David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is an American poet, critic and performance artist. Read full biography of David Antin →
I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent... →
A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.
I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.
You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them... →
David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is an American poet, critic and performance artist.