Sara Crangle

Curved Lines: Forrest-Thomson,Klee, & the Smile

Although integral to most paintings, contours merit special atten-

tion in Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poem dedicated to Cézanne,

presumably because the artist in question was such a keen propo-

nent of the heavily-demarcated outline. Initially, Forrest-Thomson

appears to imitate Cézanne in proclaiming “the joy of everything

with edges.” Restraint, compression, and “assumed balance” are

extolled as the products of the contour in the octave of this Italian

sonnet, and we await the turn. It comes. The sestet reads as follows:

But these tight contours owe

shape and definition to the eye

of inessential man who

from complication learns to simplify,

fuse form with what alone forms cannot show,

and in this act becomes as sure as they. (27)1

Beware “tight contours”: in delineating, they delude us into a state

of certainty, making us believe in what cannot be seen — “learning

to simplify” is surely suspect. Forrest-Thomson is not genuinely

interested in straightforward lines of clarification, and her address

to deceptively clear painted lines is both satirical and readily

extended to the poetic line. As she stated at a 1975 reading, the most

important principle of poetry is that it “progress by deliberately try-

ing to defeat the expectations of its readers or hearers, especially the

expectation that they will be able to extract meaning from a poem”

(169). Forrest-Thomson strives to destabilise her audience, a moti-

vation clearly in keeping with the inherent unsteadiness of the

phrase “assumed balance” in “Contours — Homage to Cézanne.”

Pursuing the defeat of audience expectation has a much longer

history than Forrest-Thomson’s twentieth-century aesthetics, albeit

in the context of producing and comprehending comedy. Kant is

credited as the first to define laughter as a reaction to expectations

that yield nothing, an instinctual response to a mental void that

emerges in place of a predicted perception. Laughter, Schopenhauer

went on to argue, begins with observed incongruity; in turn, physi-

cal and societal imbalance are central to Henri Bergson’s seminal

1884 lecture on the comic. For Bergson, it is when the human body

becomes rigid, mechanical, or clumsy that laughter erupts. He

counters this stiffness with his own philosophical emphasis on the

unrepeatable flux and flow of subjective experience, suggesting that

society laughs at rigidity as a corrective, a means of ensuring “the

greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability” from its mem-

bers (11). Bergsonian laughter affirms a living “comic spirit” in large

part because Bergson lived in an age where it was still acceptable to

use phrases such as “comic spirit.” Vestiges of this sort of language

linger on today, where theorists have a tendency to describe laugh-

ter as transcendental, as if it emerges from, or can transport us to,

an inexplicable metaphysical cosmos.2

Whilst her poetry exhibits a self-conscious wittiness and extols

the unknown, these are not the sort of language games Forrest-

Thomson is willing to play; as a speaker tells us in an early poem:

“the individual ego (once called a soul) / must learn to let the tran-

scendental go” (32). And while she often describes or discusses

laughter in her poetry, Forrest-Thomson’s risibility does not, like

Bergson’s, counter human inflexibility by affirming the flux of life.

Instead, curiously, Forrest-Thomson frequently renders the act of

laughing in the same way that Bergson describes the cause of laugh-

ter. Forrest-Thomson’s laughter is not directed at rigidity, but is

rigid; her laughter does not free, but constrains. As one speaker tells

us: “So again laughter muscles / go through their contractions nicely,

for it’s [sic] all right; / you can move now” (110). Forrest-Thomson’s

laughter is bitter: it emerges ironically after love is proclaimed, or is

tied to the fear of becoming a laughingstock.3 “Mirth,” one speaker

asserts, “cannot move a soul in agony” — in Forrest-Thomson’s

poems, mirth does not even move the laugher (135). These sardonic

tendencies are perhaps surprising in the work of a writer so keenly

interested in the failure of language to communicate; in her exten-

sive explorations of non-verbal expression, laughter might well fea-

ture positively as well as derisively.

But while Forrest-Thomson’s levity rarely rises, her combined

interests in gesture and picture produce a notable attentiveness to

the curved line. And while curvaciousness takes on many guises in

Forrest-Thomson’s work, it is the deflected and expressive line that

is the human smile that particularly intrigues and amuses. Of course,

smiling is not limited to an expression of observed humour; smiles

signal joy, scorn, grimacing, and tired acceptance, among other

things. But it is the very multivalence of the smile to which Forrest-

Thomson returns; unlike her mentions of laughter, her smiles are

presented complexly and playfully. In making this distinction

between laughter and smiling, Forrest-Thomson is in league with

traditional theories of laughter. For just as laughter has been rather

singularly limited to an outcome of perceived incongruity and

imbalance in philosophical thought, so too is its presentation con-

strained and unyielding in Forrest-Thomson’s poetry; by stark con-

trast, the smile emerges as a locus of open-ended interpretation and

balance. In depicting the smile as a source of witty equilibrium,

Forrest-Thomson echoes not philosophical thinking, but rather,

considerations of the curved line in modernist aesthetics, and par-

ticularly those of Paul Klee, whose ingeniously childlike paintings

directly inspired some of her poetry.

