Vital Modernism: E. E. Cummings's Still Life, the Quotidian, and Visceral Poetics

Abstract: Among his intermedial enterprises, E. E. Cummings engaged with the genre of still life. Instead of displaying inanimate matters in a traditional manner, the poet-painter transfigured the physically motionless façade of everyday objects into a dynamic and visceral experience of (self-)vitalizing. His aesthetic representation of the quotidian conflates the material and the immaterial as a modernist craft of art-making that recreates a vibrating entanglement of the thingy form, its surroundings, and one's attentive and meditative continuum. Through his verbal-visual experiments, Cummings overrides the distinction between the static and the motile, interiority and exteriority, and art and life, by foregrounding the intrinsic spirit of still life as an evolving desire to be encoded and reconfigured in varying senses and structures. His visceral poetics of reinstating liveness/liveliness from stillness thus provides the reader-viewers with an active way of dialoguing with the corporeal, affective, and imaginary realities that surround them.