회의와 확신 사이: 래이 아먼트라웃의 『통달』

Between Suspicion and Affirmation: Rae Armantrout’s Versed

This paper aims to read closely some poems from Rae Armantrout’s Versed and to interrogate how her poetry, well-known for its “terse, precise, and subtle” language, both hides and reveals possible connections among fragmented and juxtaposed parts whose origins are mostly unknown. Like other language poets, she is strongly against the sovereign “I” in lyrical poetry, and, using a kind of faux-collage, lets different voices mingle into her texts. However, she is not so willing as some other experimental poets to foreground ungrammatical or non-referential language for political purposes. Armantrout has a suspicion that the world is constructed of deceptions “already mysteriously arranged for us,” and, with a view to deconstructing the underlying forces, experiments with a poetic structure typically divided by asterisks or numbers. Her poetic language, relying on ellipsis and separation, is deliberately designed to make the reader fill in the gaps and decide how an affirmative awakening can be aroused among the parts.