Joe Milutis & Williams's failure

On our second day on Paterson we were visited via Skype by Joe Milutis, whose New Jersey as an Impossible Object blog I’ve been following for the last several years — since I first read Paterson in graduate school, as a matter of fact. I wanted to bring Joe in to teach us how to navigate the poem using sounds and images, but also to read his poem “By Defective Means,” which appears in Visiting Dr. Williams.

Joe pointed out immediately the irony in asking him to do so: “By Defective Means,” he told us, is the only poem of his to have been anthologized; his other work appears widely online and in performance spaces.