David Antin
David Antin Poems
about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress
or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the
problem
we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman
wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime
...
it appears whole
it has been
thought of
as good
not reasoned out
...
1.
there are two sides to every story and to abbreviate one side is to diminish a side of a wall creating an absence that is stronger than any presence and making any attempt at accurate construction hopeless sid luft is such an accusative absence
...
David Antin Biography
David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is an American poet, critic and performance artist. Antin earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1955 and his M.A. from New York University in 1966. He spent the first ten years of his career (1955-1964) as a translator of both scientific texts and fiction. By the late 1950s he had begun to experiment with writing fiction and poetry, with his first published work appearing in Kenyon Review in 1959. By the early 1960s, Antin had developed significantly both as a poet and as an art critic, and his 1965 articles about Andy Warhol and Robert Morris (artist) could be said to be among the first truly analytical writings about either artist)
The Best Poem Of David Antin
the theory and practice of postmodernism—a manifesto [excerpt]
about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress
or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the
problem
we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman
wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it
was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out
in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging
it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but
eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of
this mattress that had lived with us for such a long time and so
lotally that i thought i knew all its high points and low points its
eminences and pitfalls and i was sure that at night my body
worked its way carefully around the lumps dodging the precipices
and moving to solider ground whenever it could
but maybe eleanor
sleeps more heavily than i do i have a feeling that i spent much of
my life at night avoiding the pitfalls of this mattress that i was used
to and it was a skill id acquired over the ten or fifteen years of this
mattress' life so I felt there was no reason to get rid of this mattress
that had been promised to us by a salesman who said it would last the
rest of our lives i figured we were going to live long lives i didnt
think we were anywhere close to dying so neither was the mattress
but eleanor kept waking up with backaches
still i figured it was a good mattress and that elly just didnt have
enough skill at avoiding the lumps it never occurred to me that the
mattress was at fault so i didnt do anything and elly didnt do
anything because shes not into consumer products and hates to go
shopping but by the end of a year elly convinced me because she
has a sensitive back and i dont that she had a more accurate
understanding of this business than i did so I said sure eleanor
lets get a new mattress were rebuilding the house as long as
were going to have a new house we may as well have a new mattress
but eleanor said how will i know its a good one i dont want to get
another mattress that gets hollowed and lumpy and gives me backaches
when i wake up how will i know how to get a good one
i said well open the yellow pages and well look up mattresses and
therell be several places that sell them and ill close my eyes and
point a finger at one of these places and it will be a place that has
lots of mattresses where we can make a choice as to what constitutes
a good one by lying on them
David Antin Comments
David Antin Quotes
Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
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.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. Its hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessmans idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessmans idea of the real.
I didnt think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didnt understand.
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4/23/2024 4:30:52 PM # 1.0.0.1119
