[Remarks prepared for
presentation at the conference “David Antin: Talking, Always Talking” September
27, 2018 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in connection with the revival of
Antin’s 1988 “Sky Poems” as an exercise in the poetics of sky-writing.]
I know that this is not intended
as simply a memorial for David Antin, but rather to discuss his very great
achievements and maybe to point to some aspects of them that may not be
immediately obvious. For me, my sense of
David goes back further than that of anybody in this room and, for that matter,
probably anybody in the world today. We
met in June of 1950 – or was it 1951? – at an end-of-semester party in the
apartment of one of our professors at City College of New York, an amiable and charmingly
pretentious expert in Romantic and Victorian English literature. For David and me, however, our meeting was an
immediate turn-on, a recognition from the outset of what we already had in
common (and conversely, I suppose, of what we didn’t). So, we made plans to meet again in the fall,
by which time David had gone from a strikingly blackhaired and swarthy teenager
into the early stages of an alopecia
totalis that would deprive him of all his facial and body hair before the
year was over.
And so,
the first months of our friendship were colored by crisis for him, at the end
of which we found ourselves bonded forever. And from the start talking was at the heart of
our friendship – in person or by telephone – and an overwhelming sense of
poetry as the medium by which we would explore the world and, if it came to it,
would define or re-define that world as needed.
So, David was freely talking (always talking) from the start, but also
listening (always listening), far more than other talkers I would come to know
thereafter, and in his presence I felt myself to be a talker also. It would be three decades or so of
preparation before the talking and the poetry came together, with results we
all can talk about tonight, but the preparation, the readiness, as someone
said, is all.
Two
things (or more) to make note of, then.
At the
heart of David’s intellectual and artistic world was a sense (which he also
attributed to me) of contrariness & skepticism: to overturn the bad hand we
(and so many others like & unlike us) had been dealt as young poets in the
reigning literary world of that time, & to search (after we had nearly
succumbed to it) for an avant-garde practice across the arts against the
demands of a reborn artistic/poetic conservatism. And along with this came a distinct
desire & need to redefine the inherited poetic past in terms of the vital
present – a desire showing up, as we later found, all around us. (He also wanted, and was better equipped than
I, to shake off the mystical in poetry, then and now, in favor of a more
rational, even scientific mind-set & writing practice, while I found a
kinship in the old mystics and shamans to what would be my own non-mystical poetic
practice.
The
contrariness, then – to call it that – manifested in David early, as in his
contention, when we were still in our very early twenties, of Thomas Campion’s
superiority as a poet over the likes of Shakespeare and other more expansive
(more wordy) poets. (Shades of Edgar
Allan Poe’s “Poetic Principle”!) Something
like that didn’t last very long of course, but it gave a foretaste of his later
willingness to go deliberately against the grain (all sorts of grains), and
even closer to home, by calling into question – but not quite – such matters near
and dear to me as deep image, ethnopoetics, imagination, poetry-as-music –
while collaborating with me and supporting my own involvements therein, in all
of which he was and remained a curious but vital ally and co-creator. (I would cite him here as a marvelous translator
of André Breton and an intimate of Nico Calas, a later spokesman for Breton and
Surrealism, then living in New York – and prior perhaps to his more important engagements
with Wittgensein & Cage.) In our collaboration
on our magazine Some/Thing in
particular we brought these disparate but solidly avant-garde elements
together, starting our first issue with a series of Aztec Definitions from
pre-Conquest Mexico and with the image of a northwest coast shaman as our logo:
a reflection of his enthusiasms as well as my own.
His later
turn to talking was also a jab at a song-derived approach to the origins of
poetry, as in his dispute with Gary Snyder at the First International
Ethnopoetics Symposium in 1975, which might have been with me as well, but wasn’t. For myself I saw the talking gambit as a
brilliant extension of what was possible as poetry, but I would also turn the
tables on him later, by viewing the Talk Poems, perhaps his greatest and most
original achievement, as most interestingly a form of writing, for it’s in their written form that the structural/visual nature
of the poetry, its immediate recognition as such, is in full display. (A kind of concrete poetry, much like his sky
poems, which we’ll get a chance to look at shortly.)
