would help lead him to solutions in form and tone for Paterson. Vazakas had written to Williams before the poem had appeared. Williams now wrote Vazakas, praising him for the piece and urging him to collect some of his work into a book. He also asked to see more of Vazakas's work as soon as possible. According to Mariani, the way Vazakas combined "a long prose line" and "a sharply defined, jagged-edged stanza" to stand independent of each other yet remain mutually complementary suggested a formal solution. Williams also found an "extension, a loosening up" in tone in Vazakas's poems—an approach Williams would find seconded in the poem "America" by Russell Davenport in Life Magazine that November. Between these works and Williams's own continued efforts, he hit upon what Mariani calls the "new conversational tone—authoritative, urbane, assured" that Williams sought for his large-scale work. By late June 1944, Williams was working in earnest on the notes he had accumulated for Paterson, "gradually arranging and rearranging the stray bits with the more solid sections" as he approached a "first final draft" of what would become Paterson I. In his preface to the revised edition of Paterson, editor Christopher MacGowan points out that, even with Williams' protracted challenges in finalizing the poem's form, he "seems to have always felt close to the point of solving his formal problems." He promised it to Laughlin for the Spring 1943 book list of New Directions. He told Laughlin April 1944 that Paterson was "near finished" and nine months later that it was "nearing completion." Even after he had received the galley proofs of Book I in September 1945, Williams was dissatisfied and revised the work extensively. This delayed its appearance in print to June 1946. Composition Williams saw the poet as a type of reporter who relays the news of the world to the people. He prepared for the writing of Paterson in this way: The Poetry Foundation's biography on Williams notes the following source: With roots in his [short] 1926 poem [also entitled] "Paterson," Williams took the city as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought'." While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained during his research in preparation for its writing. On