review of
David Antn & Charles Bernstein's A Conversation with David Antin
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 28, August 13, 25, 2018

My review is presented in its entirety here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1055176-antin

For most of my life the cultural products that I'm interested in have been cheap to buy b/c they're not popular w/ the 'masses'. That's good for me b/c I'm not popular w/ the 'masses' either so I have very little money. As such, the bks & records, etc, that I like are also the ones most affordable & few people are competing w/ me to get them. I often point out that when I got interested in Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention when I was a teenager their records made it to the cut-out bins & sold for $2. Even things like Stockausen Deutsche Grammophon double record sets sold in record stores for $2 b/c the owners of the stores, apparently, just thought that they were crap that they cdn't get rid of fast enuf. Now, 45 yrs later, I can get a copy of A Conversation with David Antin, published by what is to me an important poetry press, Granary Books, for $1 even tho the original publication price was $12.95. That's ok, consumers, you just keep buying the latest teen romance vampire series & save the scholarly stuff for me.

It was probably in the 1970s when I started looking more deeply for poets & writers who were straying from the pack when I wd've found David Antin & his talk poems. I don't recall ever hearing recordings of them or witnessing them in movies & I certainly never had the opportunity to witness him deliver in person. As such, I only got to experience them as written texts. I liked them somewhat but I didn't find them as innovative as other things I was discovering so my interest waned. Nonetheless, he's always been someone I remember as a writer whose work I might revisit — partially b/c he was of importance to my exceptionally talented & scholarly friend Bruce Stater who probably studied w/ both Antin & Jerome Rothenberg, who's also mentioned a fair amt in these pages.

SO, when I saw this bk for sale & saw that it was both on Granary & featured Charles Bernstein in addition to Antin the time was ripe. Charles is someone whose work I've liked & who liked my "txt msg editorial" enuf to publish it online in "Sibila" (August 12, 2012) ( http://sibila.com.br/english/tentatively-a-convenience/6535 ).

So, cool: 2 intellectual poets discuss poetry. What's not to like?

Antin: "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. I had read all about his optical discoveries and I had managed to figure out how the steam engine worked from the Encyclopedia Britannica." - p 7

Antin: "My father died when I was two. He got a strep throat before there was penicillin or sulfa. That was his second mistake. He first was marrying my mother, who was apparently quite beautiful, but so what. My mother was a social climber headed downward. She started with a high school education, a high degree of literacy and a Pennsylvania accent acquired by arriving in Scranton at age seven. In those days the family had expectations. In the twenties they were successful business people and figured she would go to college. They figured wrong. She took a job as a bookkeeper in the family business, spent her money on looking pretty and married my father as soon as she could. When he died a couple of years later, she turned into a professional widow. By the forties she was already a marginally competent examiner in the dress business. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer, she thought I should be a chicken farmer in Lakewood." - p 8

I'm reminded of Gypsy Rose Lee's mystery novel: Mother Finds a Body. I quote from my review of that:

"Lee doesn't depict her mother in a very favorable light & her son claims that Lee's mom sued her over it. I got a great deal of pleasure from seeing the depiction of her mother as unscrupulously manipulative. I've been there.

""Many people have wondered: How much of Mother Finds a Body is true? Ultimately, all of mother's writing was based on her life, so by the time she got to Gypsy she was comfortable with the characters. Ironically, she waited until after her mother died to write it because she wanted to avoid another lawsuit, but she got sued anyway. This time by her sister. Like the earlier suit by her mother, it was settled with money. To call our family mercenary would be an understatement." - p 9"

- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2429180220

It's obvious that Antin has a low opinion of his mother & wasn't impressed by her 'beauty'. The older I get, the more aware I am of how 'beauty' is used to manipulate. Lee was similarly cynical about her mother. My own mom was told when she was younger that she looked like the popular actress Doris Day. I think that that was a point of pride. I never saw her as beautiful but I've come to realize that getting her hair done was a higher priority than most things so I think that maintaining that 'beauty' has always been central to her life.

Similarly to Antin's mother wanting him to be a chicken farmer, mine wanted me to be an insurance salesman. My being a reasonably accomplished mathematician, artist, & musician by the time I was a teenager was neither here nor there. According to her, I was 'exactly like the insurance salesmen at work' despite my having matted long hair a foot or so past my shoulders (not that common at the time) & my living as a hitch-hiker/drifter. This bk is divided into 2 parts: the interview & a section of annotated family photos called "Album Notes". Antin returns to his mom & dad in the latter:

"They told me he died as a result of medical incompetence at the age of twenty-seven, when I was two. I never completely believed it. I suspected he'd run away to escape my mother, for which I didn't blame him in the least." - p 103

Bernstein: "I often get a sense of poetry being disappointing to you, that the failure of poetry to do something it could be doing or doing better was a kind of inspiration for writing poetry (well you know that's my current theory, speaking of theories, and I do see you as a particularly good model for it). What do you or did you think poetry should be doing?" - p 13

