Response 1 :Antin’s “What am I doing here?”
Antin’s conditions himself as an avant garde creator of talking. Can poetry be measured in time of the past and the future? Does talk not hold a presence in the present because it changes meaning for the audience while it’s being performed? If telling of stories is based on myths and was orally heard, then the ancient part of the art that Jerome Rothenberg belongs to is almost necessary in creating and recreating the primitive cultures. A poem is not talk or is it? While Antin composes ideas as he is proposing his own questions he becomes independent of the rules of poetry per say, or is he? His presence in a specific place talking, is not a completely practice of poetry as the audience absorbs Antin’s ideas as personal. Is the personal interpretation the only truth?
The Aristotelian way of looking at poetry vs. the Platonic view of the poet as the liar and imitator of truth become essential in understanding Antin’s approach to himself as a poet. His reaction to bringing a recorder to this event and beginning to record his own dialogue and his own understanding of sharing thoughts. “Talking is not always spoken” is an idea that does not belong to a specific place. “What am I doing here?” has multiple indications of meaning. What is the poet doing in a specific place, but also what does the purpose of the action of doing be considered talking?
The reference to science as a “sacred art of terror” is significant in looking at the ways in which Antin compares his rule breaking and creative process to the brainwashing of scientific discourse. The “enforced consciousness” of science and “interrogation of memory” as vital to the poetic mythical consciousness. A myth allows a story to have possibilities. According to Antin, the poet is the “self as a no literate society” and later he refers to the self as the “preliterate society”. I think it is interesting that he separates himself from the Rothenberg by naming himself the future. It is indeed he, Antin who relates to feeling and memory before written language. Plato’s world of the poet, as well as Homer’s where the stories told were based on retelling of the same event without writing they always hold the possibility of change.
you wrote: “The Aristotelian way of looking at poetry vs. the Platonic view of the poet as the liar and imitator of truth become essential in understanding Antin’s approach to himself as a poet. His reaction to bringing a recorder to this event and beginning to record his own dialogue and his own understanding of sharing thoughts.”
And though I agree with this as an important context for seeing some of what Antin is up to, I think it is revealing when he might consider a poet if you consider Socrates a poet: Socrates spoke and never wrote, Socrates’ method of dialoguing was meant for stimulating a process of self-inquiry in the opponent and the audience, he never reached final answers, but merely opened avenues of discourse that his audience was meant to carry away with them and chew on indefinitely…might this be some of what Antin is after…avoiding some of that self-serving finality that comes from closing a book cover by creating the echoes of his talking within the audience’s memory in a way that written text cannot?