Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

ëDesire does not speak, it violates the order of speechí.^25 For Lyotard,
via Merleau-Ponty, the invisible world violates the visible world as
the Freudian unconscious haunts consciousness. In this way, the work
of art is ëconstantly on the edge of its own ruptureí which takes us
back to Elmer Andrewsís statement about poetry on the edge and
Paulinís proclamation that his poetry is interested in ëthe dangerous
edge of thingsí.^26
The artwork of Klee, on whom Paulin draws, attempts to tap into
a nonsensical beyond. As the art critic Robert Fisher argues:

Paul Klee consumed himself with a passion for communicating the

incomprehensible. He sought to take the viewer beyond the concepts of

language, beyond the idea that the real world is what we see, and to remind

those who looked at his works that life is full of mysteries [Ö] His mission, he

preached constantly was to make visible that which is invisible [Ö]^27

Kleeís art pays attention to something other that cannot be fully
represented. Kleeís allusions to the activity of making visible (das
Sichtbarmachen) and an artistic in-between world (eine
Zwischenwelt), indicate a frontier of delirium or frenzy, where the
primal or pre-signifying haunts the edges of representation, and
nonsense underlies sense.
Klee notes in his diary on New Yearís Eve of 1909: ëMit
Morgensternís Galgenlieder sei das Jahr [1909] beschlossen.í^28 The
German poet Christian Morgenstern wrote Galgenlieder (Whistles in
the Dark) in 1905 and his nonsensical verse was prefaced with the
following:

Lafl die Molek ̧te rasen

was sie auch zusammen knobeln!

25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et LíInvisible (Paris: Gallimard/TEL, 1981).
Discours, Figure, p.239. Trans. Dews, p.46. Cf. Julia Kristeva, ëRevolution in
Poetic Languageí, The Kristeva Reader, ed., Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell,
1986).
26 Discours, Figure, p.384. Trans. Dews, p.48.
27 Robert Fisher, trans., & Theodore Reff, ed., Klee (New York: Tudor, 1967),
p.3.
28 Paul Klee, Tageb ̧che, ed., Felix Klee (Cologne: Dumont Schauberg, 1957).
My translation: ëWith Morgensternís Galgenlieder let the year be ended.í