Antin: "Reading through Simone Weil's journals and an insurance manual, there were lots of sentences whose meaning I didn't really understand. They weren't unusually difficult sentences. They often contained words that were cultural commonplaces or cliches, ordinary abstract terms that everybody seems to understand. "Loss" "Value" "Power." But as I looked at them I found out I didn't understand them at all. So I started to write them down, thinking that by writing them down, I could concentrate on them, ask them questions and find out what meanings they might conceal. And I saw that my not-understanding could be a way to go on. And as I went on with this writing down I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand. The first part of "definitions for mendy" with its questions about "loss" and "value" and "power" and "brightness" were written this way and temporarily stopped on the day Jack Kennedy was killed in the fall of 1963. My two first books — definitions and Code of Flag Behavior — were written this way, bringing not-understanding as a set of questions to puzzling commonplaces and cliches — linguistic and cultural acceptances of every kind. So I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard won lack of understanding. Of course my lack of understanding kept expanding." - pp 16-17

How many people go thru the process of analyzing commonplaces? IMO: almost no-one. That's a part of what makes Antin's work potentially important to me. I've been saying for decades that people like things b/c they're familiar & not b/c they have any understanding of them. Recently, e.g., a friend of mine expressed displeasure at Arnold Schoenberg's "atonality" w/o having the slightest idea what that meant. He isn't a musician. He probably likes tonal music b/c it's familiar & not b/c he understands what makes it tonal or 'consonant'. I often say that if I only play the white keys on a piano & use the sustain pedal alot non-musicians are going to think I'm 'good'.

Antin provides examples of poems of his to represent what he's talking about in the interview. Bernstein provides a few explicatory examples of his own. I don't really like most of the poetry by Antin presented but I like an example or 2 of Bernstein's.

Bernstein: "I have long been fascinated by Laura Riding's turn away from poetry in the late '30s, at the beginning of World War Two, and her ultimate move to philosophical prose. She certainly spoke of poetry's insufficiencies. You twice moved away from poetry and indeed, finally, to a kind of telling, in (Riding) Jackson's sense. Yet I persist in seeing this as innovation not renunciation." - p 28

Antin emails Bernstein an old poem & discusses how it was changed in its initial publication:

Antin: "I'm sending it to you without capitalization or punctuation, which was the way the damn poem was written. But The New Yorker in their stylistic commitment insisted they had no lower case for poem titles. A week or two later they called back to ask if I'd let them put a capital letter at the beginning of the poem and a period at the end. But, I said, the poem contains lots of sentences between the first word and the last. That's okay, they said, but we really like to start a poem with a capital letter and we need the poem to end with a period. I'd already spent the money they paid me. So I figured, the hell with it." - p 29

Now, hopefully not surprisingly, I find The New Yorker's interference w/ the form of the poem to be inexcusably moronic. I've had things like that happen too. When I started writing "tentatively, a convenience" in tOGGLE cASE in 1979 as "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" I didn't really want to spend the rest of my life fighting for the 'right' to do that but, yep. I still do. The comma (",") in the name also presents a big problem for people.

In the 1970s I tried applying for 2 NEA grants for myself as a writer. The submission requirements were that everything had to be typed in double space. The most interesting writing I was doing at the time was in field form. Double space was irrelevant to my writing & actually interfered w/ its content. As such, I didn't follow the rules. I can easily imagine the robopath at the NEA taking one look at the work, seeing that it wasn't double-spaced & rejecting it w/o trying to read it or understand it. Bureaucrats like that are an impediment to the support of creativity.

Antin: "But getting back to your take on these early poems, it's hard for me to think about poems I haven't looked at for thirty-five years. And it's harder to explain accurately or reliably why I twice abandoned ways of writing that I had become quite skillful at. Like you, I don't see my move away — or escape — from the image-driven work late in 1963, and then from what you call the "process poetry" by 1971 or 72, as renunciations." - pp 30-31

Some of the connections & interests of Antin's were not what I expected:

Antin: "My new work of 1963 had more in common with George Brecht than Bertolt Brecht and still more in common with the Judson dancers than with the Frankfurt School. It's hard to remember '63 without thinking of Yvonne Rainer, Judith Dunn, Steve Paxton, David Gordon and their fellow dancers, jogging, crawlings, climbing, or falling or simply walking around, carrying strange objects, wearing trashy furs or grey sweatsuits" - p 36

Given that I like George Brecht & the Judson School of dance, Antin's connecting his work to theirs interests me b/c in my limited experience of it I wd've never made that connection.

