Episode 80
April 25, 2025

PatersonThe Door

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

                               Rolling in, top up,
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter;
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a
wash of seas — from mathematics to particulars —

                              divided as the dew,
floating mists, to be rained down and
regathered into a river that flows
and encircles:

                              shells and animalcules
generally and so to man,

                              to Paterson.

Suzanne has been enjoying Paterson, Paterson, Paterson! Paterson is a book-length poem by William Carlos Williams (you know, the guy who wrote the one about the red wheelbarrow and the one about the plums in the icebox). Paterson is a classic photo essay by George A. Tice. Paterson is also a film inspired by the poem, directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Adam Driver. And, of course, Paterson is a city in New Jersey. It’s near where Suzanne grew up, so she talks about how her own experiences open up these different reflections of Paterson.

Chris, meanwhile, has stepped far from home by reading Magda Szabó’s novel The Door, a classic of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. (Chris has never been to Hungary. Or Paterson, for that matter, despite also growing up near there.)

We talk about reading literature that emerges from a familiar place, and literature that emerges from unfamiliar places. And we talk about book covers that have mesmerized us — or not.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping to edit this episode!

[Episode artwork]

80. Paterson / The Door.

The Spouter-Inn William Carlos William's book-length poem Paterson, Magda Szabó’s novel The Door, and oddly enticing book covers. More episodes

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Show Notes.

William Carlos Williams: Paterson.

George A. Tice: Paterson.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016).

Magda Szabó: The Door, trans. Len Rix.

Also by William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, vol. 1 includes Spring And All. Collected Poems, vol. 2. Also check out The Doctor Stories.

Also by Magda Szabó: Abigail.

We mention our episodes on Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walt Whitman and Dante.

The cover of Joyce’s Ulysses that Chris describes.

The cover of The Door on the edition by New York Review Books.

Eva Hesse.

The covers of Paterson on Suzanne’s copy, Chris’s copy, and the first editions.

Charles Demuth: I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. (Which includes the text of the poem.)

Ezra Pound: The Cantos.

Ron Padgett. He's got a Very Collected Poems coming out this fall (over 1100 pages!).

Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems.

The Kossuth Prize.

Shushan Avagyan: A Book, Untitled, trans. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, but Chris has the edition from Tilted Axis.

Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan.

Margareta von Oswald: Working through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Kent Monkman at the Royal Ontario Museum.

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