A LA DAVID ANTIN

David Antin creates a theatrical persona for himself....engaged in conversation while actually speaking uninterruptedly in the somewhat artificial style of a text. Speech and writing remain intertwined for Antin....the breakdown of genres in literature and philosophy has left a conscientious writer like Antin with a highly idiosyncratic and lonely stance on the boundary between poetry, criticism, philosophy where it all becomes a single activity. His work is very improvisational with no stiff conventions that prescribe a method, a style, appropriate quotations from books. Here in an eclectic jungle which sounds like someone talking to himself and anyone else who will listen. Here we have: ethics, divinity studies, humour, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, philosophy, poetry. Antin endeavours to produce a seamless discourse. For some people he succeeds. -Ron Price with appreciation to Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, Cambridge UP, NY, 1983, pp. 135-140.

How does one talk about these structures, these gardens.....I’ve tried
in a dozen different ways....but what does a humble poet do when his
heart is so filled....there are no lofty, soaring words to say it....poetry
is not a clear cut and simple process.....even to reduce it to some
manageable set of words in a sort of vernacular style...an improved talk
...a simplified arrangement of ideas that everyone can understand.....
a private world where anyone can eavesdrop on someone’s thoughts
about this world being created up on Mt Carmel I tell you it makes me
cry when I watch it on a video even some of my poems just take me to
the edge you know what I mean it’s part of my life story now some
quintessential me up there someone I may never quite become because
of the pull of nature, life, the Earth the whole thing is untranslateable
even in this improvised form pushed out from a word processing
package on my computer where noone is addressed specifically......
why my first memory was back in about ‘53 when the Shrine got finished
.......that’s a whole lifetime ago the days of not knowing how little was
the little that we knew I was nine years old, then.....


Ron Price
23 January 1996