Paterson

Book 3 begins in a library—compared by the narrator to locust trees—where Paterson leafs through old newspaper files and observes the other patrons. The narrator sees both salvation and desolation in the library, which smells of stale heat. Several historical interludes describe local events: Native Americans accused of killing pigs and captured by Dutch soldiers, who killed the Native Americans; 19th-century thrill seekers who crossed the Falls on a tightrope and gave performances while aerial. The narrator meditates on the fraught relationships between men and women.

Paterson struggles with the urge to give up poetry altogether; he describes writing as like a fire across a landscape. The image of the fire connects Paterson’s thoughts to a historical interlude where Native Americans conduct a religious ceremony inside a wooden hut and to an accidental fire at a street railway company. The narrator explores the impact of fire on various objects. He also considers how fire is both beautiful and dangerous and how fire erases what’s in its path, including language.

A fire threatens to engulf the library and erase all of the language stored within it. An African American letter-writer, DJB, writes to a recipient she calls Kid.