To begin: some general thinking about curves. A very familiar

curved line is, of course, the bracket; the word “curve” has been used

as a synonym for parentheses, or curves that enclose writing too

distinct for commas, and not emphatic enough for dashes.4 In

geometry, a curved line is conceptualised as the tracing of a moving

point, one that continuously changes and deviates from a straight

line. In physics, a curve is a graph or line that represents a continu-

ous variation of quantity. In geometry and physics, then, curves

are associated with movement, change, and variety. This instabil-

ity is emphasised by Mondrian, who considered curves “too emo-

tional . . . and banished them from his art.” Critic Leo Steinberg

comments on Mondrian’s rejection of the curve as follows:

Consider now what manner of judgment this is — that curves are emo-

tional. Mondrian could not have arrived at it from a consideration of

their essence a priori; the proposition had to be empirical, generalised

from the emotional effect which certain curves of his acquaintance had

on him. Curves were weighed in their typical contexts and found guilty

by association.

Now suppose we apply an equally empirical test to straight lines;

our enquiry will lead to the following findings: that a straight edge on

a wooden surface indicates lumber, or furniture, but never a tree; that a

straight line limiting a flow of water defines an embankment or canal,

never a river; that a batch of fish surfacing in a flat plane betrays, not a

fresh haul, but a new-opened can of sardines. A straight line, then, is

the mark of human purpose, human cunning, enterprise, success. And

it is a fine example of unconscious human self-congratulation that the

word ‘straight,’ in our language, takes on connotations of superior vir-

tue. (277)

Steinberg’s is, perhaps, an almost too-obvious association between

rectilinearity and rectitude, one that reduces Mondrian’s art to the

basic — even base — aims and principles of consumer capitalism.

But of course, the straight line is the pre-eminent symbol of

progress. In his memoirs, artist Hans Richter suggests that in revolt-

ing against bourgeois European society, the Dadas explicitly worked

against any sort of “straight-line thinking” (58). And Richter is far

from the only Dada to proclaim the value of curvaciousness; on

June 20th 1917, Hugo Ball wrote in his diary: “The modern artist

will quite consistently avoid incorporating the impulse of his aes-

thetic creation into certified experience. He will convey only the

vibration, the curve, the result, and be silent about the cause” (Flight

119). Similarly, in an essay on Kandinsky, Ball praises that artist’s

ability to reject mimesis, “and go back to the true form, the sound

of a thing, its essence, its essential curve” (Flight 226). Belief that

curves are distilled essence and inspiration arises also in the writing

of Jean Arp, who claimed that many of his artworks began with his

perception of “a curve or a contrast that moves me” (243). Full of

breasts, buds, and bowls, Arp’s sculptural oeuvre is devoted to the

curve, which appeals because it is a natural, organic shape that

counters the precise angularity of human constructs such as archi-

tecture. The curve, as André Breton asserts in “The Automatic

Message,” reminds us of “a budding fern, an ammonite, or the curl

of an embryo” (23). But more than these natural associations, the

curve also evokes the infinite: it is synecdochical for the endlessness

of the sphere.

I’ve made much here of Dada references to the curve in large

part because Forrest-Thomson holds this modernist movement in

such high esteem; she dedicates a significant portion of her treatise,

Poetic Artifice, to a discussion of Dada aesthetics. Forrest-Thomson

is drawn to Dada because she believes that Dada writers prevent

“bad naturalisations,” or readings of poems that are tied too closely

to the specific meaning of words, and fail to take into account non-

semantic levels of meaning such as sound, rhythm, and cadence.

