All Talk

Allen Mozek’s For the Birds blog features a review of David Antin’s Selected Poems 1963-1973. This work tracks the development of Antin’s talk-poems, which are improvised talks site-specific to the performance time and space. Mozek characterizes these improvisation in terms of the movement of thought itself:

Poet David Antin's career walks towards the boundaries of thought as he privileges the act of thinking. He breaks up the ice and facilitates the splendor of motion. Action. Antin is best known for his talk-poems, an engagement with performance-poetry that spans the majority of his career. These performances are suffused with charismatic arrogance, easy erudition and musicality as Antin talks his way around any variety of subjects. His art is one of approaching a subject.

What’s interesting about this review is that it doubles as an aesthetic. Mozek not only summarizes and comments upon Antin’s work, he takes it as an argument about the uses and possibilities of poetry:

David Antin once said that if Robert Frost was a poet, he didn't want anything to do with poetry, but if Socrates was a poet, and if Wittgenstein was a poet, then we would consider it. By calling Socarates and Wittgenstein poets, we safely move poetry away from the static thingness earlier mentioned in regard to 'thought.' Poetry is an action, not a codified litany of verse and meter, it is how we think, not what someone thinks it has to be.