THE SUNDAY POEM: No 18 Tom Paulin

Every week Ruth Padel discusses a contemporary poet through an example of their work.

TELEVISION CRITIC, controversial essayist, and a literary-historial academic whose politics inform all his work. A Nationalist who grew up Protestant in Belfast, with an Indian-Northern Irish wife, a poet who is a passionate and original critic and political thinker, he thrives on fusing divergent worlds. Five collections, most recently Walking a Line, plus a Selected, of poems about art, history, politics, love, people in society, selves in a demanding landscape: their deceptively gentle and demotic voice, noticing and identifying deeply with individuals, is vehicle for a ruthlessly moral and serious approach to art and society.

The great Swiss modernist, painting aircraft logos for the Kaiser, provides a slanting, tender way into the ruthlessness with which art plunders life and turns instruments of power to beauty. The poem is on the side of the lippy private, who alchemises crashed junk into blank canvas, the prerequisite for art; on the side of personal letters, personal vision, against unlovely aristos of every kind. Its own democratic avoidance of punctuation (no inequalities like capital letters) is a contrast to the gothic insignia of royal majesties and Flying Schools, or to the junk formulas (echoes of formal) of speechifying drill. The artist who lays out a garden between the second and third runways is using the precision skills of lay-out and stencilling numbers which the airforce employs him for, to find ways of making an unofficial, unprogrammed beauty blossom between numbered runways and formalities of line. Klee keeps to geometry (he cuts canvas in squares), as he keeps to guard duty and varnish. But this private has a private way of seeing those machines which are the reason for the Flying School's existence. They start to look daft, ridiculous, half-joky and untrue while he slices bits from their wings which will acquire far deeper power and truth in the world - as art.

The first lines hold together musically round the "or" of boring (watch, watch , endured, horribly, morning, formulas), the feminine ending of cellar, (hanger, formulas, numbers, insignia, Bavaria, and on to weather in the second verse), and the rippling echo of gasoline and Zeppelin (picked up, perhaps, in wings). All "k" sounds belong with the enemy, the hierarchic powers-that-be: gothic, first-class, School, tacked with junk. The longer lines of the second verse are more relaxed, highlighting the painter's own words becoming more and more beautiful. There are a few ending-harmonies (garden, often) and internal rhymes (crashed, smashed meshing with canvas and ridiculous) but from each time onward, power increasingly shifts to the narrative, the mystery of what the guy is doing.

Direct quotations from the artist himself (horribly boring, nice this spring weather) underwrite the poem's own, casual, talky voice (and that happened quite often). Through this tone the poem increasingly identifies with the artist; the climax of this convergence is in the last three lines. These have a lovely smile in them, but also point out the divergence of vision between pilots and painter. The pilots and their planes have all the negatives (unlovely, untrue). For Klee, though, that negative becomes a useful blank. The last lines also suggest an inside-out way of seeing art. These primed winged canvases crash-land on something Klee has already made, whose beauty he is already glad of: his beautiful airfield. And the title says Klee is in Clover. His woman's name is Lily: planes land on the airfield. Art may serve war, but is more deeply aligned with nature and flowers against gothic stencils or labels like Flying School 5 (Bavaria). The real blank canvas, the real prerequisite for art, is not what you paint but the private flowering of individual vision. Klee has turned the whole airfield into a work of art by the way he sees it. And by the way he has unseen how other people see it.

c Ruth Padel, 1999

`Klee/Clover' is taken from Walking a Line (Faber)

Ruth Padel adds: apologies for saying last week that Carly Simon's `You're So Vain' was written by Carol King.

Klee/Clover

Nightwatch after nightwatch

Paul Klee endured

"horribly boring guard duty"

at the gasoline cellar

and every morning

outside the Zeppelin hangar

there was drill then a speech

tacked with junk formulas

he varnished wings

and stencilled numbers

next to gothic insignia

a private first-class

with a lippy dislike

of their royal majesties

and Flying School 5 (Bavaria)

he wrote home to Lily

it's nice this spring weather

and now we've laid out a garden

between the second and third runways

the airfield's becoming

more and more beautiful

each time a plane crashed

- and that happened quite often

he cut squares of canvas

from the wings and fuselage

he never said why

but every smashed biplane

looked daft or ridiculous

half-joky and untrue

- maybe the pilots annoyed him?

those unlovely aristos

who never knew they were flying

primed blank canvases

onto his beautiful airfield