And
finally, I want to speak about his take on dreams or the absence thereof, as a
contrarian escape perhaps from his earlier surrealism. Here his decade-long challenge was to the
experiential core of Surrealism and of many other schools of poetry, but he put
it in negative experiential terms of his own -- that dreams were phenomena to
which he could pay no serious attention because he in fact did not dream and therefore had no
experience of dreaming. So, in the talk
poem called “how long is the present” (1978) we get the following assertion:
i am
somebody who doesn’t dream in the
significant sense you could probably
get rapid eye movement measurements and electroencephalograms to produce a
plausible case that i have occasionally been dreaming and you may believe it and i may believe it
but you cannot prove it to my
satisfaction that i dream because i simply have no memory of it so phenomenologically it is not possible
for anybody to say that i dream because i have no experience of dreaming except for one time there was this one dream i dreamt that i was dreaming but then i woke up and found out that it wasn’t true
It’s to be noted of course that
after several years of unwavering denial, David followed his renewed interest
in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and
other Freudian writings into frank discussions of his own experiences of
dreaming.
About all
of this I may someday write at greater length.
But for now – with the short time allotted to us this evening – I’ll
close this presentation with a couple of poems addressed to David as both a
non-dreamer and a dreamer, and will let it go at that.
[Reads from “Seneca Journal: The
Dreamers” and three sections from “The Mysteries of Mind Laid Bare in Talking,”
as follows:]
from Seneca
Journal 7: “The Dreamers” (1972)
that couple sitting
in splendor of old houses
Albert Jones & his wife Geneva
were old before my time
he was the last of the Seneca diviners
died 1968
the year we first stayed in Salamanca
with the power to know dreams
“their single divinity” wrote Fremin
(S.J.) 1650
as we say “divine”
the deva in us
like a devil
or a divus (deus)
when these old woods were rich with
gods
people called powers
they would appear in words
our language hides them
even now
the action of the poem brings them to
light
dear David
not in the business man’s
imagination
but asking
“who is Beaver?”
forces them out of the one mind
in mything
mouthing the grains of language
as David that sounds like deva
means beloved
thus every Indian once had a name
from “The
Mysteries of Mind Laid Bare on Talking” (2017)
4
who
does not dream
dreams
deeper
by
not dreaming
until
the door
swings
open
draws
you to
sleep
within
what
forms
assailing
us
the
scattered dreamers
curtains
closing
on
our eyes
in
frantic bursts
lights
streaming
take
the shape
of
birds & stars
outlyers
move
across the sky
the
eye in love
with
tentacles
in
mauve & amber
the
new year
underway
without
you
then
the rest
is
dream
whether
the images
arise
or not
the
screen goes blank
foretold
by you
the
dreamer
here
is the death
we
feared
infinite
space
to
every side
absent all light
5
After Wang Wei
O my friends!
there is no friend.
at Weiching
morning
rain
the
fine dust damped
a guest house
green
among
green
willows
urge a friend
to drink a final
glass of wine
west
of Yang Pass
there is
no friend
6
except the memory
the loss a
dream
that will not stick
but comes & goes
as if we hadn’t
dreamed it
for which I name you
poet of the dream
in whose denial
dreams come forth
the word “desire”
foremost
pleasures first
a place as large
as Prospect Park
where others
feast & bathe
some sleeping
& the dreamer
kicks his shoes off
wades into a pool
the north branch of
an old estate
its master far away
then goes from room
to room in search
of shoes as
prelude
to a silent movie
buried like his life
too
deep for tears
for which the word
the woman
throws at him
is hog (he
says)
not out of shame
or fecklessness
but turning
subject into object
echoing the master’s
words the world
is
everything
that
is the case
waking
& dreaming
much
the same
13.i.2017
No comments:
Post a Comment