For Forrest-Thomson, Dadas foreground the fundamental artifice,

or unrealism, of poetic language, and, as a direct consequence of

this emphasis, are adept at defeating audience expectation that art

should have a discernible meaning. While recognising that this

defeat of expectation can generate humour, Forrest-Thomson tells

us rather sternly in Poetic Artifice that Dada writing should not be

reduced to the comic. Instead, we should use our disappointment as

a tool that makes us “better fitted to appreciate Artifice as readers of

poetry” (PA 131) — she thus shares with Bergson a sense that

humour has an ethical, improving aim. While failing to

acknowledge the culturally transformative value of Dada humour,

Forrest-Thomson is nevertheless attuned to the movement in other

regards. As in Dada manifestos, Forrest-Thomson points out that

Dada writing is nonsense but is not nonsensical; its obscurity is

programmatic, as there is always discernible form behind the chaos.5

Dadas may deal in extreme unrealism, but they turn that artifice

into a principle of composition — their work is not random. As

such, Forrest-Thomson believes the Dadas exemplify her maxim: “A

line must be struck between too much and too little experimenta-

tion” (PA 81).

This boundary drawn between various degrees of experiment

extends Forrest-Thomson’s abiding interest in contours and lines,

and a similar urge to delineate can be located throughout her criti-

cal writings. Echoing formalist practice, Forrest-Thomson con-

demns criticism that moves beyond the frontier of the poem. And

in “Dada, Unrealism and Contemporary Poetry,” Forrest-Thomson’s

distinction between realism and “unrealism” involves a boundary

both abstract and emphatically concrete. She writes:

If Realism in literature aims to mediate the contours of a reality we

know from non-literary experience and if it builds its linguistic tech-

niques accordingly, then Unrealism aims to mediate the already medi-

ate techniques of Realism into the contours of fantasy. Unrealism

accepts that poets tell lies, and explores and articulates the lies with all

the joy of the parodist who may step down from the telescope of theo-

retical despair to the microscope of technical detail. (78)

The contour Forrest-Thomson describes emerges from a fantasy

built out of a so-called reality. This edge lacks palpable definition,

yet Forrest-Thomson insists on its sharpness, its appealing micro-

scopic detail. Later in this same article, Forrest-Thomson suggests

that in reading and writing poetry we pass through levels of mean-

ing and their non-verbal extensions; we then return to the poetic

medium with a heightened, fuller sense of its formal principles.

What Forrest-Thomson describes is a roundabout journey in which

we do not return to our starting point, but to a point of greater

comprehension. She delineates, then, an aesthetic based on emphatic

lineation, attention to detail, and curved thinking very much akin

to that of Paul Klee.

For instance, Forrest-Thomson’s emphasis on the minutely

attentive contour recalls Klee’s painterly style: Klee is considered the

master of the hair-line, and Hugo Ball admired how, “[i]n an age of

the colossal” Klee could “fal[l] in love with a green leaf, a little star,

a butterfly wing” (Motherwell 54). Klee painted abstractly and

microscopically. But more than this, Forrest-Thomson’s travels

through poetry recall how Klee, in a well-known passage from his

essay “Creative Credo” (1920), takes a metaphorical line on a detailed

walk. Klee’s promenades are not linear jaunts from A to B; he does

not arrive at a clear destination, and does not want to. Instead, like

Forrest-Thomson, Klee invites his reader to “take a little journey to

the land of better understanding,” a journey that is entirely circu-

itous and curvaceous. I quote now from its outset:

The first act of movement (line) takes us far beyond the dead point.

After a short while we stop to get our breath (interrupted line or, if we

stop several times, an articulated line). And now a glance back to see

how far we have come (counter-movement). We consider the road in

this direction and in that (bundles of lines). A river is in the way, we

use a boat (wavy motion). Farther upstream we should have found a

bridge (series of arches). On the other side we meet a man of like

mind, who also wants to go where better understanding is to be found.

At first we are so delighted that we agree (convergence), but little by

little differences arise (two separate lines are drawn). A certain agita-

tion on both sides (expression, dynamics, and psyche of the line). (76)6

As Klee’s metaphorical journey continues, it involves getting lost,

and numerous encounters, including one with “a child with the

merriest curls (spiral movement).” In the end, he returns us to our

starting point, reflecting on our memories and impressions.

Although we’re directed toward a land of better understanding, we

never seem to arrive — instead, understanding emerges in the

endeavour to understand, rather than an end-point reached by cun-

ning or enterprise. Points are dead in this passage; elsewhere Klee

describes the point as “an infinitely small planar element, an agent

carrying out zero motion” (105). The point is an impetus, but

motion is the goal, and circuitous motion in particular. The circu-

itousness of Klee’s journey is echoed by the curved lines he encoun-

ters: the wavy rivers, arches, the spiralled hair, even, perhaps, by the

number of brackets he uses throughout.

