of the lecturer conceals a clandestine entente with the listener, who could only
be rescued from deception by refusing it.^13If political poetry need not contain a committed ëmessageí then what
exactly constitutes a political poem?
Adornoís statement suggests that committed poems critique
received ideological messages. In Muldoonís ëLunch with Pancho
Villaí (1977) the ëpoliticalí speaker assumes that committed art must
be referential and that it must represent ëusí. Yet for Adorno, com-
mitted art wordlessly critiques referentiality rather than com-
municating a received message: ëit is to works of art that has fallen the
burden of wordlessly asserting what is banned to politics.í^14
Committed art communicates a message that is other to that of the
dominant ideology; it is unaccommodating rather than accommo-
dating to the world. Underlying this problematic notion of the agent
ëwordlessly asserting what is banned to politicsí is the idea of art as
defamiliarization whereby political commitment happens in estranging
art forms that bear the burden of a silence. It is therefore not surprising
when Adorno draws on the avant-garde work of Paul Klee as an
example of a type of art that is committed not to the comfortable
political messages that the world wants to hear. Although differences
lie between them as Adornoís more nuanced discussion of com-
mitment goes beyond Paulinís understanding of the political in
relation to the lyric poem, it is possible to see connections between the
views of Adorno and Paulin as they both draw on Klee.
Paulin would seem just as strange a match for Berkeley if his
poetry were to be judged in terms of the ëpolitical poetryí with which
he started his career. However, Paulinís Walking a Line (1994) moves
away from what can be crudely understood as ëpoliticalí or ëcom-
mittedí poetry, in favour of a more complex understanding of the
relation between aesthetics and politics, and this is facilitated by his
use of Klee. Walking a Line draws on avant-garde art with the effect
of charting a different relationship between poetry and politics.
Paulinís first poem in this collection, entitled ëKlee/Cloverí, reveals
the artist creating a beautiful garden in the middle of an airfield during
13 Ibid., p.98.
14 Ibid.