Antin: "I always had the feeling I should put up a sign over the entrance to any of my performances: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," because I don't feel obligated to "entertain" — though I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. But I also don't give a damn if half the audience walks out. This separates me not only from" [Lenny] "Bruce, but from other entertainers like Spaulding Gray or Garrison Keillor, all of whom I enjoy. I'm standing up on my feet thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome." - p 46

I had a rubber-stamp made that read "Abandon HOPELESSNESS all ye who enter here" ( http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=21&article_id=79 ). I much prefer that. I remember Jackson Mac Low telling me that he considered his work entertainment & I find his work much less likely to please consumers-in-search-of-a-'good'-time than Antin's. I remember telling the (v)audience after the premier of my "A Catamaran Animist Vigor" ( http://youtu.be/cn3U055X-2U ) that that was my idea of entertainment & asking them if they'd also found it to be entertainment. The answer was "NO". On Friday, April 2, 2004, as response to my performance at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), half the audience DID walk out by the time I got to this portion of my program: https://vimeo.com/29371740 & one of the 2 organizers tried to get me to stop soon thereafter.

Bernstein: "One stream of thinking from Walter Ong's Presence of the Word to David Abraham's Spirit of the Sensuous has suggested that alphabetic literacy, compared to what preceded it, puts its users in a fundamentally more alientated relationship to language and the body. Such thinking suggests the value of a return to "orality"" - p 50

Perhaps. After all, written language is a mediation & any mediation might be an alienation. Nonetheless, you wdn't be reading this review & I wdn't've read the bk if we returned to orality. As such, our experience w/ language is likely to be more narrow w/o "alphabetic literacy" — limited, perhaps, to the speakers around us — unless radio & such-like were accepted as "orality" — but, then, they're mediating/alienating too IMO.

Bernstein: "This tradition is described in great detail by Frances Yates in her marvelous book The Art of Memory. The idea was to call to mind a familiar and complicated building and stage a mental walking tour of all of its rooms, imagining precisely and in their places all of its decorative details, and then to place each of the images of a projected speech in a particular detail of the building in the sequential order that it would have to be recalled in the speech. It's a kind of mental roadmap with illustrated "view points" or "rest areas." This isn't writing, but it is a way of spatializing memory" - p 51

I'm 'inevitably' reminded of A.R.Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist — A Little Book About A Vast Memory in which the mnemonist's instinctual method of remembering is described thusly:

"When S. read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was farily long, he had to find some wayof distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence. Most often (and this habit persisted throughout his life), he would "distribute" them along some roadway or street he visualized in his mind. Sometimes this was a street in his home town, which would also include the yard attached to the house he had lived in as a child and which he recalled vividly. On the other hand, he might also select a street in Moscow. Frequently he would take a mental walk along that street—Gorky Street in Moscow—beginning at Mayakovsky Square, and slowly making his way down, "distributing" his images at houses, gates, and store windows." - pp 31-32, A.R.Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist, Basic Books, 1968

A part of what fascinates me about the mnemonist is that he naturally used this technique w/o reading about it or otherwise coming upon as presented by someone else. I ordered Frances Yates's The Art of Memory almost immediately upon reading about it.

Bernstein: "couldn't you write one of your talks? Who would know the difference beside you? What would be the telltale signs?

Antin: "Taking your last question first. I used to think it was the speed at which it had to be done. In a talk piece I usually have between a half hour and a hour and a half to do whatever I have to do. I can't walk away to check sources for quotations. If I am trying to analyze something, I have to live with whatever abilities and resources I bring to the occasion. I have to have complete confidence in my abilities for the occasion." - p 54

That's interesting to me. Those distinctions seem like limitations to me. Perhaps those limitations are part of why I was never that impressed by the Talk Poems. Maybe I prefer taking advantage of the resources that enable checking quotations, maybe I prefer analysis that can be modified by further reflection than what's available in the moment. Although, Antin does go on to explain: "I have to find a way to turn my momentary inadequacy to dramatic advantage" (p 54) & that appeals to me, the thinking-on-his-feet mother-of-invention.

Antin: "While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called "song" in modern poetry or, for what's usually called "music," I really don't think of "speech" as so far from song and I don't think of "talk" as "unmusical." Prose may be most of the time unmusical — because it wants to be. It wants to be responsible. And music is playful and irresponsible. Phonologically overdetermined, as Jakobson might say. Jingling or tuning. Think of the blues refrain in Stein's "Melanctha." It sneaks into the novella right after one of the narrator's "prose" paragraphs.

"Why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive, helf white girl Melanctha Herbert love and do for and demean herself in service to this coarse, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose, and why was this unmoral, promiscuous, shiftless Rose married, and that's not so common either, to a good man of the negroes, while Melanctha with her white blood and attraction and desire for a right position had not yet been really married." - p 80

SHEESH. The reader is informed that "music is playful and irresponsible". That seems like the sort of mind-bogglingly stupid oversimplification that a non-musician wd plop out ye olde sphincter. Then he brings in Gertrude Stein as some sort of example. Antin tells the reader that what he learned from this is "that even the stiffest prose sections threaten to become musical".

My review is presented in its entirety here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1055176-antin ( )