이질성의 확산

Expansion of Unlikeness: The Poetry of Jorie Graham

This paper is intended to examine how Jorie Graham’s poetry becomes difficult in its effort to find final grounds of being through analyses of her two poems: one is “On Difficulty” from The End of Beauty (1987) and the other the title poem from Region of Unlikeness (1991). And it also aims to shed light on how she consistently keeps her sense of “the invisible” even when under the pressure of “hybrids” of things far away from their “region of likeness.” Graham has shown failures in abstracting conclusive bases of identity from any kind of being in the world. Through her conscious confrontations with the failures, she composes herself to decline any reliable vision of identity. This attitude is projected into her poetic self as well as into the world. She acknowledges that things come into being by establishing temporary relations among one another, and does accept it as an unavoidable aspect of reality, not as a chaotic phase which she has to be overcome. The land, where Graham arrives in Region of Unlikeness, is filled with a variety of floaters on the surface of time. Her poetry does not try to discover why things are there. Rather, it performs the process of asking and finding the why. She is intellectual and audacious in her manipulating of the language so as to embody the process, which results in new difficulty in her poetry.