“what am i doing here?” as a question serves as a metaphorical bridge between two other questions – “what is a poet?” becomes linked with the existential concern of one’s purpose and the issue of agency and no capitalization or consistent punctuation tends to string along the statements into a continuous stream of words much like the inner monologue of private thought but externalized into a soliloquizing logorrhea of performativity before an other and it is before this other that one must ask “what makes a poet?” since this other the audience has presumably arrived for the purposes of hearing poets and this audience includes the live listening audience of 1973 as well as the reading audience of everyone else afterwards including you and me so that “what makes a poet?” becomes problematic for Antin as he refuses to participate in what the mainstream considers a poet as he rejects Frost and Lowell and not simply because he refuses to take up the first name of Robert but because he’d rather share company with Socrates that is as an extemporaneous interlocutor a spontaneous diologizer there is a dynamic transcendentally immanent element to orality lost in the deadness of composing written text so that your literary creation is an aborted child before the ink has dried on the page or you have saved on the screen the poets of yore whether epic like Homer or allegorical like the Nazarene or dialectical like Socrates take facial cues and ambiance to synthesize with a verbal conceptual thread an organic tapestry of human experience as personal communal narrative enmeshed within a temporal Heraclitean flux Antin considers what he does talking but not just talking and can understand that because there is oral composition in what he does that it might fall into the category of poetry simply because it falls nowhere else but can poetry be a catch all? poetry began with the lyric and the epic and the epic tried to record the myth and myth also means in greek to talk so to talk is to mythologize is to poetize but in an older way than has been recently construed or mythologized and yet Aristotelian concepts of poetry allege that they hold more truth than history since they hold universal truths that is we talk to tell stories that convey our truths truths as mythologized events taken to crystalize the who behind our lives and elevate the arbitrary to the profound but this is personal talk extemporaneous poetizing as opposed to what Antin calls totalitarian use of language that is the conformity produced through the rigors of education to systematize what we talk, how we talk, and who can talk grades are not rewards for truth and new insight but rather chains for enslavement for λόγος in ancient greek meant speech word study reason ground but it also meant expectation and plea so all of the ology (s) we study then expect and plea for us to play by their pre-established rules not so much to talk but to recite not to compose but to regurgitate not to fertilize with new thoughts but to circle jerk the old ones not to dialogue but to chorus and no the irony is not lost on me that i myself am guilty of precisely this totalitarian use of language as I appropriate Antin when i emulate his style of poetizing in order to complete this assignment so that I too am part of the circle jerk so again the question comes back to “what am i doing here?” but more importantly “what are you doing here?”