Klee’s aesthetics are inherently witty, and his brand of wit shares

allegiances with Bergson, whose philosophy informed Klee’s high-

modernist era and whose work on laughter remains central to

humour theory. In their writings, Klee and Bergson emphasise

motion and feeling; both thinkers seek a balance between dyna-

mism and rigidity. Klee argues that life is defined by a continual

oscillation between tension and elasticity; similarly, Bergson con-

tends that the fluidity of experience is regularly countered by an

inevitable, ridiculous inflexibility. In order to illustrate the connec-

tion between these extremes, Klee sketches a pendulum, arguing

that it represents “a compromise between movement and

countermovement, the symbol of mediation between gravity and

momentum” (387). Gravity, or seriousness, is thus often contrasted

by levity, or a “movement that demands expression” (389). The line

Klee draws to illustrate the swinging movement of the pendulum is

a concave arc, or the expression that is the human smile. For Klee,

the curve and the circle are “the epitome of the dynamic,” whilst the

straight line indicates “the static” (40). Elsewhere, Klee suggests that

curved lines can supersede straight: “where the power of the line

ends, the contour, the limit of the plane form, arises” (64).7 As in the

pendulum diagram, Klee’s rising contour recalls a straight mouth

curving into a smile.

As for the Dadas, Klee’s interest in the curve stems in part from

his opposition to his rectilinear, technologically-driven age — he

finds in curves the playfulness that his art embraces. Klee’s celebra-

tion of childish humour bears similarities to Bergson’s pre-Freudian

conceptualisation of the relationship childhood memory and adult

laughter. But a still more specific kinship lies in Bergson’s use of the

curve to illustrate levity. Bergson tells us that the curve is comical,

even when it shouldn’t be, as when we mock the hunchback, or the

person with an overlong nose or exceptionally large ears. Bergson

uses these specific examples because, as he suggests, these curva-

ceous, physical “deformities” echo the comedy and appeal of the

human smile; in the hunchback, he suggests, “[y]ou will have before

you a man bent on cultivating a certain rigid attitude whose body, if

one may use the expression, is one vast grin” (13). So far does

Bergson extend this metaphor that he likens immorality to a curva-

ture of the soul — even the spirit can express pleasure, amusement

or disdain via the smile. Bergson’s discussion of the curve, then, is as

widely and diversely applied as Klee’s own; the open-endedness of

the expressive smile appeals to their shared emphasis on fluctuation

and process over linearity and end points. As Klee writes: “In pro-

duction it is the way that is important; development counts for

more than does completion” (35).

The curve, then, embodies infinite process, and a balanced but

dynamic oscillation between extremes; by ready extension, the

human smile is a multivalent gesture, occasionally tending to ambi-

guity. This open-endedness, of course, is part of the appeal of the

curvaceous, and in Forrest-Thomson’s poetry, there is some evi-

dence that she aims to makes broad use of the curve in a way that

echoes the modernist theorists and artists she admired. In the early

poem “Christmas Morning,” for instance, “A gull curved like a boo-

merang / slants the sky, tilting / the horizon with a surge of

snow” — here, a drawn curve challenges the stability of a world per-

ceived and presumed. The gull’s curve is paralleled by “Trees

stand[ing] shrunk” as if cowering beneath “crouching clouds”; still

more hunching can be located in the houses within view, which

Forrest-Thomson likens to “a huddle of grey tents” (23). The view

in “Christmas Morning” is etched out by curves that signify uncer-

tainty and unresolved waiting: the speaker tells us that there is no

longer anything to worship on this once-holy day, but that time

must pass regardless. Lacking surety, these scenic curves foreshadow

a later reference Forrest-Thomson makes to the “uncertain curves

and camber” of the mythic route traversed by all readers and writers

(116).

Similarly unstable, dynamic curves occur in “Antiquities,” where

Forrest-Thomson’s speaker declares: “A gesture is adjective, / two

hands” and “Emotion is a parenthesis” (85). A meandering explora-

tion of cultural treasures from statues in the Louvre to the Cambridge

townscape, the poem insists on the relationship between the body

and the body rendered; the phrase “two hands” and parentheses are

repeated throughout like a quiet refrain of paired and pairable

curves. As the speaker takes these small curved lines for a walk, he

or she doubts our ability to contain culture in museums, art, and

books, and by extension, questions our capacity to relay human

feeling. In their failure to contain, gestures and brackets prove

emphatically mortal indicators of the self; regardless of their effi-

cacy, both are nonverbal forms of communication that seep into the

realm of language. As in Forrest-Thomson’s poem about Cézanne,

even the clearest of contours — of letters, of typography — must be

treated with an appropriate degree of scepticism. And it is on this

highly sceptical note that the poem ends: “The art of English Poesie?

