명미 김의 시와 공간의 문화 정치학: 『깃발 밑에서』와 『듀라』를 중심으로 (Myung Mi Kim’s Poetry and the Cultural Politics of Space: Focusing on Under Flag and Dura)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학연구 / 18호 / 63 ~ 97페이지
· 저자명 : 정은귀

초록

This essay explores the notion of space and its cultural politics in Myung Mi Kim’s poetry. Born in 1958 in Seoul, Korea, and then moving to the States at the age of 9, Myung has been considered as a poet representing the diasporic experience of a 1.5 generation Korean American. The critical venue on her accordingly has usually been focused on her biographical aspects within the frame of ethnicity and identity politics. To get over the limit of critical stance so often woven with ethnic poetry, this essay focuses on the notion of space, from the capitalistic everyday space where her poems are born to the space on a page where her poetic language appears as a material entity, and thus tries to expand the scope of her criticism into much wider recognition embedded with cultural politics and poetics, which her poetry deserves. This work, on the one hand, is to re-locate her in the poetic tradition of American poetry such as Language Poetry Movement. On the other hand, it is to see how Myung articulates and re-imagines her poetic space in terms of negativity and betweenness.
In Under Flag and Dura, Myung, by refusing to reside in the realm of both her origin and her new home in language, tries to invite readers to problematize the question of living in other language, of experiencing capitalistic commonness embedded in everyday life. In her poetics, both language and her diasporic experience are spatialized in a fragmented form and succeed in reconceptualizing the lyric I in the ever-changing moments of experience and recognition. In the process, we readers confront the raw landscape of late capitalistic system where English and capital are connected in social power relations. Her poetic space is, in a sense, the practical place where the autonomy of language, of the text, of the subject I is challenged and questioned, and finally attains the power of representation of reality in a slant way. Evoking the geographical distance between two different nations, roots, languages, and cultures, Myung inscribes difference in histories of other times and spaces, difference in languages. In that sense, her poetry becomes spatialized as duration of history, of broken memory, and finally attains the power of its materialized space in the form of contaminated English. Echoing one of the most radical free verse in the tradition of American poetry, her poetry shows how poetic language can be drawn in the energy of phonemes, syllables, sound, patterns and succeeds in articulating the unassimilable otherness in American space, in English and thus enacting transnational and transcultural presence on the page.

영어초록

This essay explores the notion of space and its cultural politics in Myung Mi Kim’s poetry. Born in 1958 in Seoul, Korea, and then moving to the States at the age of 9, Myung has been considered as a poet representing the diasporic experience of a 1.5 generation Korean American. The critical venue on her accordingly has usually been focused on her biographical aspects within the frame of ethnicity and identity politics. To get over the limit of critical stance so often woven with ethnic poetry, this essay focuses on the notion of space, from the capitalistic everyday space where her poems are born to the space on a page where her poetic language appears as a material entity, and thus tries to expand the scope of her criticism into much wider recognition embedded with cultural politics and poetics, which her poetry deserves. This work, on the one hand, is to re-locate her in the poetic tradition of American poetry such as Language Poetry Movement. On the other hand, it is to see how Myung articulates and re-imagines her poetic space in terms of negativity and betweenness.
In Under Flag and Dura, Myung, by refusing to reside in the realm of both her origin and her new home in language, tries to invite readers to problematize the question of living in other language, of experiencing capitalistic commonness embedded in everyday life. In her poetics, both language and her diasporic experience are spatialized in a fragmented form and succeed in reconceptualizing the lyric I in the ever-changing moments of experience and recognition. In the process, we readers confront the raw landscape of late capitalistic system where English and capital are connected in social power relations. Her poetic space is, in a sense, the practical place where the autonomy of language, of the text, of the subject I is challenged and questioned, and finally attains the power of representation of reality in a slant way. Evoking the geographical distance between two different nations, roots, languages, and cultures, Myung inscribes difference in histories of other times and spaces, difference in languages. In that sense, her poetry becomes spatialized as duration of history, of broken memory, and finally attains the power of its materialized space in the form of contaminated English. Echoing one of the most radical free verse in the tradition of American poetry, her poetry shows how poetic language can be drawn in the energy of phonemes, syllables, sound, patterns and succeeds in articulating the unassimilable otherness in American space, in English and thus enacting transnational and transcultural presence on the page.

참고자료

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