«EVERYDAY LIFE» IN THE WORKS BY W. C. WILLIAMS AND J. JARMUSCH: FROM POETRY TO POETICS. INTERMEDIALITY

The article examines William Carlos Williams’ works that focus on the everyday, mundanity, and poetize daily life which was common in modernist literature. In our time, Williams’ poetry inspired director Jim Jarmusch to make a poetic film «Paterson» about everyday life and the poetic potential of ordinary routine life. The director reinterprets Williams’ ideas and makes a complex, postmodern film about everyday life in the small town Paterson, where he depicts the routine life of his main character, a bus driver. This life, despite its external simplicity and triviality, encourages the hero named Paterson to read modernist literature and write his own poems whose themes and images are intertwined with the work of the well-known Paterson resident, William Carlos Williams himself. In particular, we examine the intermedial interaction of Williams’ works («Paterson» and «This Is Just To Say») with the film and the indirect transition of one sign system into another. In addition to the more or less direct and explicit influence of literature on film through allusions or quotations from the work of the American modernist poet, Williams’ poetry becomes a precedent for the stylized poems of the film’s main character, written by a contemporary American poet Ron Padgett («Another One», «The Run», «Love Poem») and Jarmusch himself («Water Falls»). In this article, we also compare Padgett’s and Jarmusch’s poetry with some of Williams’ poems («Blizzard», «To A Poor Old Woman»), to demonstrate the similarity of motifs and imagery. Thedirector’s work can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of looking for poetry in the everyday, or that everyday life is already poetry. Jarmusch’s film about everyday life provides a possible answer to the question of literary anthropology «why is literature as a medium important in people’s lives» – creativity is the very meaning of life. This penetration of one art form (poetry) into another (cinema) gives grounds for speaking about the relevance of the themes of modernist poetry in the context of modernity and about the meaning and value of simplicity for creativity in general.