Against the weather: On teaching Williams

Julia Bloch

Joe Milutis & Williams's failure

Screen shot from Joe Milutis's sound piece.
Screen shot from Joe Milutis's sound piece.

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.

Visualizing Paterson

Question gallery.
Question gallery.

Our first week on Williams’s Paterson we began by constructing a question gallery. First, come up with a question about some key detail of the poem. Second, come up with a question about some formal element of the poem. Third, come up with a question about a larger question raised by the poem. Once the questions have been pinned to the wall, used colored post-its to annotate, respond to, and further question the questions.