If our experience of the poem is also the poem experiencing itself then our experience of language and place is a singing of ourselves into existence

“The use of Irish that in the words of Theo Dorgan, ‘places us out of the language set of the boat’ specifically appeals to speaking and identity.  It speaks to the individual ‘saying’, in the act of ‘saying’ but not only in Irish but as an individual voice speaking out of its own boat.”(An Gailearaí, Donegal. Ciall 2011)

The Gaeltacht sensibility depends in the end upon one premise that it keeps speaking that it keeps saying, that it keeps sounding.

Within my own register of voices the poet Maggie O’Sullivan speaks of growing up in Yorkshire with Irish Parents and how that has skewed her relationship to language.   To paraphrase John Hall[1] this work places itself as a gerund ‘an action’ caught as a thing’.  A performance of it would anticipate itself as a thing in action.  The sensibility of the Gealtacht is or has to be that of an action, an anticipation of a ‘we’, of a making of a present.  Otherwise it ceases to be.

This work anticipates a reader, a viewer, an other making a meaning. That meaning is a present of activity, the Gealtacht makes a present out of its own body of language, language of body, of I of mé, of tú, of muid. The world exists as and how we sing it into existence, anticipate its present. While it reaches graphically towards voice this work must retain its link to writing and reading, its focus is on the making of meaning and identity through language and the material bodies present in that activity. The visceral qualities of the graphic sign and the reader viewers body in equal focus

[1] John Hall, Thirteen Ways of Talking About Performance Writing,(Plymouth College of Art Press, 2007) p.27.