver made the poems his own.

"He never asked me, for instance, 'How would you read this poem?' And I was really glad he didn't, because how I read them is how I read them," Padgett said. "But I'm not in the movie. He's in the movie. He's portraying the character, and they become his poems, not mine."

Coffee House Press is celebrating the film by offering 30 percent off his books. Padgett said the film is so accessible, he hopes it helps American poetry. But that was never Jarmusch's aim, Padgett said.

"He just wanted to make a good film about something that really meant something to him," he said. "And I wanted to help him do that as much as possible."

When asked how he describes "Paterson," Padgett said he doesn't. He reckons he's seen the film eight times now. He just looks at it and marvels.