David Antin

what it means to be avant-garde is David Antin’s third collection of “talk poems” published by New Directions. As in his earlier talking at the boundaries (1976) and tuning (winner of the 1984 PEN/Los Angeles Literary Award for Poetry), Antin’s brilliant improvised disquisitions at once challenge readers’ expectations even as they instruct and entertain. A poet, performance artist, art critic, and professor of visual arts, Antin, since his college days in New York in the ’50s, has been at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. The avant-garde? Yes, if by this is meant not an image of fashion but the place where art and life intersect, imparting to both a greater urgency––if is meant the place where experience and knowledge find their deepest expression, where the idea of a universal language can find shape, where the price of art is life itself, where the fringe is the very center of existence.

“I reject the idea of a sacred language,” the poet and art critic David Antin has said. “For me, poetry is a mental act, not work which will become the object of a specialized cult.” His own poems since the early 1970s have taken the shape of improvisatory talk performances before live audiences––narrative pieces often autobiographical and even fictional, but always with the critical and philosophical base that is the ground of his poetry. Tuning, Antin’s first collection of such improvisations since Talking at the Boundaries (1976), is a book of eight thematically related performances––a single structure built out of loosely fitting, overlapping pieces enclosing some central space like a shingled workshed. The ideas that appear here, the characters that come to mind, seem again and again to be involved with problems arising from a misconceived notion of “understanding”––as if in life experience there were an ideal, geometric congruence between idea and thing––that ignores the crucial, human question of how we arrive at a “common knowing.” But how common and for how long? And how is it, starting from different places and experiences, traveling by different pathways and at different paces, we can come to a common knowing? “These questions,” Antin explains, “recur, as I try to offer an alternative, dynamic model of the way we arrive at and depart from such a knowing, while my characters––friends and acquaintances, rumors and ghosts––walk in and out of my pieces.” ’Tuning’ is the name of this model.

David Antin: _Writing and Exile, _E. M. Beekman: _The Last of the Maidu, _Marcel Cohen: _The Peacock Emperor Moth, Martha Collins: Owl, _George Evans: _Five Poems, _James B. Hall: _The War in the Forest, Helena Kaminski: Four Poems, _James Laughlin: _The Man in the Wall, _Bernadette Mayer: _Three Poems, _Jay Meek: _Two Prose-poems, _Douglas Messerli: _Entr’acte: Twelve Tyrants Between Acts, _Eileen Myles: _Bleeding Hearts, _Alice Notley: _From an Untitled Long Poem, _Josip Novakovich: _In the Same Boat, _Fiona Pitt-Kethley: _Six Poems, _Murray Pomerance: _I__mbroglio, _Peter Porter: _Three Poems, _Anthony Robbins: _Three Poems, _Edouard Roditi: _Four Meditations, _Henry H. Roth: _Style, _John A. Scott: _The Apology, _Enid Shomer: _Street Sign, _Kazuko Shiraishi: _Seven Happy Cats, _Charles Simic: _Love Worker, _Sergei Task: _Study in Jealousy, _Anne Waldman: _IOVIS OMNIA PLENA, _Cynthia Zarin: General Lasalle’s Last Horse and Other Stories

For the last few years the poet and art critic David Antin has been performing spontaneous “talk poems,” eight of which have been brought together in Talking at the Boundaries. “I see my talking pieces,” says Antin, “as philosophical inquiries to which I try to bring the resources of language, not only my own language, but natural language in its natural setting, or one of its natural settings––talk. I’ve been a poet, critic, linguist, and engineer, and though this knowledge informs the book, it is not the work of a professional, of which there are by now too many that have proved too useless. What kind of a professional was Socrates? Talking at the Boundaries,” he continues, “asks questions about life, about art, about the nature of experience and how it is apprehended. All of the pieces in it began––like most talk––as improvisations on particular occasions in particular places. They were recorded and transcribed with more or less modification to make this book. But as an improvisation is not in ’prose,’ which is an image of the authority of ’right thinking’ conveyed primarily through ’right printing’––justified margins, conventional punctuation, and regularized spelling––this book has been printed without recourse to such appeals. I do not recognize my wife’s name by its spelling on a page and write it as I see fit when the occasion arises. In this I console myself that Shakespeare’s father’s name is recorded in eighty-three different spellings and that he himself spelled it four different ways in his own will.”