“There are no poets that were ever in it for the money,” Jim Jarmusch recently told British film magazine Little White Lies. “Nobody makes money being a poet. You scrounge, you have another job. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Frank O’Hara was the curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There’s a kind of purity of intent if you’re a poet. You’re not doing it for the money or the fame, you’re doing it because the form is strong and your hand is strong.”
In Jarmusch’s latest, Paterson (Adam Driver) is a poet, albeit an unpublished one. He scrounges, and he has another job: Each weekday, he wakes up, walks to work, and drives the Handsome Express 23 bus line through the crumbling, blue-collar streets of Paterson, New Jersey.
