. : MatthewDallman.com : . The Official Site for Matthew Dallman's Music, Art, & Writing

Again, from the introduction to Break, Blow, Burn:

In gathering material for this book, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past forty years. Our most honored poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment, and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering dairy entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or the material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant -- lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government bad) that looks naive enxt to the incisive writing about politics on today's op-ed pages. To be included in this book, a poem had to be strong enough, as an artifact, to stand up to all the great poems that precede it....One of my aims is to challenge contemporary poets to reassess their assumptions and modus operandi.

The beauty of Paglia's commentary is that, while here directed specifically to poets, in its best moment it poses no major conflict when transformed into commentary for all artists, of any medium. One of my longest held contentions is that at every level of being (physical, mental, spiritual) artists can learn methodology from one another, and Paglia provides direct example of that. I know many poets whose whirled assumptions and modus operandi ought be deeply questioned, but I also know many musicians, actors, sculptors, cooks, filmmakers, and so on that ought stand the same inquiry.

Before I resigned from wilber university, I was in the process of developing the strategy and architecture for an online library of artist methodologies that arists of any medium could learn from. Victoria was helping in this task. It had to be abandoned when I left that circle, but it is growing close to the time when work on it ought resume. A truly transdisciplinary artist library of methodology -- what a resource and touchstone that will be! Stay tuned on that count (and if you want to help, let me know).

One other note: The elevation of process over form is symptomatic of worldviews in transition (a condition of our tumultuous age) but in fact every artist from the beginning of art that we know about has been able to successfully transcend their own artistic process. 'Process as art' is a remnant of late modernism (or if you must, 'postmodernism) and has long since lost its novelty and attraction, and is now a gimick. Because its replacement is undecided-upon in any wide-scale, it can easily be recycled as an excuse to not go the final, exhausting, difficult, and scary steps towards a truly completed artifact, with a full and coherant extension of the artist's present consciousness. No books or instructional DVDs talk about these final, mysterious, almost homeopathic brushstrokes -- only guidance from an experienced master in your medium can pass along this discreet wisdom, born of lineage and time-tested experimentation. And Paglia, as a deep believer in the power of lineage and tradition, would undoubtedly agree.