POLYSEMY Main

The Woodshed

The Cathode Ray

About PALMA POLYSEMY Academy for Literary and Musical Arts (PALMA) aims to inspire a "back-to-basics" synthesis of the traditional with the contemporary in the literary and musical arts. Offering online education starting in January 2010 at both the child and adult levels, PALMA currently provides resources, discussions, and insights framed to begin to restore the Humanities to their rightful place at the center of common imagination. Over the course of the last century in the West, the literary and musical arts have run aground. An education at PALMA will help you rechart the course back to the waters that inspire us all. For literary and musical disciplines, PALMA seeks rejuvenation. In the process, a PALMA education will demystify the process of making works of fine art that are able, as all great works of art, to operate on multiple levels of perception and imagination. The word "polysemy" itself means 'having multiple meanings'. The notion that works of fine art provide multiple meanings is a traditional view that PALMA renews and updates. PALMA director Matthew Dallman has suggested that what makes up an enduring work of fine art is its capacity for "entertainment, education, and enlightenment", in an at-once relationship with audiences, individually and collectively. How artists go about fashioning their works so as to entertain, educate, and enlighten is where the rubber meets the road, and the goal underneath every thing PALMA offers. The good news is that we have plenty of example of artists from the past who demonstrate the kind of multidisciplinary training necessary to produce works of art that endure and are truly great — "great" as in wide, encompassing, superior. The fine arts are living traditions of imagination requiring constant renewal by artists; each work of fine art is a resonator that renews. These traditions, which can and do wither and decay, are based upon beauty, intelligence, wisdom, awe, mystery; traditions that defy categories of time, and are the result of both verbal and nonverbal conversations between the works of imaginative people across the ages; truly great conversations about great ideas, great perceptions, great intuitions. To educate children and adults so as to encourage practical inspiration, insight, and intuition to be applied towards the bringing forth of renewed literary and musical arts is the project of PALMA. And thus, PALMA seeks to be a useful companion or touchstone to creative people the world over. PALMA debuted in May 2006, as a collection of blogs and commentary. It shipped a one-time, 32-pg, four-color journal issue in Summer 2006. The evolution to its present incarnation began in summer 2009. It will offer affordable online instruction to all literate ages starting in January 2010. Please direct correspondence to matthew [at] polysemy [dot] org. ©2006-10 POLYSEMY. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.