Paul Klee: The World Before It Has Learned to Behave

There is something wonderfully suspicious about a painter who writes a poem called “Bimbo’s Pome.”

The spelling is deliberately wrong. The poem is written in the voice of a cat. Its subject is a violin, a master, smoking, scratching and irritation. It is only a handful of lines long, and yet it immediately tells us something important about Paul Klee: he was not particularly interested in keeping the world in its proper categories.

Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively. His lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Painter here. Poet there. Human here. Animal there. Serious thought here. Nonsense there.

Klee seems to have spent much of his life quietly removing those borders.

Some Poems by Paul Klee, translated by Anselm Hollo and published by Scorpion Press in 1962, is a small, strange book. The poems themselves were not published during Klee's lifetime. Klee died in 1940, and the poems were subsequently discovered among his papers—some in a blue notebook, others scattered through his diary. The first German selection, Gedichte, appeared in Zurich in 1960; Hollo's English selection followed two years later.

That afterlife is appropriate.

These are poems that often feel as though they have wandered out of a sketchbook.

And perhaps that is the best way to read them.

Paul Klee is usually encountered first as a painter: those little floating worlds of lines, signs, faces, animals, geometric shapes and strange colours. He belonged to the extraordinary generation that remade European art in the early twentieth century. He became associated with the Blaue Reiter circle, taught at the Bauhaus between 1921 and 1931, and eventually found himself persecuted by the Nazis, who dismissed him from his post and labelled his work part of the "degenerate" modern art they sought to eliminate. He returned to Bern, where he spent the final years of his life.

But Klee's art was never simply about making pictures. He was fascinated by how things become pictures.

How does a line become a face? How does movement become a shape? How does a thought become an image?

His poetry asks essentially the same questions with words. In Antonin Artaud's remarkable introductory piece, included in this little volume, Klee is described as an artist in whose work "the objects of the world / fall into order." That phrase is a useful doorway into the book.

Klee doesn't seem to look at the world and say: This is a tree. He looks at the tree and wonders what else it might be.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

One of the delights of this collection is how quickly the grand becomes ridiculous.

Consider “The Happy One”, written in 1901:

“The happy one, who is almostan idiot, everythingblossoms, bears fruitfor him.”

This sounds almost like a children's fable until you notice the cruelty underneath it. The happy man is almost an idiot. Everything grows for him. He waters his little patch of earth while pointing at himself as though he were the centre of creation. It is funny. It is also rather devastating.

Klee's humour frequently works this way. He gives us something charming and then lets a little darkness crawl into the corner. In “Irrational Speech”, he asks:

“Has inspirationeyes, or does shewalk in her sleep?”

That might be a joke about artistic inspiration. Or it might be a very serious question about whether creativity is something we control at all. Then, almost immediately, Klee brings us violently back into the body:

“my bellygoes on digesting, my kidneysfiltering their clear juices ....”

The artist folds his hands in contemplation. Meanwhile, the kidneys carry on. It is an excellent Klee moment: the sublime and the digestive system occupying the same universe.

Perhaps the most entertaining poem in the collection is “Individuality.” Klee asks what individuality actually means, and instead of giving us an abstract philosophical answer, he turns himself into a theatre company.

“Myself,for instance: an entire dramatic company.”

Inside him appear an ancestor, a brutal hero, a rake, a professor, a lyrical beauty, a heavy father, a liberal uncle, an aunt who gossips and a chambermaid who giggles. And Klee stands in the middle, watching them all:

“And I, watching it all,astonishment in my eyes.Poised, in my left handa sharpened pencil.”

It is funny, but it also feels startlingly modern. The self is not a single person. It is a crowd.

We contain contradictory voices, impulses, memories and characters. The "I" is perhaps simply the person holding the pencil and watching the others perform. For a painter, this makes perfect sense. A picture is made of fragments that somehow become a whole.

So is a person.

The collection changes as Klee's life moves forward. The early poems can feel playful, absurd, almost mischievous. But by 1913–14, something darker enters. In one tiny poem, he writes:

“I stand in full armourI am not hereI stand in the depthsI stand far ...I stand very far ...I glow with the dead”

The poem is dated 1914. That date matters. Europe is entering the First World War. Klee himself served in the German army from 1916 to 1918, although he did not see combat.

