Quotes from David Antin

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

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

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.

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.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

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

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

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

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

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

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.

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.

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

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 self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

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

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

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.

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

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

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.

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