David Antin's Quotes

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.