Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson is set in Paterson, New Jersey, the city that is also the focal point for William Carlos Williams’s modernist epic Paterson, a telescoping study of the individual, place, and the American public. Paterson is home to—and the name of—Jarmusch’s hero, a bus driver and a very private poet, played brilliantly by Adam Driver. He lives with his ditzy but extremely loving wife, Laura, who is obsessed with black-and-white patterns and becoming both a country-and-western singer and Paterson’s “queen of cupcakes.” Like much of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, the film is a celebration of ordinary life. Every day in Paterson’s life is the same. He wakes at the same time each morning, kisses his wife, eats a bowl of Cheerios, goes to work, listens to his colleague moaning about his life, sits in the same picturesque place to have lunch and write his poems, comes home to have supper with his wife, goes to the bar. And he’s not interested in being published. His pleasure is in the writing, and in seeing poetry in the everyday. As Carlos Williams writes: “no ideas but in things— / nothing but the blank faces of the houses / and cylindrical trees …”

One of my favorite scenes in the film is Paterson’s encounter with a little girl who is writing a poem while waiting outside the bus station for her mother and sister. When she reads him some of her work, his response is respectful, tender, and genuine. The whole film is suffused with this gentle respect. The only fly in the ointment is Marvin, Laura’s bulldog, who hates Paterson (perhaps because Paterson leaves him outside the bar when they go on their evening walks?). After Marvin wreaks revenge on his poems, a bereft Paterson visits his usual writing spot. There he meets a Japanese poet and fellow Williams fan, who makes him a gift of a new notebook. “Sometimes empty page presents most possibilities,” he says, before leaving with an enigmatic “Aha.” And Paterson begins to write again. In the midst of the ongoing evils of our time, it is a balm to be immersed in the entirely unsaccharine Paterson. It is a privilege to appreciate how sweet it can be when everything—the good and the ordinary—stays the same.

—Margaret Jull Costa, cotranslator of “Three Sonnets” by Álvaro dos Campos

This story begins more than thirty years ago, in the late eighties. There are poets working at the Odesa newspapers, many of which are faltering. A publisher visits my school classroom.

“Who would like to write for a newspaper?”

A room full of hands.

“Who would like to write for a newspaper for free?”