"공적 시 문화"에 대한 난해시의 공격

The Attack of Difficult Poems on "Official Verse Culture : Charles Bernstein

This paper is an effort to understand why Charles Bernstein, a leading Language poet, has chosen to write difficult poems of his own to the extent of non-intelligibility. To do this, first, it examines why he criticizes the "official verse culture" and the education of standard English, by investigating his prose and conversations; second, it analyzes how his experimental language makes sense depending on its nonreferential materiality, such as visual design and sound; and third, it traces how he develops new strategies of reading and writing by means of his difficult poems. Bernstein's poems are innately difficult because they are intended to obstruct such precepts as subjectivity, lyricism, authenticity, and the unified voice. For him, poetic language should not be a means to convey the voice of self. His poems are often fragmented, even pulverized, as a result of his strong discomfort with the standardization of language as well as his radical experiments with physicality of language without reference. What he tries to subvert with such difficult poems are not only aesthetic tastes for the beautiful and understandable, but also the institutions and systems which help to give an illusion of universality to such tastes. He is a political poet in that he seeks to regain the world by "repossessing the word." His difficult poems are an answer to his questions about how the official and the standard are historically and ideologically formed in mainstream culture and institutional education. He asks us to find a new way of staying in difficulty, not rejecting or overcoming it, when reading and writing. In so doing he hopes we might be granted both aesthetic pleasure and intellectual challenge.