Landshut ëbeautifulí by planting a ëgarden/ between the second and
third runwaysí. The painter took a step away from the received
politics of the state as he chose to go about his own business:
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
halfjoky and untrue
ñ maybe the pilots annoyed him?
Those unlovely aristos
who never knew they were flying
primed blank canvases
into his beautiful airfield (p.2)The poem plays with ways of seeing and with notions of authenticity.
The world of the pilots is ëridiculousí and ëuntrueí, and as jingoistic as
the ëdrill speechí each day. The aristocratic pilots are unaware of the
ëlippy dislikeí of Klee, the ëfirst-classí ëprivateí who, in his margin-
alized place as reluctant soldier, continues his role as artist and refuses
to swallow the dogmas of war. During his time at Landshut, Klee did
not avoid the overtly political and disappear into an aesthetic realm all
of his own. Rather, in his refusal to allow the war to overcome his way
of seeing the world, he undermined the politics of the day and took a
sceptical and critical stance apart in relation to the war around him.
While outlining the art theory of Paul Klee, as he is drawn upon
by a writer from the North of Ireland who has lived through civil war
and Partition, it is difficult to ignore how Paulinís obsession with
different kinds of lines and edges has a political dimension as he
questions ways of seeing and how we choose to represent. Ques-
tioning the way things are represented at an aesthetic level implicitly
challenges how we see and represent at a political level. The poet who
paces at the borders of aesthetic and political representation has the
potential to destabilize the real, what we take to be true and how we
represent ourselves to ourselves. Reading the outspoken essays in
Writing to the Moment (1996) or sitting through his disaffection on
BBC 2ís Newsnight Review, it would be impossible to declare that