If New Jersey is oftentimes known for being perpetually overshadowed by its neighbor New York, then William Carlos Williams’s epic five volume poem entitled “Paterson” certainly helped put it on the map.
When I came in for a chicken pox shot, my mother mentioned to Dr. William Eric Williams that she could recite one of his father’s poems from memory. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
When I was a teenager I read T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound obsessively. (And yet somehow managed not to have a girlfriend. Go figure.) Eliot and Pound might seem stodgy and academic to most but for me—growing up in Fresno, California—they represented a larger, better world. Ivy League schools.