Mathias Svalina: Artist Statement
This poem comes from a manuscript of serial poems exploring what it means to be influenced by an artist. They are ekphrastic in the basic sense that they respond to artists or works of art. Beyond that they attempt to understand, via the lyric, how the art that matters to us continues to be present long after we’ve stopped thinking about the color, form & content of an individual work. This poem is a response to Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, a painting that I have never been able to get out of my head.
It’s Good to Be Dead in America