파편의 정치학: M. 누베세 필립과 명미 김의 공적 실천으로서의 시

Politics of Fragments: M. NourbeSe Philip and Myung Mi Kim’s Poetics as Public Praxis

This paper presents a comparative reading of M. NourbeSe Philip and Myung Mi Kim’s fragmentary poems that draw attention to their countertextual impulse. Both of them, infamous for the radical experiments of poetic forms, have tried to delve into the relationships between history and poetry, between language and reality, between poetic form and content. For these two poets, poetic form has long been sustained as the praxis and methodology of writing to attain the public value of poetry and to problematize the ideological aspect of English as the world language in the current world system. The form of fragments, among others, has been the creative power to sustain the unspeakable witness and impossible representation in the past history. While the uncanniness of the fragmentary forms estranges readers sometimes, it provides a necessary position and effective angle from which to turn toward the unspeakable, the untraceable, the unrepresentable. Hence the claims of Philip and Kim that poetry must tread the route of words and vacant space in a new way, in the fracture and disseminations, at any how, if it is to bear witness to the human history and the forgotten, can construct the common counter-textual ground in the pages as the mixture of sound and silence, letters and blank, meaning and nonsense. This article, while relocating the scattered words in the texts of Philip and Kim as the act of de-contamination, argues that the radical explorations with the fragments in these two contemporary poets invite readers to rethink the public value of poetry, poetry as praxis of social, historial imperatives that can be fulfilled through everyday writing and reading.