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William Carlos Williams: Paterson  •  Tom Lachais:Three Hundred Streets of Venice California • Calvin Wharton: This Here Paradise 

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Paterson by William Carlos Williams. £20. Carcanet Classics. ISBN: ‎ 978-1800173613
reviewed by Tom Phillips

The poetry that falls within the broad category of modernism however we want to definite that exhibits two opposite tendencies, both driven by a desire to – in Ezra Pound’s words – ‘make it new’: one essentially minimalist, the other essentially maximalist. On the one hand, there are haiku-esque Imagist miniatures; on the other, The Waste Land, The Cantos, Four Quartets, Paterson, Maximus Poems, Briggflats and so on. Despite the flourishing of the former, long or at least longish poems are as much a part of the landscape of modernism as they are of romanticism, neo-classicism et al. Don’t just make it new, in other words, make it big.
Most immediately, perhaps, the…