Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics

Selected Talk Poems of David Antin

David Antin, Stephen Fredman

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780826355300
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the "talk poem." He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses.

In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out, Antin's work is a form of conceptual writing that has influenced generations of experimental poets and prose writers. His profound and humorous talk poems are essential for classroom and scholarly discussions of the arts in modernism and postmodernism—offering as well an invitation to strengthen the ties between the sciences and the humanities.

From tuning (1984)

when roys daughter died we held a memorial at the center for music experiment the memorial readings and performances by poets and artists and musicians was an attempt to offer some fellowship to roy and marie who were in a state of shock over the terrible accident it was held in the late afternoon in the long somber wooden shed that had once housed a marine officers bowling alley been refurbished with a black ceiling much redwood stripping and a mauve carpet to serve as the university art gallery and then turned over to the music department in the middle 70s the readings proceeded quietly one after another without interruption for long introductions and the last piece on the program was a composition by pauline oliveros pauline was working with a small performance group at the time and its young men and women were scattered informally around the room pauline came to the center of the gallery to tell us how to perform the piece we were all to rise and form a large single circle joining hands with our nearest neighbors to listen until we heard a tone we felt like tuning to to try to tune to it and when we were satisfied with our tuning we could fall silent and listen choose another tone and try to tune to it and go on like this listening and tuning and falling silent as long as we wished until we felt that we were through i was holding hands with a carefully dressed young history professor and a smart looking dark haired woman from a travel agency in la jolla i listened for a while and could make out several humming tones coming from various places about the room i could hear the history professor clear his throat and start to hum a tone in the middle of the baritone register i thought i would join him there and my partner on the left opened a lovely mezzo just above us around the room soft surges of sound floated up while others stayed suspended or died away to be succeeded by still others in fifths and octaves lightly spiked by onsets and decays that underlined the simple harmonies that filled the space at one point a high clear soprano tone floated out across the room and i saw the history professor start to cry i squeezed his hand and tried to join a high tenor almost beyond my range the history professor nodded and joined us there our dark haired neighbor to the left opened a flute like tone a fifth above us all around the room people were crying and smiling and singing in waves of sound that throbbed and swelled and ebbed and climbed and peaked and dropped away into a silence that lasted until pauline thanked everyone because the piece was over

annina said that nearly everyone was talking art now and she was trying to organize a series of art talks at n.y.u. later that spring and wanted to know if i could come in for it who else is going to be there i asked joseph kosuth she said and sarah charlesworth with anthony mccall for the political art group international local ian wilson was going to hold one of his discussions giuseppe chiari was coming in from florence carolee schneemann the dancer performerfilmmaker would be in it bob ashley the composer would probably do something and joseph beuys would be represented on a videotape presented by willoughby sharp i thought for a while about all this talking coming from painters and sculptors and choreographers and what it meant for all of them who are usually considered makers of some kinds of valuable objects that these makers also think of as some kind of utterances or exchanges in a discourse filled with ideas of a certain currency according to some system of values and how thinking of these utterances as hard bright objects turns them into coins that could be collected but not exchanged while all these talks were meant to be some kinds of exchanges and i agreed to come in and think about discourse and the twin currencies of language and money

the currency of the country

i only came in for this particular occasion it seemed sotailor-made i couldnt resist coming in this was so completely unlike any group i had ever been a member of joseph beuys joseph kosuth a pair of josephs sarah charlesworth i thought it was a wonderful occasion chiari on the other hand another joseph with whom i may have something of an affinity but i dont really know because after all hes a giuseppe not a joseph but with joseph beuys i dont feel any affinities so i thought it would be great to form part of a group with someone with whom i have and want no affinities

joseph beuys was one of the first people i thought i recognized as an alien in the art world when i saw him appear i never expected to find myself in a group occasion with an ex-stuka pilot strafer ofpeasants in the ukraine and what impressed me immensely was his transformation in the art world at that point i was still very naive i had not really expected to find any of the art world populated with ex-murderers fascists green berets and now i know that you can find anything in the art world and they can even become prophets

weve all heard how after strafing and dive bombing in his regular way how beuyses ju-87 was hit by flak and he had to crash land in a desert where he was found by slant-eyed nomads lying wounded and alone watched over by a roebuck and an elk till these nomads found him there in the crimea and nursed him back to health beside the fire near their yurt and his wehrmacht friends finally came to take him back to the army of civilization which is one of the mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• From talking at the boundaries (1976)
• From tuning (1984)
• From what it means to be avant-garde (1993)
• Afterword: An Interview with David Antin, Spring 2013