Quotes by David Antin

• 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.
• Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
• My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
• My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
• It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
• 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.
• 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 couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
• The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
• 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 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.
• When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
• 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.
• I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
• 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 have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
• 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.
• 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.
• Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
• 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 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 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'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.
• I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
• I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
• I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
• I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
• 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.
• I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.
• I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.