/ ‘Such synne is called yronye.’” (86).8 Here Forrest-Thomson quotes

The Ordynarye of Crystyanyte or Crysten Men (1502), in which the

author likens false humility in prayer to the grammatical term for

saying one thing and meaning another. This book contains one of

the earliest written usages of “irony,” and by referring to it, Forrest-

Thomson calls attention to a long history of self-conscious linguis-

tic slipperiness. Lacking confidence in the capacity of language to be

straightforward, the poem focuses instead on curved lines and ges-

tures, including, at its end, an implicit mention of raising one’s

hands in prayer. These gestures do not yield certain truth, but rather,

an endlessly circuitous journey.

Not all of Forrest-Thomson’s curved lines are quite so infinite in

interpretation — many end abruptly in references to death or stasis.

Forrest-Thomson’s “Subatomic Symphony” is another poem that

likens the curve to the living body. Here Forrest-Thomson com-

pares the liveliness of a wavy line to music. Music flows and ripples,

while discord and twang are modulated by “[s]ounds pitched at a

lower key” that “regain stability.” Like Bergson and Klee, Forrest-

Thomson illustrates sound waves or curves oscillating from one

extreme to another, yielding balance. This balance is also life gener-

ating, cyclical:

tune resolves

material notes of mass

and energy underneath

spreading like ripples of breath. (31)

But as part of this curving, circular musical journey, “Subatomic

Symphony” includes the lines: “Rhythm sways / to the throb of

decay” — sound waves signal both life and death (30). Mortality

and curved lines are twinned also in “Point of View at Noon,” where

the speaker regards lime trees “fixing their contours in a mould of

light” — mould suggesting both an external form and rot (19). A

picture of these trees is outlined, likened to a Byzantine “ikon,” and

rendered as dead as the scene immediately before the speaker. The

poem reads:

Framed in an unblinking eye

the scene seems no more living

or capable of movement

than the turquoise tendrils traced on this quiet vase

which holds severed roses

red against the blue enamelled sky.

Emphasis is placed on the deadness of cut flowers in this stillest of

still lives. Yet another poem suggests that contours dissolve the

future, an assertion followed by a graveyard scene.9 Cézanne’s “joy

of everything with edges” is certainly dashed in these far-too-mortal

instances.

This association of mortality and the curve is extended to

Forrest-Thomson’s poem “Ambassador of Autumn (By Paul Klee).”

Also known as “Harbinger of Autumn,” the painting in question is

dominated by black, bluish-green, blue, and white blocks laid out in

brick-like layers that emphasise the gradations of their shading.

These blocks frame two images. The first image is a tree, comprised

of a black trunk and a bright orange circle, located slightly high and

right of centre. Second, left and low of centre, is a white semi-circle,

or half-moon shape. Forrest-Thomson’s poem plays with the shad-

ing that the picture exhibits, opening as follows:

Year’s spectrum modulates

around the centre spectre.

Each single moment’s tone

appears alone, yet signals

the gradation in the air

towards the centre spectre;

clears a half-uncovered curve

cold moon, negative reflector

of the centre spectre (25)

The centre spectre here presumably relates to the absent centre of

the picture, as Klee’s tree and moon are deliberately offset from a

figurative centre defined only by spectrums of colour. The word

“spectrum,” which arises in the first line, refers to a figure that

haunts, and patterned wavelengths (or curves) of light, colour, or

other forms of electromagnetic radiation. In the phrase “year’s

spectrum” Forrest-Thomson extends light and colour — Klee’s

painterly mediums — to the temporal range of lived time: both

move toward a mere spectre of the stability centeredness might

otherwise portend. A sense of pointlessness is compounded by the

“half-uncovered curve” of the moon: the adjectival phrase “half-

uncovered” is superfluous, as a curve remains a curve, no matter

how much of it is on display. But as the poem continues, even whole

spheres do not fare well: the moon is considered “frail parody of

sun,” and the leaves on Klee’s childishly circular tree are “about to

snap, / fulfilled as things only may / whose sole future is decay” (25).

While the curved moon and bright, round tree quite evidently

counter the near-monochrome angularity of the layered blocks

around them, Forrest-Thomson consigns both to a future of autum-

nal rot without spring’s rejuvenation. Once again, potentially joy-

ous curves intimate stasis.

