“Say it! No ideas but in things—”: Punctuation Marks and American Locality in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article explores the innovative use of punctuation marks in William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson. Paying close attention to the typographical features of the poem, it argues that Williams aligns the textual surface with social spaces and uses the exclamation mark and the dash creatively in his modern epic to problematize the dynamic between the human subject and the vernacular landscape. These typographical idiosyncrasies are testimony to Williams’s vision of a localist poetics that is rooted in the American soil.