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was saddened and surprised to learn of the death of David Antin who helped me .
________________ We live in the fragment and talk poem/
Call it
Spoken thought I call it Spoken thought
in Memoriam David Antin (1932–2016)
Marjorie Perloff
Summer 1975: I was attending the first
annual Ezra Pound conference in Orono, Maine. Among such prominent
conference speakers as Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie was a
former Davie
PhD student from Stanford, now teaching at Indiana University at
Bloomington, named Barry Alpert. Barry was a true radical—so radical
that he was soon
dismissed from Bloomington and has led a peripatetic
life as free-lance poet, critic, and
book dealer; for a time he owned a
bookshop in Washington D. C. that burned to the
ground one dark night.
But in the 1970s, he was editing and publishing an important
literary
journal called VORT, which had just brought out the Jerome
Rothenberg and
David
Antin issue. Barry gave me a copy, which I read
cover to cover, ordered earlier issues
(there was one on Jackson Mac
Low, another on Guy Davenport), and began studying David’s provocative
ideas about the “new American poetry,” as well as his curious “talk
poems”—transcribed oral performances, avoiding all punctuation and
capital letters and
And this hearkens back to poetry of Tzara and his endless books with no punctuation at a t all
leaving plenty of white space between phrases so as
to simulate actual talk. I was hooked
and was soon reviewing Talking at the Boundaries for the New Republic (1978). Ironically, then, it was via Ezra Pound that I came to Antin. My 1981 book The Poetics of
Indeterminacy contains chapters on both.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 to take up a position at the
University of Sothern
Claifornia, I introduced myself to David, then
already living in Del Mar; both he and his wife, Eleanor, soon to be a
famous artist, were professors at UC San Diego. Soon we
began to pay
visits back and forth—in those days, one could drive from Del Mar to LA
in about one and a half hours, whereas today it can be three or four—and
we also had
countless long phone conversations, during which David
would educate me on issues like Wittgenstein’s numbering system,
Diderot’s dialogism in Rameau’s Nephew (one of his
favorite books and a model for his own monologues), the use of narrative in Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
and Gertrude Stein’s syntax. Once he was on track, David could talk on
and on, and I wish I had recorded what in retrospect were quasi-talk
poems. I also remember the excitement of going to conferences with
David. One time in
1978, he and I and Charles Altieri (another great
talker) were at a conference on postmodernism held at Stanford. In the
afternoon, I went up to my room for a nap; when I
woke an hour later I
could hear, below my window in the motel courtyard, David and Charlie
still going on and on about the meaning or (nonmeaning) of the term postmodernism. The conversation never let up for an instant!
I shall forever be in David’s debt for these conversations, which
taught me how to think about American poetry in the larger context of
European modernism as well as the
Platonic dialogue. It was David who
first made clear to me that, at a time when Pound was still writing
rather romantic stylized dramatic monologues of Personae,
Blaise Cendrars
(for whom David’s son Blaise is named) was already
completing “La Prose du
Transsibérien,” with its artful simulation of
actual speech and its colloquial free verse.
And it was David who
introduced me to the collage texts and paintings of Kurt Schwitters.
David’s talk poems, written in the short phrasal units of
what Northop Frye defined as the
“associative rhythm,” use repetition
and metonymy to produce complex meditations that
look nothing if not
“natural” but are in fact carefully constructed and shaped. In their
emphasis on the actual thought processes that lead to certain
conclusions, they look ahead to the conceptual poetics of our own
moment. But David was also a leading literary and
art critic, and in
2016 it may be useful to remind younger readers of what a difference
that criticism made to those of us who came of (literary) age in the
1970s.
In his two essays on modernism and postmodernism—the first for the inaugural issue of boundary 2 in 1972, the second in Occident 1974, and both reprinted in the Chicago
volume Radical Coherency (2011),
David stages a stinging attack against what he took to be the
neomodernist symbolist poetry of the post-World War II period. It was a
time when
W. D.
Snodgrass was considered a major new voice. Antin takes as a specimen the lines:
The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
Of which David remarks:
“The comparison between this updated version of A Shropshire Lad . . . and the poetry of the Cantos or The Waste Land
seems so aberrant as to verge on the pathological.” Here,
as in the
case of Delmore Schwartz, or Allen Tate, or early Robert Lowell, Antin
insisted, the “originating styles” of modernism seemed to have lost all
their energy. We were witnessing, in establishment poetry, a giant step
backwards, even as the poets Donald Allen had introduced in his New
American Poetry, beginning with Charles Olson, were
doing exciting new
work. And, anyway, David argued, none of these poets, whether “raw”
(Allen Ginsberg) or “cooked (Lowell), were as brilliant as such
Europeans as Schwitters and Cendrars, not to mention that unique
expatriate Stein, who was the most innovative of them all.
Antin could be excessively dismissive and arrogant about his likes and dislikes, but the fact is that his boundary 2 article and its postscript in Occident changed
the map of postwar twentieth-century poetry, as it was being studied
and understood in American
universities. Students had to ask themselves
whether the metaphoric mode of, say, Richard Wilbur really was a
valuable successor to the modernists or why the “history collage” of
Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle often seemed merely tepid vis-à-vis Pound’s “history” Cantos.
Meanwhile, his bon mots like “From the modernism that you want, you
get the postmodernism you deserve,” and “Anthologies are to poets as the
zoo is to animals,”
were widely cited and repeated by a growing circle
of disciples.
Part of David’s appeal was what T. S. Eliot, talking of Andrew
Marvell, called “the tough reasonableness behind the slight lyric
grace.” Writing of avant-garde poets and artists, David always began reasonably
with the literal. In “Duchamp: the Meal and the
Remainder,” David’s
focus was on Duchamp’s use of language, on the erotic puns and double entendres that made the work what it is as well as of the significance of calling The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” a
“delay” in glass. Again, David wrote what is still considered the best
essay on the all-black paintings of the Rothko Chapel in Houston—on the
power of this “uncompromising difficult and secular work” to produce in
the observer “a sense of your human fallibility,” by evoking such things
as the early promise of nuclear energy as a “kind of glowing in the
dark that’s still part of the metaphoric system we have to engage in.”
In this essay—“The Existential Allegory of the Rothko Chapel,”—framed
not as a conventional essay, but as a talk piece, micronarrative
intrudes so as to “thicken the plot,” to use Cage’s term. There are
shaggy dog stories, speculations about remembering faces
like the poet’s
father’s, who died when David was two, conversations with other art
critics, and so on. But the seeming diversions and parenthetical stories
are all related: in
the end an Antin talk poem has a curious way of
coming full circle and tying up the loose knots. Only when the poet
stops talking (or in the transcribed version, writing) do we see
that
the threads that have come together were there all along.
Many of David’s talk poems and art essays, now in the J. Paul Getty
Trust archive, have yet to be transcribed; one of my favorites is called
“The Poetry of Ideas and the Idea of Poetry,” and compares Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s writing to Bertolt Brecht’s verse version of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto,
arguing that Wittgenstein’s “prose” is, finally, much
more poetic than
Brecht’s hexameter version of Marx. David performed this piece at a
conference on poetry and philosophy at Berkeley, and it was not well
received by many of the academic philosophers, who found its treatment
of “serious” ideas frivolous. But I
predict that, as generic boundaries
become less important, the Wittgenstein piece will be recognized for its
profundity, its understanding of what poetry is and can be and where
poetry and philosophy meet.
Most great critics have their blind spots; think of Samuel Johnson dismissing John Milton’s
Lycidas or Virginia Woolf deploring the scatological language of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
David had little
interest in the novel—I never heard him say anything
interesting—indeed, anything at all— on Leo Tolstoy or
art, of which Eleanor was a key exemplar. He admired theorists like
Michel de Certeau, whose work on the
everyday was backed by thorough
scholarship, but had little use for Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan, or
even
Theodor Adorno, whom he
regarded with bemused skepticism. Despite
his love of French and Russian avant-garde poetry—Maria
Tsvetaeva was a
great favorite—when it came to theory and criticism, he was an American
pragmatist. Does it
work? Is it useful? What can you do with it? These
are the questions that interested him. But perhaps because
he was so
unabashedly American—with a Brooklyn accent to boot—it was in the France
whose theorists he dismissed that he was especially popular. Most of
his books have been translated into French and the Oulipo poet Jacques
Roubaud was an early kindred spirit.
In the decades to come, I am convinced, David will be recognized for
the transformative critic and poetician he
was. Close to so many of the
artists and poets of his day, beginning with his best friend and fellow
innovator Jerome Rothenberg, whom he had first met in his undergraduate
years at City College, he was, finally, entirely
his own person—a
bracing, provocative, and entirely original voice in the wilderness of
what is considered the poetry scene.
Here an anecdote may be apposite. In 1980 or so, I invited David to
give a poetry reading—that is, a talk—at USC. The auditorium was
reassuringly full. But about ten
minutes into the piece—I think it was
“Who’s Listening Out There?”—David was interrupted by a woman’s
voice
from the audience. “When,” she asked impatiently, “does the poetry
reading begin?” Everyone laughed.
“You’re not going to hear anything
you’re not hearing now,” David responded calmly, “so feel free to leave.
There is nothing else coming.” She stayed.
cited from Critical Inquiry
Visit the Epc website to read some of David Antin’s work—
