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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.

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
Century
Centuries
Song
Literary
Like
Settings
Passed
Melodic
Circles
Corny
Several
Commonplace
Setting
Lyrics
Looked
Text

More quotes by David Antin

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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
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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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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 my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
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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've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
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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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An art machine is a system whose parts when put in motion act upon each other in such a way as to cause you to see things differently
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You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
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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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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.
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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.
David Antin
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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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My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer she thought I should be a chicken farmer.
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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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.
David Antin
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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
David Antin
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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.
David Antin