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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
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Melodic
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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've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.
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I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.
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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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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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From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
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There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.
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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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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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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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I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
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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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My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.
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Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
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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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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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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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