Tablet Magazine Goes to San Diego to Talk With David Antin

Tablet Magazine has Jake Marmer talk to David Antin about talk poems! And much more, including "extremism, secular Yiddishists, Stalin, transgender etiquette," and our fave, doubt. "Driving down Highway 5, a half-hour’s drive from the San Diego airport to the Antins’ residence, I took a few detours and wound up near the ocean, thinking: This may be the strangest town for an avant-garde artist to live in." Agreed! More from Tablet:

You could say the day’s performance started shortly after I knocked on the door and shook hands with the poet. Antin gave me a tour of the grounds surrounding the house—the garden filled with short trees and flowering cacti, well-loved overlapping paths. David showed me into his wife’s studio, a spacious, long, wagon-like room with floor-to-ceiling windows, suspended between the house and a hilly mound right next to it. Elly, David, and I began to talk, and over what seemed like a very short slice of time, moving from studio to the dining room, we covered a quite a bit: extremism, secular Yiddishists, Stalin, inherent fallacies of language, Middle-East, feminism, transgender etiquette, and of course our personal histories.

Antin’s gift is to converse, and while conversing, to peer through the lens of self-awareness, to examine what it is he is saying, assessing whether he believes his own words and notions, as they occur to him. Later, when we settled down for the interview he clarified:

“What do I mean? It’s not I who does the meaning. It’s as if the meaning comes of the culture         speaks through me     I feel myself in awareness of cultural reverberations of every word         And I’m doubtful of what I’m saying     My doubt is what makes it improvisational.”

Thinking of improvisation, we may imagine near-prophetic rants, ecstatic overflow of free-associative images and visions famously espoused by the Beat poets in the 1950 or ’60s—or manic jazz solos that were soaring high around the same time. Not so with Antin. His entryway into improvisation is through ecstasy’s very nemesis, or foil: the doubt.

Antin’s peculiar brand of doubt has something to do with the fact that he—as he said of his colleague and friend Jerome Rothenberg—“never gives up that Jewish shrug of the shoulders.” The shrug as a philosophical trope is tendency one could trace as far back as the Talmud. From one tractate to the next rabbis evaded answers so as to prolong conversation, leave doors open rather than bolted shut with conclusion....

Thoughtful piece--read it all here.