Forrest-Thomson reads Klee’s painting one-sidedly, generating

an imbalance in her poem; although replete with double meanings

and word play, the poem is neither comic nor open-ended.10 With

entirely different and more successful intent, Forrest-Thomson

elsewhere depicts curves as dynamic, infinite counters to the linear

progress toward death, and the smile best effects this affirming

countering. Quite unlike “Ambassadors of Autumn,” the spectres in

her elegy for Ezra Pound, for instance, do not horrify, but are easily

overcome:

. . . .Pluck the petal

in the orchard where the factions act on emblematic

colours, red and white; leap with Nijinsky always

poised for entrance in La Spectre de la Rose. This

spectred isle, defying death with gesture. Awhile

to porpoise pause and smile and leap into the past. (132)

Here image, art, and gesture can defeat time; the poem celebrates

brash smiles and buoyant, curved leaps of self and faith. In like

spirit, the speaker tells us repeatedly that Pound lives on, ending:

“He is not dead. Instead. / Give back my swing. O Ferris

wheel” (133). Like the curved smile, the swing and Ferris wheel

speak to an arcing triumph and an affirmation of life’s playful cycles.

With considerably less aplomb, the smile nevertheless affirms the

self also in “Tooth,” where Forrest-Thomson’s speaker anticipates

the dentist with trepidation, and closes with the anxious lines: “And

how can I be sure / of reconstructing the framework of that smile /

I left behind me at the door” (58). Lastly, Forrest-Thomson privi-

leges curves over straight lines in “The White Magician,” where

Leonardo Da Vinci is derided for presenting “the desperate flatness

/ of her smile” (39). A smile without a curve — however famous — is

just hopeless.

These examples bring us to Forrest-Thomson’s liveliest discus-

sion of the smiling face, “Clown (by Paul Klee),” where curves idle,

sidle, swerve, insinuate and grin — here the smile is a truly multiva-

lent curve.

The poem reads as follows:

Clown (by Paul Klee)

Seen in the wink, a link (with)

green flaunt, too clear in face (of)

shadows which do not appear;

a jaunty impulse, yet boxed,

looped (also) in

a curve idling, a sidle into

an angle, stencilled by heat;

hot thought read through

red through red thought

what not?

a whatnot leer

clear in nose swerve, in

blue insinuate grin let in

seen within (is) a view

somewhat askew;

and you? (21)

To use Forrest-Thomson’s critical language, a “good naturalisation”

of this poem might entail a reading of its repetitions — seen in,

insinuate, seen within. A good naturalisation might relate the wink-

ing, flaunt-y, jaunty words of this poem to its playful rhyme scheme

and clownish title. Instead, I’m going to offer a bad naturalisation of

this poem, in large part because I think the title asks for it. My bad

naturalisation reduces the poem to what I think it means, which is

as follows: Forrest-Thomson’s poem is about Klee’s 1929 painting

“Clown.” The poem relies upon the painting to discuss perception,

and to argue against the certainty of any single viewpoint. The

speaker is playfully and adamantly opposed to straightforwardness,

and enjoys oscillating between the comic and the tragic. As in Klee’s

illustration of the pendulum, the pursuit of balance in Forrest-

Thomson’s poem hinges on the visualisation of the curved shape

and open-ended, expressive gesture of the human smile.

First: perception. In the painting itself, a green circle on the

clown’s shoulder mirrors the red, open eyeball of the portrait; the

mirroring here underscores, of course, how red and green are

complementary colours. Seen in the wink of line one, then, is the

colour that links that green eyeball to the green pie-shape or hat on

the clown’s head, which is arguably the source of the “green flaunt”

of line two. Perception, I suspect, is embodied in those lines midway

through the poem where reading, the colour “red” (homophoni-

cally recalling past-tense “read”) and hot thoughts unfold; the fig-

ure in the painting might be seen as absorbing and assimilating the

redness that dominates the background of the portrait. We’re mov-

ing here toward a view that is askew: crooked, out of position,

oblique. Crookedness is enhanced by the sense that the figure in the

painting is not quite singular: we can make two portraits from the

line Klee has drawn down the middle of this face. It is unlikely that

the portrait is of two people — the singular noun of the title sug-

gests otherwise, and clowns are generally solitary, estranged crea-

tures. I think Klee’s portrait depicts a masked clown, and this read-

ing is consistent with Klee’s carnivalesque, early sketches, where

masks often feature.11 Masks point to the fact that self can take on

many guises; hence, perhaps, Klee’s display of this double-faced

creature (both profile and frontal portrait) as firmly contained

within the contours of the emphatically single, oval head. Due to

facial expression and ruff, this clown is most likely a Pierrot. Stock

characters in nineteenth-century and Expressionist art, Pierrots are

riven by unrequited love, alienated to the point of madness, and the

butt of pranks. Pierrots are naïve, trusting, and moonstruck, and

Klee’s wistful, unsmiling clown betrays this pathos. Their capacity

to quest and question may well be the source of the cloying queries

in Forrest-Thomson’s poem, both of which follow moments of

perception.

