Home

Poetry & Personality

About Coach Mary Bast

Contact

Individuality

Individuality?
is not of the substance of elements.
It is an organism, indivisibly
occupied
by elementary objects of a divergent character:
if you
were to attempt division, these parts
would die.

Myself,
for instance: an entire dramatic company.

Enter an ancestor, prophetic;
enter a hero, brutal
a rake, alcoholic, to argue
with a learned professor.
A lyrical beauty, rolling her eyes
heavenward, a case
of chronic infatuation --
enter a heavy father,
to take care of that.
enter a liberal uncle -- to arbitrate. . . .
Aunt Chatterbox gossiping in a corner.
Chambermaid Lewdie, giggling.

And I, watching it all,
astonishment in my eyes.
Poised, in my left hand
a sharpened pencil.

A pregnant woman!, a mother
is planning
her entrance --
Shushhh! you
don't belong here
you
are divisible!
She fades.

Paul Klee, Some Poems by Paul Klee
(Translated by Anselm Hollo)

Paul Klee (1879-1940)
The Twittering Machine
(Zwitschermaschine), 1922
Watercolor, pen and ink over oil drawing,
41.3 X 30.5 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Karen V. Maur, The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art: Painters have always been intrigued by music, its incorporeality, its sovereign independence of the visible and tangible, and its freedom from the obligation to imitate nature that for centuries was felt to be binding on European art. While poetry, too, despite its higher degree of abstraction, remained tied to the concrete and nameable, music was able to unfold in a free realm delimited only by the rules of tonal harmony derived from its intrinsic means.