Talk Poem as Visual Text: David Antin's "Artist's Books"

Review of Contemporary Fiction, The, Spring, 2001 by Marjorie Perloff

David Antin is primarily known as a brilliant talker, a performance artist or improvisator whose talk pieces belong, in the words of Michael Davidson, "somewhere among a standup comedian's rap, a storyteller's fable and a formal lecture."(1) Antin has been compared to Lenny Bruce and to Spalding Gray:(2) indeed, he has himself insisted on his commitment to "talk" rather than "writing," as, for example, in the headnote to "what am I doing here?" (1973), where he declares, "if robert lowell is a poet i don't want to be a poet if robert frost was a poet i don't want to be a poet if socrates was a poet ill consider it."(3) Socrates, in this scheme of things, because, in Antin's view, his is a form of "talk" that epitomizes the "thinking capacity of language," and hence "poetry as inventive thinking."(4)

But unlike Socrates, whose "talk" is known to us only through its written representation by Plato, Antin transcribes his own talks in a highly particularized format: unjustified left and right margins, lowercase letters, spaces (usually five or six characters) between phrases, and the absence of all punctuation except--intriguingly--the question mark. An Antin transcription, as Davidson points out, "is in no sense a replica of the talk itself. Antin freely edits and modifies the talk so that it becomes a representation, not a mimesis, of speech."(5) The printed text is usually somewhat longer than the original talk (Antin tends to add and amplify), and years may elapse between performance and publication. Indeed, some of my own favorite Antin talk pieces--notably, "The Poetry of Ideas and the Idea of Poetry" (on Wittgenstein and Marx) delivered at the West Coast Humanities Institute at Berkeley in 1984--have yet to be transcribed and published. However "improvisatory" the talk, in other words, the written transcript is nothing if not calculated. As Frederick Garber noted acutely, the refusal to justify margins or use punctuation may well be calculated to "undo the immobility" of standard prose, but "the spaces on the page, whatever their status as counterparts to the pauses in the performance, never go out of being, never cease to make their statements against the discomfiting lies of fixity, even as they are, themselves, irrevocably fixed" (79).

There is, in short, nothing casual or improvisatory about the placement of the words on a given Antin page. Indeed, one could argue, Antin's talk pieces, beginning with "Talking at Pomona" (1972), exhibit a form of Concrete poetry or, more accurately "Concrete prose" in the tradition of Gertrude Stein's prose or such "Concrete" works as Haroldo de Campos's Galaxias, with its not-quiteverse, not-quite-prose page-long constellations, where repetition, punning, spacing, and unjustified margins create a tense visual field.

Such attentiveness to visual layout is hardly surprising, given that Antin's early Fluxus-related texts were designed with the care one usually associates with artist's books, definitions (Caterpillar, 1967), for example, designed by the poet's wife, the artist Eleanor Antin, is a graph paper spiral-bound notebook, in which typographical layout, handwritten addenda, and ink diagrams like "Owl and Rat," an astronomical drawing that "illustrates" part 2 ("the constellation") of the found-text sequence called "The Black Plague" (see figure 1) combine to create a parody textbook.(6)

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In part 3 of definitions Antin takes the sequence of propositions that deal with pain (#244 ff.) in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations--a series itself made up of short disjunct visual units on the page--and rearranges them so that key phrases like "what is the grammar of pain" and "the future is hidden from us" stand out on the page as isolated units. Further: the vertical lines of the graph paper act as dividers, so that we have effects like the following (definitions 31):

| he might | not see c | ruelty as | cruelty | cruel | ty blindn | ess |

Another book whose visual design is integral to its meanings is Code of Flag Behavior (1968), with its pseudo-American flag (red and white vertical candy stripes with blue insert on white field at bottom right) on the cover (see figure 2), its red and white frontispiece pages followed by the title page with blue lettering, and its internal spacing, as in "the marchers":

by walking together         they will not feel all alone
their keynote was joyful    lending an aspect to their ardors
that drizzle will not dim   in spite of their protest

and then the shift to capitals a few lines further down:

ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE LOVE    IS THE LOVERS
ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE PLAYS   IS THE PLAYERS
ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE JOYS    IS THE JOYFUL(7)

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And a third--perhaps the most striking of the "pre-talk poem" volumes--is the 1972 Talking, which Antin designed himself. Here the outside and inside front and back covers are based on his own photographic piece called "30 days of the News." As Antin tells it: