David Antin

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.”

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

“It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.”

“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.”

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