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The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.

David Antin

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David Antin
Art Critic
Performance Artist
Poet
Writer
the United States of America
David Abraham Antin
David Abram Antin
Memories
Poems
Help
Poets
Helping
Greek
Remember
Began
Always
Anxiety
Deficiencies
Ancient
Oral
Praying
Deficiency
Poet
Muse

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When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.
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I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
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When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.
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Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.
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I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
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I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.
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The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.
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I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.
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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.
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
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I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
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