This Friday I’m posting an essay and poem I’ve been working on for the past few weeks about Star Wars. I’ve seen Rise of Skywalker twice now and have been chasing down other Adam Driver movies since. One of them was a slow, quiet and meditative Jim Jarmusch flick called Paterson, about a bus driver of the same name who writes poetry. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
He lives with his beautiful, soft spoken wife who has a broader and louder creative drive but compels her husband to share his work with the world, too. There’s barely any conflict at all and the climactic part of the movie only involves the title character in a tangential way.
I think this is going to be my chicken soup movie – the movie one watches to heal from a rough day or when one is too sick to move from their bed. The main character is a model stoic living his so-quiet-it-would-drive-me-crazy life and not having any problem with it. He processes it all with his gentle, solid writing.
Jesus, I would love to be that stoic, but as Ron Padgett notes, “…Jim doesn’t make realistic films. They’re like fables or dreams.”
Sourcing poetry for movies is a thing, since screenwriters don’t seem to do it themselves. The Kindergarten Teacher sourced the poems for its two main characters from three different real-life poets, and Jim Jarmusch asked fellow Columbia alumnus Ron Padgett to lend his voice to Paterson.
Reading the above-linked articles makes me feel very self-conscious about my own work – as I should, because mine is poor to middling and I need to spend a lot of energy and practice figuring out how to make it better. I guess that’s where “The Paterson Challenge” comes in.
I didn’t get the idea from feeling bad about myself as a poet. In fact I was inspired by the movie. I thought about how much I would like to switch gears every so often and just see the world around me, so I came up with the idea of a writing challenge.
The film’s story takes place over the course of a week, starting on Monday, so the challenge is to write a poem each day over the same period of time. It’s a challenge because I have to develop an awareness that I’ve let atrophy: awareness of the points in my day where I have the freedom to write as well as awareness of the things going on around me. One of my biggest character flaws is that I’m aloof, walled safely into my own little world, so this is much needed therapy.
This being my first challenge, I only got three poems down. Ideally, I would do all seven days and then post something here on Tuesday (because I once designated it poetry day). It’s Wednesday but I think I’m going to post anyway, because another character flaw I have is prohibitive perfectionism and I mean to kill this one with fire.
Here’s the most complete of the three. It surprised me and was a quick, impulsive writing. The image just surfaced from my subconscious as I rolled out of bed last Wednesday. Later in the afternoon I tried to describe it and this is what I got.
Old Rope
When you find old rope it is dirty,
faded, fraying into a hundred fibers
lying in grass like straw
dating back to the 1980’s probably
a very short section
culled from its longer self
unable to rope anything
in its afterlife
almost one with the dry grass
but not quite
a misfit retiree, taking the sun, the wind, the rain and snow
and someday, perhaps not too long now
a brush fire
that doesn’t discriminate
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