Top 37 Quotes by David Antin

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

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.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

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.

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.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

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.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.