Forrest-Thomson’s derision toward clear contours resurfaces on

lines two and three of this poem: there are not enough shadows in

this figure, which is jaunty, yet somehow constrained, boxed. But

the curve of the green pie-shape intrigues, as it sidles into the angu-

lar division of the clown’s face. Deviance is stressed throughout: the

“idle” of “curve idling” refers to something that leads to no solid

result, vanity, foolishness. A leer is also indirect, a side glance; in its

original, Old English usage, leer meant countenance, or face; as

such, Forrest-Thomson’s “whatnot leer” nicely embodies the sub-

ject at hand — the portrait — and the newer sense of leer as “a look

or roll of the eye expressive of slyness and malignity.” So too does

the swerve of “nose swerve” suggest a turning aside, away from the

straight or direct course, a deflection or transgression. Perception in

the poem is askant, off-balance, and the avoidance of certainties is

compounded by the term “whatnot,” which embodies a nondescript

anything and everything. “Whatnot” can also be a euphemism for

something the speaker does not want to name, which perhaps takes

us back to deviance. Against these vacillations, the didactic sureness

of the title, the winking, linked first line, and the flaunted jauntiness

of the first stanza announce show, display, and liveliness.

Forrest-Thomson’s love of unrealism arises in the “blue insinu-

ate grin” of the third stanza. The “blue insinuate grin let[s] in” a

view, seen within, askew; it is a curve that is artificial — it does not

exist in the painting, where the blue mouth of the Pierrot is emphat-

ically straight — but is internal, or central to the composition of the

poem, which is consumed with deviating lines and curves even in

its punctuation, its repetition of parentheses. To insinuate is to

introduce by imperceptible degrees; Forrest-Thomson may suggest

this is a clown on the verge of a smile. But insinuation means many

things: it is subtle, artful, cunning, oblique, implied — as unread-

able as the smile itself. And a “grin” may well be the smile at its most

ambiguous: in Old English, “to grin” means to draw back the lips

and show the teeth in pain, anger, or pleasure.12 The grin, then,

embodies both comedy and tragedy; it is the arc-line of balanced

momentum that Klee illustrates in his quest for a dynamic connec-

tion between extremes. And the speaker’s articulation of an implied

grin is also very much in keeping with Klee’s thinking on artistic

reception. Writing about the salutary effects of art, Klee claims that

imagination “conjures up states of being that are somehow more

encouraging and inspiring than those we know on earth or in our

conscious dreams.” He adds that these unreal states indicate “[t]hat

ethical gravity exists with impish tittering at doctors and priests”

(80). In her interpretation of Klee’s painting, Forrest-Thomson

conjures up the gravity and levity of a non-extant grin, a grin both

implied and implying, even as it embodies the extremes of tragedy

and comedy: the grin in “Clown” is a foray into unrealism that is

both witty and balanced.

Here we might pause to consider Klee’s description of balance,

whilst keeping the physical act of grinning in mental view:

The base broadens and with it the horizontal at the expense of the

vertical. An appreciable relaxation sets in, an epic tempo as against

the dramatic of the vertical, though, of course, this does not exclude

the balancing of both sides. The vertical is still with us. Balance is

excluded only when . . . the scales congeal, e.g. in the most primitive

of structural rhythms, where there are only horizontal or vertical

lines. (212)

As in Klee’s description of a contour arising from a line, this passage

delineates a broadening horizontal that recalls the sideways line of

the mouth extending to a smile, and leading to a relaxed dynamism

that keeps extremes — of emotional states, of levity and gravity — in

view. Or as Forrest-Thomson puts it in another poem: “Value of

forces in two dimensions / — equilibrium”; indeed, in this poem,

balance is described as a means of “express[ing] unknown in

known” — yet another unification of extremes (37). In “Clown,” the

insinuated grin embodies Forrest-Thomson’s own delineation of

creative flux, her suggestion that “what makes any work of art valu-

able is its dynamic expression of the inter-relation between subject/

object which is often expressed in the content/form tension” (164).

“Clown (By Paul Klee)” strives to counterpoise dynamism and ten-

sion by exhibiting the physical pendulum swing of expression, pic-

torial and poetic, wistful and lively. Forrest-Thomson’s “Clown”

aims to capture the “jaunty impulse” of Klee’s painting, and the way

in which we — his audience and hers — are, to quote the poem,

“looped (also) in” to a circuitous journey to an unqualified land of

understanding. The line “looped (also) in” nicely gestures towards

the extremes of a curve crossing itself, or a curvaceous journey that

loops back to a new and different location — the final “and you?” of

the poem leaves assessment of our arrival point up to us.

