블루스 시와 현대시조의 형식미 연구

Abstract

America's blues poetry and Korea's modern sijo shares many things in their basic forms and their development process. To begin with, both of them combine music and poetry. What is especially interesting is that the basic styles of blues and sijo are "3-line & 12-bar style" and "3-line & 12-foot style" respectively. Moreover, both blues poetry and modern sijo started growing significantly in the 1920's when Langston Hughes and Byung-gi Lee (Karam) actively started their career. In the meantime, blues poetry maintained its original form of blues but adopted variability to contribute to the birth of jazz poetry and hip-hop poetry later on, pushing the boundaries of modern British and American poetry. Modern sijo also accepted variability in its basic framework of sijo and continued to change itself to become the "oldest brother" among Korean literary genres. The basic goal of this research is to compare blues poetry and modern sijo on equal ground. However, it is an undeniable fact that one of them is in a more favorable cultural and literary position due to its political and economic power. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that blues is at the center of international popular music. Blues poetry derived from blues has also joined the mainstream so it is no longer a genre enjoyed only by African Americans. On the other hand, the position of modern sijo is rather weak both on the global scene and in Korea, despite the genre's originality and artistic value accumulated throughout its much longer history. Finding this unfortunate has actually led me to start this research. As in the case of blues, the strong vitality of sijo comes from its "open formal beauty." In other words, blues poetry and modern sijo can change themselves to express the poet's individuality and the poem's deeper meaning. In this context, this paper first looks through the blues form and short sijo form and then compares the formal beauty of blues poetry and that of modern sijo. It then goes further to find out what they have in common in terms of their cultural prototypes, to rediscover the value and potential of modern sijo and ultimately, to seek the symbiotic growth of blues poetry and modern sijo.