Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the

fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of

combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and

with the mobility of sounds.^38

Fenollosa comments on the ability of the Chinese character to offer a
more immediate representation that is both visual and linguistic,
whereby word and image appeal to the readerís sense of both sight
and sound. This ëbrings language close to thingsí and provides
impetus for the notion of a more ëconcrete poetryí. A ëvivid
shorthandí of ëpictures of actions and processes in natureí, the
Chinese character provides us with a ëprocess of metaphorí that
alludes to both the ëseení and the ëunseení, by using ëmaterial images
to suggest immaterial relations.í Without metaphor, there would be no
bridge to cross ëfrom the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of
the unseení. Metaphor as the ëchief deviceí of the Chinese character
and the hieroglyph ëis at once the substance of nature and of
languageí.^39
Arguing that poetry can be delirious when it does not operate
predictably, Lecercle comments that like poetry, dÈlire is made of
metaphors that must be taken literally:

Instead of a linguistic system, we have the unreliable and unpredictable

workings of poetic language: not a pack of rules, a system, but a strange

growth, a machine with a dynamic of its own. DÈlire is made up of metaphors,

and yet nothing in it is metaphorical; it must all be taken literally. As a

consequence, frontiers are blurred, and dÈlire reigns everywhere.^40

This echoes the beginning of Anti-Oedipus (1984) where Deleuze and
Guattari insist that their argument is ënot mere metaphorsí.^41 Likewise,
Fenollosa was concerned with the loss of a more metaphorical mode
of representation and this was found for him in the Chinese character.
To deny the metaphorical as being somehow less empirical, as

38 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed.,
Ezra Pound (California: City Lights Books, 1936), p.9.
39 Ibid., p.13.
40 Lecercle, p.161.
41 Gilles Deleuze and FÈlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(London: Athlone, 1984), p.3.