DAVID ANTIN

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

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

I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

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

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.

I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.