시란 무엇인가?

사월은 미국에서는 '시의 달'(National Poetry Month)이다.

이를 축하하기 위한 <뉴욕타임즈 서평> 특집 "What Is Poetry?"는

시가 무엇인가에 대한 Elisa Gabbert 의 에세이로 시작한다.

 

Elisa Gabbert: Toward a Definition of Poetry

 

(아래 삽화와 발췌는 이 에세이로부터)

 

 

Sue 여라

나는 Emily 이고 --

다음에는,

여지껏 네가 무엇이었든,

무한이어라

 

-- 에밀리 디킨슨이 올케에게 보낸 편지

 

 

I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.”

I love a definition this ambiguous.

['coherent enough' 알아들을 만큼은 조리가 있는]

 

If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry.... And since words in

aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, ... any words composed

in lines are poetry.... Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the

simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics

for that reason.

 

All texts leave something out ... but most of the time, more is left out of

a poem.... It’s why fragments are automatically poetic.... The poetic is not

merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence.

 

“What is poetry?” is not the same question, quite, as “What is a poem?” ...

Perhaps my favorite poem of Dickinson’s is not, perhaps, a poem — it’s

an odd bit of verse in the form of a letter to her sister-in-law, ending

with the loveliest, slantest of rhymes: “Be Sue, while/I am Emily —/Be

next, what/you have ever/been, Infinity.” ... The letter is written on a small,

narrow card. ... In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more

a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being,

than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines

in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

 

They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you

write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are,

your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an

awareness of the mystery, of what is left out.

 

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or

shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the

known into other, less familiar language.

 

The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and

assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it

seems to be giving subconscious advice.