A Poetry of Talking: a Conversation with David Antin

Robert L. Pincus at the San Diego Reader wrote an in-depth feature on poet and art critic David Antin, whose Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1965 to 2005 was published in March.

Antin begins by talking about the artistic community he found in southern California, where he, a native New Yorker, relocated in 1968:

Antin soon discovered there was a semi-covert art world in San Diego that interested him greatly: “It was the character of the place that interested me. I wasn’t much interested in the affluent world of La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe. But there was a bohemian art community here, with artists like Richard Allen Morris and John Baldessari. The setting was provincial, but the art wasn’t.

“The California situation was a fortunate one,” he adds, “particularly in Southern California. It was a mixture of everything that was interesting and alive about America, and everything that was lethal. They were both here together.

“I think I couldn’t have done the work I did in New York. There is something wonderfully wacky about the West Coast that I love. It was more radical; its art was more radical. In New York, art was more ‘responsible.’ The problem with the New York art world was that you felt like someone was looking over your shoulder all the time, if not sitting in your lap. Everybody is spread out in Southern California. It may be a difficulty, but it is also a virtue. It allows you to do things that aren’t validated because you don’t know what the validation is.”

California has indeed been good to Antin. Here, he has become one of the true originals among American poets, creating a genre of his own — the talk poem. It first takes life as a kind of improvisatory performance. He invents the piece as he goes, with only a broad topic or theme in his head, only later turning a talk into a text — if, that is, he, or someone else, has been prescient enough to have recorded it. (Inevitably, there are some lost to the universe of inspired improvisation.)

And here he talks about his hesitation to limit his thinking and writing according to the demands of publication:

“I signed the contract for a book of essays something like 20 years,” Antin recalls. “The problem was, I was incapable of looking backward, I was so committed to going forward. Frankly, the idea of it depressed me a little. Even selective essays would be like a tombstone.”

But now that he has succumbed, Antin has come to believe that a collection of his critical writings won’t freeze him in time — even at 79. In fact, he seems pretty happy about the publication of Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1965 to 2005. It’s dedicated to Charles Bernstein, whom Antin describes as “that keen and generous/ poet critic thinker/ without whose friendly insistence/ I might still be dawdling over this book.”

And, a bit more on writing art criticism in the late 60's:

It was a heady period to be writing art criticism, as Antin acknowledges. Pop art was challenging the prevailing notion that only abstraction mattered. The dominant idea put forth by the critic Clement Greenberg, that art was somehow moving along a path to formalist purity, was under attack from critics like Antin. He refers to Greenberg’s scenario as a “manufactured history of painting.”

Antin was hardly alone in his skepticism about Greenberg, who held considerable sway at the time: “The art world was very much alive with conversations and ideas and quarrels. It was an exciting time and art seemed to matter. It wasn’t about money. And criticism was part of that.”

Antin’s “talk poems,” or “talk pieces,” were from the start a hybrid form, as adaptable to his ambitions as critic as to his aspirations as a poet. Like many a discovery in any field, this one involved some serendipity. He had been asked to give a talk at Cooper Union art school in New York, and his index cards were jumbled, so he just started talking instead and liked the results. A few months later, in 1972, he was asked to speak about art at Pomona College in Claremont and the talk poem or talk piece was born; it was aptly titled “talking in pomona.”

He quickly found that the form of these talk pieces defies and blurs genres. It lends itself just as well to criticism as poetic thought, to philosophical ruminations as well as to storytelling. His influences in them are as much Plato and his dialogues as the work of any poet. Other touchstones are Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Antin studied the structure of Stein’s writing as a graduate student in linguistics at New York University, where he earned an MA in the field). Antin offers up a succinct explanation of what he has been up to in the introduction to his new book: “I had been looking for a poetry of thinking and what I found was a poetry of talking, because talking was as close as I could come to thinking.”

Read the entire piece here.