The smile is multivalent; it captures extremes of anguish, deri-

sion, scorn, pleasure, joy, and affection. As Robert Motherwell

writes, “there is a point on the curve of anguish where one encoun-

ters the comic. I think of Miró, of the late Paul Klee, of Charlie

Chaplin, of what healthy human values their wit displays” (qtd in

O’Hara). The duality of comic anguish in Klee’s art hangs suspended

in Forrest-Thomson’s poem about Klee’s “Clown.” Forrest-Thomson

is interested in the swing, motion, ambiguity and evanescence of

the smile, rather than the clarity of the contour: at the end of her

essay on Dada, she lauds some lines written by Tristan Tzara for

their representation of “[t]he rhythm of the impersonal voice of

language on the printed page” which “gives indeed neither joy nor

sorrow, but only the curved archaic smile of an early Greek kouros”

(92). Smiles are living, playful curved lines that delineate, but also,

helpfully, deceive. As Klee writes in one of his poems, a “[s]mile of

mutual comprehension” can rapidly disorient or distance; the line

following this mutual smile reads: “Not everyone should decipher

this, / else, alas / I’d be totally betrayed” (Watts 134). So, while

many — arguably too many — of Forrest-Thomson’s curved lines

and poetic journeys end in a kind of death-tinged stasis or one-

sided rigidity, I tend to read the suggestion in her “Individuals” that

poetry “try / to straighten the spring” as satire (67). For, as in Klee’s

aesthetics, Forrest-Thomson’s lines often are at their best when cir-

cuitous, even emphatically curved. Ultimately, the smile allows for

an ambivalence that is more balanced — and more fruitfully and

wittily open-ended — than the rigid incongruity said to catalyse

laughter.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all Forrest-Thomson primary source quotations are drawn from Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Collected Poems.

2 For a history of this transcendental strain in laughter theory (of which Nietzsche and Bataille are the most famous proponents), see Barry Sanders’s Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History; for a recent version of the same strain, see Diane D Davis, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Arthur Koestler describes laughter as self-transcendence in The Act of Creation, and Hub Zwart gives it the sta-tus of truth in Ethical Consensus and the Truth of Laughter.

3 See “Sonnet” (141) and “The Garden of Proserpine” (139) respectively.

4 All definitions are drawn from the on-line OED.5 See, for instance, Arp’s “Notes from a Dada Diary,” where he discusses the rela-

tionship between Dada and nonsense, and claims that while Dada is pro-nonsense, this “does not mean bunk” (Motherwell 221-223).

6 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Klee’s aesthetics are drawn from Paul Klee Notebooks: The Thinking Eye.

7 Klee regularly, if inadvertently, uses the smile as an index of the world around us and its latent appeal: in a discussion of “natural measurement,” for instance, he mentions increase and decease, “and between them, culmination” (13). The sketch that results is the shape of a curved human mouth, turned on its side. This comic, inverted image is countered by an illustration of artificial measurement, which is akin to a blocky Mayan temple; by marked contrast, “natural measurement” is not constructed, but emerges from the fluidity of human expression.

8 A similar scepticism emerges in “Pastoral,” where “contours clear” of a country meadow and its clover do not compensate for names that are “jagged” and cannot be possessed, which “Remind us that the world is not ours.” Like modernists from Nietzsche forward, Forrest-Thomson exhibits enormous suspicion toward what she calls in this poem, “the frightful glare of nouns and nerves.” While the conflation of nouns and nerves here suggests that language is a part of the body, the poem ends with a contradictory reading in which language is emphatically tied to the artificial-ity of the machine: car brakes squealing are likened to “our twisted words” (123). In “Pastoral,” language is an unyielding, alien tool.

9 See “Provence” (24).10 Forrest-Thomson also writes on another painting by Klee; both poem and

painting are called “Landscape with Yellow Birds.” The painting in question empha-sises playfulness — upside-down yellow birds feature throughout — and large swathes of organic, curved leaf shapes, much like sideways-on smiles, dominate the picture. Forrest-Thomson’s poem is concrete, experimental, and oblique; apart from her turn and return to Klee’s paintings with notable curved shapes, I am at a loss to generate any connective or significant reading of this poem.

11 See, for instance, Margaret Plant’s excellent book, Paul Klee: Figures and Faces, and particularly chapter two, “The Mask Face.”

12 The word “grin” is related to Old and Middle High German words grennan — to mutter or grunt — and grennan — to wail or grin. For etymological overview of grin and leer see Trumble 81-86.

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