Pungto of Sense, Pungto of Poetry -Focusing on the Pungto Imagery of Kim Chunsu

Abstract

This paper examines Kim Chunsu"s poetry from the perspective of pungto (natural characteristics of a territory or climate), a concept that unites time, space and community. From the time viewpoint, this paper deals with “tradition” as something opposed to history, and from the spatial dimension, it reveals how Kim Chunsu creates a unique poetic world of his own through his imagination. For Kim Chunsu, history was a symbol of violence and oppression, so he connected “traditional-time” and “community-place” through a kind of “sense of pungto”, which offers a different way to look into the flow of time than the one from history. The sense of pungto relates to a time and space that is forever resumed and, at the same time, is differentiated from the time of violent history because it forms part of a certain tradition. Thus, Kim Chunsu introduces in his poetry the traditional folk song taryeong and a Silla’s folktale called Choyeong but, instead of emphasizing its expected traditional elements, the poet transforms them successfully into a new form of modern poetry by the use of allegories. Also, he creates in his poems a certain feeling of tension between “inside” and “outside” by constantly juxtaposing exotic or unfamiliar elements symbolized by foreign place names and landscapes and images of familiar spaces represented through places related to Korea. The “inner” and “outer” spaces are embodied in his poetry in the form of poetic images that transform themselves into the elements of the pungto of a particular place. By reconsidering Kim"s poems, specially his “non-sense poetry”, through the viewpoint of pungto, this paper aims to examine the possibility of new interpretations of his works and to find the meaning that hides under his unique poetic world.