[Feature] Poets and Citizens: How Should They Meet? / Song Jong-won
The Quarterly Changbi 190, Winter 2020
Abstract
The feature in this issue, “Poetry for a New Kind of Community,” explores various aspects of Korean poetry, in a search for possibilities of a new kind of community after the Candlelight Revolution. Since the late-2000s, we at Changbi have led discussions about “poetry and politics”—a topic of heated debate within literary circles. Again, we present a topic of essential importance in our discourse on poetry and criticism. Literary critic Song Jong-won pays attention to the fact that the Candlelight Revolution and the Covid19 pandemic have awakened civic agency in us, and that the citizen is a subject in the making. Based on this realization, he re-evaluates the relationship between the citizen and the poet, considered to be in opposition to each other in past discussions on “poetry and politics,” while revisiting Paik Nak-chung’s argument for “civic literature” in the 1960s, in which he argued for the possibility of their concurrence. Song then examines how civic vitality has been depicted in poetry through his close reading of poems by An Hui-yeon and Yi Jeong-hun.