On David Antin’s How Long Is the Present
Christian Schlegel
i have a small impatience with this assignment which i think is maybe appropriate i was saying to someone that i wanted to adopt a new crankier persona for when i do my own talks of which this obviously is one though conducted in private as i used to do them what i really want to do is go outside and walk around the heat's broken and the sun is out
but in front of me is the task of reviewing or maybe just encapsulating this selected poems of david antin's called how long is the present edited by stephen fredman which came out in 2014 and was published sort of heroically i guess by unm press it's difficult because antin for me has become a completely necessary figure someone without whom at least my current practice isn't really conceivable (my second book consists of talk poems which are wholly dependent on antin's work)
so the quick biographic sketch of antin is that he was involved in the downtown art scene he grew up in brooklyn in the thirties and forties went to brooklyn tech for high school then didn't totally know what he wanted to do he had a good deal of what we'd now call STEM aptitude his mother as he describes her was a professional widow his father died when he was young and antin winds up at city college and becomes interested in linguistics which you know makes sense based on his proclivities it was the terrain the intersection between his interests in the technical and what he goes on to describe as the narrative and he actually develops a theory in one of the poems of the selected called the price about what it means to do narrative versus story and he seems to believe that the narrative implicates the talker that narrative creates its own occasion and its own requirements its necessity i guess in a way that story can be somewhat abstracted from or might give itself the gift of being abstracted from
so anyway he goes on to study linguistics in new york at the graduate level but he doesn't get his phd because he becomes more and more of an art critic he's always had this interest going back to his undergrad days when people around him were painting and he develops an eye for the downtown ny style he's a sophisticated aesthetician over time begins writing pieces in the fifties and sixties about the artworld back when that was a somewhat remunerative job and he's also working as a translator he picks up a bunch of languages there were a bunch spoken in his home as he says and he also writes poems in the sixties his poetry practice as it grows is one of well it's conceptual constraint-driven deals with collaged language you can find though they're hard to find his early books of poetry that he wrote down on the page or at a typewriter as he says in a closet they're interesting you know you can hear glimmers of the voice
but what he starts doing around 1970 is giving improvised lectures and they're recorded it's actually his wife elly who by his own description is one of or the first person to get that the transcripts of these talks can themselves be published as poems so the first talking at pomona is published in the book talking which contains other i think he calls them discursive experiments like a dialogue with elly as one example none of those is included in this selection then he publishes a book called talking at the boundaries which i think is his best his first full book of talk poems so this selection includes a few from that book a few from the next called tuning where he develops an understanding of the concept of understanding or he tries to reinvigorate our mental system by which we talk about the appreciation of other people's experience and knowledge through this figure of tuning of walking with someone because the thing we call understanding a static framework is limited and by walking with it turns into this dynamic time bound practical endeavor actually going with someone somewhere
in the third book excerpted what it means to be avant garde he talks about the story/narrative distinction i laid out earlier about his conception of the fringe and what he calls the white light of the center and his own performed frustration with the idea of the avant garde that maybe he's not an avant gardist himselfbecause of his insistence that he really talks about through all these poems on the present the ongoing now critics and theorists of antin they seem to really dig this part of his method the ongoingness
and i basically see what he's saying here though his idea of a present is super capacious
as opposed to what he sees in avant gardism as a bizarre demand on both past and future
how do we make something radically new well only if we're deeply invested in a past and a future where these things signify
so this is all to say that if one were to read david antin from scratch i would hope they would begin not with this book this selected but in a different way from what it posits or offers because this book does not include the good ones is the short answer the good talk pieces but the flip side is this is a great thing unm has done to buoy antin keep him alive attempt to account for the fullness of the work but i actually think there's a feature of antin's project that makes it more difficult to see this in the selected his books really all that i've mentioned and one later one published by uc called i never knew what time it was those books are to be read i think as books which is so often the case with poets so we can't really slight stephen fredman here it's just the limitation of the form
