Re-Tuning: David Antin and the Audio Text

Abstract

ive written before this in natural vacuum that is artificial hermetic that literature has been in some and problem me is in confronting a typewriter and person so that me literature defined as literature has urgency it has need of address David Antin, tuning Close Listening This paper combines two modes of writing--the expository and dialogical--in an attempt to excavate criticism from the artificial hermetic closet where it, too, has been stuck for some time (1) The essay's latter half thus consists of an excerpted conversation about David Antin. (2) Our hope is that this talk embodies much of what we value in Antin's work: its defiance of genre, its immediacy of address, its adoption and extension of vernacular, its humour. But before presenting our own dialogue, we wish to briefly examine current discourse concerning Antin's talk-poems (a discourse enhanced, in recent years, expanded distribution of Antin recordings via internet). After offering more general remarks, we will focus a particular printed text (i never knew what it was), while also paying attention to PennSound audio record. Audio records of Antin's talk-poems, we will argue, provide an especially revealing sense of poet at work. For even though, as critic Henry Sayre writes, [T] he lack of punctuation and capitalization in [typed] talk-poems require such a heightened attention level of reader that something like a sense of presence is reestablished in text, Antin's published pieces have been thoroughly revised, in some cases significantly expanded (Sayre 446). A comprehensive engagement with Antin's output thus requires (in Charles Bernstein's phrase) close listening--in addition to traditional reading. Active Thinking When Antin steps out of his and enters a lecture hall, what does he want to tell audience? Or, more properly speaking, what does he hope to create with them? In a 1974 letter to boundary z editor William Spanos, Antin writes: am a poet--a man talking in a way that makes happen that i like to call thinking into and among important things Correspondence 625). Around this time, Antin offers a related description of his work, suggesting that it is no longer so clearly a poem a criticism an investigation but somehow lying between them or their borders (talking 55). These passages provide crucial insight into talk-poems: we learn that talk-poems constitute events, that these events involve active thinking, we note that thinking defies conventional genres, occurring on their borders. In his own words, Antin thinks by any means available to him (A Conversation q,2). The talk-poems blend genres--or, rather, demonstrate a distaste genre, as well as traditional demonstrations of poetic technique. Being a poet does not amount to mastering meter and constructing precious objects. To be a poet--and this is a recurrent theme Antin--is to go a way of language. Similar to Heidegger, who thinks of mindful writing in terms of way-making, Antin conceives of talking as taking a walk: I can imagine my impulse to speak, to move through language to some formulation, to some new place as being like a kind of walk Correspondence 628). Heavy lyricism and dense versification are among first items abandoned this decisive return to nomadic talking. Antin's agile pursuit of present of thinking overcomes any anxiety that his work should fit pre-existent categories. Vernacular Address Improvisation grants Antin access to present: moment in which thinking occurs. Near beginning of a talk-poem performed at 1999's Los Angeles Bookfair (how long is present'), example, poet wonders if he should just read from talking at boundaries. …