Suddenly the little poem about standing "in full armour" doesn't seem quite so whimsical.

Nor does the later “Dream”, where the speaker discovers his house empty, his wine gone, his river diverted and his joy stolen:

“I findmy house : emptyGoneall the wine”

Klee does not write a war poem in the conventional sense. He doesn't need to.

The world has begun to appear as a dream from which things have disappeared.

The greatest pleasure of Some Poems is that Klee refuses to explain himself. A moon appears at a railway station. A wolf eats a man while discussing God. A sorcerer's daughter watches the dreamer through a window. A star rises beneath someone's feet. A cat feeds on sound. A tiny stone sits inside the self. And somewhere along the way, a very serious philosophical proposition suddenly becomes a joke. Take “The Wolf Speaks.” The wolf is chewing on a man while asking the dogs where their god is:

“Where, then, istheir god?”

There is something almost Nietzschean about it, but Klee makes it grotesque rather than solemn. God has become a question asked by a wolf with a mouth full of human flesh. It is absurd. It is also unsettling. And that combination is central to Klee. His imagination does not make the world prettier. It makes the world stranger.

One of the most beautiful things about this edition is its physical modesty. The poems occupy tiny islands of text on large white pages. The typography gives them space. The book almost looks like a collection of sketches. That seems exactly right. Klee's poems are often not arguments. They are observations. This six-line poem, for instance:

“Water Waves on the water A boat on the waves On the boat-deck, a woman On the woman, a man.”

That's almost nothing. Water. Waves. Boat. Woman. Man.

But watch what happens: the poem keeps narrowing its focus, like a camera moving closer.

The world becomes a sequence of relationships. Water contains waves. Waves contain a boat. The boat contains a woman.

The woman contains a man. Suddenly the entire universe has become five lines long.

This is Klee the painter thinking with words.

Anselm Hollo, in his introductory note, makes a fascinating claim: Klee's poems possess a kind of "foresight and modernity," seeing in them something resembling Imagism, Brecht and even the later experimental language of the Beat poets. That claim can sound exaggerated.

Some of these poems are certainly fragments rather than fully developed poems. Hollo himself acknowledges that some might remain at the stage of what he calls "materia poetica." But the poems are undeniably odd for their time. They are compressed. Fragmentary. Visual. Funny.

Surreal without quite being Surrealist. Philosophical without sounding like philosophy. And frequently closer to a sketch than to a finished literary composition. That is precisely their charm.

The book ends with “Last Things Last”:

“In the heart's centrethe only prayersare stepsreceding”

After all the animals, dreams, gods, jokes, lovers, mountains, rivers, cats and strange little philosophical machines, Klee leaves us with four lines. And suddenly the book becomes quiet.

There is no grand revelation. No comforting conclusion. Only something moving away.

Perhaps that is why this strange little volume stays in the mind.

Klee spent his career trying to discover what existed underneath appearances. His paintings turned the visible world into signs. His poems do something similar to language: they take ordinary words and loosen their grip on reality. A cat becomes a musician. A wolf becomes a theologian. A human being becomes a theatre. A railway station becomes part of the moon.

A thought becomes a line. And a line, eventually, becomes a world. That is the real pleasure of Some Poems by Paul Klee. It isn't a book that demands to be "understood" in the conventional sense. It asks us to look differently.

Perhaps that is why Artaud's description feels so appropriate: Klee's art is an "ordering of visions" and "a search for the hidden sense." The poems are little doors into that process.

Open one. Step through. The world on the other side is recognisable—but it has stopped behaving itself. And that, for Klee, seems to have been the beginning of art. #PaulKlee #SomePoemsByPaulKlee #AnselmHollo #ModernArt #ModernPoetry #PoetryAndArt #ArtAndLiterature #ArtistsWhoWrite #PoetryBooks #PoetryReview #BookReview #LiteraryBlog #ArtWriting #ArtHistory #AvantGarde #Expressionism #Surrealism #Bauhaus #EuropeanModernism #VisualPoetry #ExperimentalPoetry #PoetryLovers #ArtLovers #Bookstagram #LiteraryDiscoveries #ForgottenPoets #ArtistsAndWriters #TheArtOfSeeing #ReadingList #WorldOfBooks