ok but even more than some people antin thinks of his books as collections of talks that ramify that move in a direction together so certainly the talk piece at pomona is a landing place that antin reaches at the end of the talking experiments that comprise that first book and you can buy that first book
i think dalkey archive has it in print so the first thing people should do is read that
the second book talking at the boundaries is out of print published by new dierctions
and i think people should read that one in its entirety too maybe i should just make a pdf of it available because that one is also a travelogue
it's clear that he's taking his act on the road and there's a feeling of journey sorry that's cheesy but true here it's beautiful and important that part if you take then some of the pieces out of their context as fredman has and if you don't talk about the best pieces in the book which fredman basically admits this at the start
for example there's an antin talk in talking at the boundaries that's about a photo where DA isn't sure if it's his father or uncle
another section about his marriage though that's widely anthologized if you don't get these you're missing the fullness of the poetry
i think people should spend time with that entire volume
i'm sorry but it's just the way of it
then there's tuning which i think people can skip unless you're a real antin head
mostly because the metaphor of tuning of walking together is implicit in all the other talks it's like a ground to the project
and there aren't the sparkling individual pieces here i've found except i love the one at the la book festival where you can tell he's a lttle bit flailing in a good way
then there's what it means to be avant garde which is in print with new directions you should read that in its entirety and its last poem the structuralist is my favorite of his
and SF in the intro mentions that he couldn't include it because it's novella length
now that's the sole one i would have picked from this volume so what this has really turned into is a critique of the selecting of the selected
you should also read i never knew what time it was the bernstein conversation book the radical coherency art crit book but if you were a person who only has a certain amount of time then i would say you should read talking talking at the boundaries what it means to be avant garde
now that's the end of the assignment but i'd like to close with my own thought
on what it means to do talking and read antin what reading him has done for me in this moment as i've been going through this selected and worrying a little because as i've gone through i've felt well maybe i should be walking moving my books from the old apartment to the new one washing the sheets in the brooklyn room i've also been watching cinda firestone's movie from the early seventies attica which is a documentary about the prison uprising and to amplify one bureaucratic feature of this movie it just makes the rockefeller administration apart from the structural terror of incarceration it makes them look incompetent even in their management of their cruelty
putting down something they clearly were so threatened by they couldn't begin to see what it was
what i realized watching the movie was the people in the prison like l d barkley they talk because their demands were not only circulated in writing
but promulgated by the impartial observers of the media
it's an extraordinary relationship to access and documentation
exchange of ideas from people in a prison yard through their orthogonally motivated intermediaries journalists who nevertheless have some commitment to what they understand to be fact what antin would call the invention of a fact to a listening public
and through the repressive apparatus of the state literally through a wall
and in listening to those men talk many of them Black and brown
about what it was to be in prison what it meant to be in prison
what they were asking for in the short term
what those of them that survived the police assault on the prison on the third day
what they saw and were forced to do i was reminded not just of the testamentary tradition of which it's part like shoah a decade later
but also of the remarkable durability of talk even if those organizers and their words
hadn't been recorded and disseminated they were heard by people who were doing what they could in a genuine revolutionary way not in a soft liberal way to insist first to themselves and then to the world outside the walls that they remained people
as they say throughout the movie they were strengthened as a collectivity despite the privations of being in prison by the effect of this talk so thinking of political talk
this revolutionary talk it points up the performativity and i will say maybe even at moments the preciosity of what antin does
and it lays out that at almost exactly the same time as when antin was making a set of aesthetic and philosophical discoveries through talk there were others already doing it antin was joining them and pretty much he knew that
from his wide experience and reading even though his politics got crankier and he shifted i’d say from the radicality inherent to his work his politics shaded away from the truly liberatory and became cynical
but he knew that talking lay prior to him and at his finest he cited the antecedent talk
and didn't just pay his debt to it but went with it as a doing
a doing with more even than as a saying with
he went with it