«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.

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson

Jarmusch's film is not a strict adaptation of the 1946 William Carlos Williams epic poem by the same name. One might more appropriately bill it as a cinematic homage to observational poetry, as essay contributor Jack Ryan does. Jarmusch does, after all, shape his films around the tenets of such poetry. Jarmusch structures the film around what is taken to be a typical work week of its hero, Paterson (Adam Driver). That hero builds a deep sense of place into the poems he writes. The chapter offers that these qualities form the center of Jarmusch’s adaptation, which finds a way to allow a daily routine to protect the creative consciousness from the crush of modernity. The film ultimately favors the process of poetry over the content of any singular poem, a point the chapter claims that Jarmusch returns to each time Paterson meets another poet.

Coda

A concluding discourse on the survival of Pauline allegorical circumcision into modernity. Figures and circumstances discussed include William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Daniel Defoe, George Washington (and his cherry tree), the English Civil War, and contemporary political questions (particularly in the United States) around circumcision, antisemitism, and the lingering effects of the intellectual frameworks with which the book opened.

Dumb and Forked: The Street Tree Poetics of Millay and Williams

This urban ecocritical study reads the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and William Carlos Williams in the context of the American street tree movement, a civic health and beautification program that advocated for the planting of shade trees along urban thoroughfares. It argues that both poets critique the ‘ideal’ street tree forwarded by the movement. In ‘City Trees,’ Millay presents a shade tree whose therapeutic effects are overwhelmed by the noise pollution in New York City, much like the speaker herself. In ‘Young Sycamore,’ Williams eschews the visual ideal of symmetrical, evenly-spaced shade trees in favor of a wily, asymmetrical organism that actively torques toward the light. By extension, these poets present city habitats as alternately more toxic and more wild than the street tree movement had imagined, a critique with ramifications for contemporary urban reforestation movements today.

Hearing the Form: Breath and the Structures of Poetry in Charles Olson and Paul Celan

This essay examines the ways in which the American poet Charles Olson, and the German-speaking Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, each in relation to specific post-war cultural circumstances, experimented with new ways of structuring poetry in relation to the breath: Olson in response to new global scientific, political, and intellectual currents; Celan in response to the Holocaust. The essay discusses not only how the poets wrote but also how they realised the printed forms of their poetry in performance, contrasting Olson’s literal performance of his theories with the different relation of print to performance of his contemporary and associate William Carlos Williams. It argues that Olson’s experiments, polemically formulated in his manifesto Projective Verse, while they have influenced central currents of American poetry since the 1950s, have remained largely American, whereas Celan’s, tentatively intimated in his anti-manifesto Der Meridian, and inimitably personal in their specific forms, can also be seen as modelling ways in which a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry can be realised in reading aloud.

Usos de lo literario en las humanidades médicas: leer a William Carlos Williams y A Fortunate Man de John Berger y Jean Mohr

Esta nota propone investigar los usos de materiales literarios llevados a cabo por las humanidades médicas, a partir de la indagación de las lecturas concitadas por William Carlos Williams y el libro A Fortunate Man de John Berger y Jean Mohr. Por medio del análisis de artículos del área de las humanidades médicas que toman por objeto estos textos, se busca observar qué modos de hacer con lo literario —y, por ende, de comprenderlo— proponen con respecto a aquellos instituidos por los estudios literarios académicos. Se señalan como condiciones generales de estas lecturas un deslizamiento imaginario entre el autor, el narrador o el yo poético, los personajes, y los lectores y lectoras, y el desmonteje de lasfronteras disciplinares. Asimismo, se sugieren tres formas específicas de hacer con los textos literarios: una educación de los sentidos, la narración como espacio de especulación ética y la reescritura de discursos como el de la medicina.