by Jason Camlot

  1. How are we listening under the present circumstances? How are we feeling about what we hear?
  2. Please enter one question or topic you would like to discuss in relation to today’s course materials into the “chat” function. Share your questions with everyone. We will get to these in the course of our discussion.
  3. What is an antin “talk poem”? Where does it exist? How do we define it as an entity?

“I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’d been thinking about…”
–antin, “The Principle of Fit II”

“ive gotten into the habit of going into a closet to address myself over a typewriter what kind of talking is that?” –antin, talking at the boundaries

Q: What is kind of relationship between talk and thinking is being performed? What is the status of “intention” in relation to structure, improvisation, chance?

  • Apostrophe + ecphonesis + prosopopeia (figures of address).
  • Deixis (Poetic Deictics): Linguistic tropes and procedures speakers (in literature and otherwise) use to locate themselves in space and time.
  • Ecphonesis: The gesture of turning away from one recognized audience to address another.
  • Prosopopoeia: Addressing a dead or absent person, an animal, a thing, or an abstract quality or idea as if it were alive, and capable of understanding.
  • Ecphonesis: A poetic outcry or exclamation.

”[I]t is certainly beyond question that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in its turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general).”
–Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription” in Resistance to Theory**

“O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me 
What this strong music in the soul may be!” 
–S.T. Coleridge, “Dejection: an Ode”

“as a poet i was getting extremely tired of what I considered an unnatural language act going into a closet so to speak sitting in front of a typewriter because anything is possible in a closet in front of a typewriter and nothing is necessary a closet is no place to address anybody”
–antin, “talking at the boundaries”

Q: How might we think of antin’s talk poetry as a radical extension of the poetics of dectics? What kinds of arguments about antin and apostrophe can we develop? Where does that lead us, critically speaking?

Listening to the “Principle of Fit II”

  • The idea of ‘fit’
  • Glaucoma (the wish for fit / discursive vagueness)
  • Bev (half-fit – yes, Vegas, no)
  • Funeral Speeches (style)
  • Actress Hotel Shtetl (narrative non-fit)

Q: How do we listen to an antin talk poem? How do we take notes on it? Make sense of it? Discern structure?

Shuhei Hosokawea, “The Walkman Effect” – Three passages to think about in relation to antin.

Singularisation: “[I]it enables our musical listening to be more occasional, more incidental, more contingent…The Walkman produces or constitutes a musical event which is characterized as unique, mobile and singular.” (p 107)

“To make the concept of ‘positive distance’ more precise, we may compare within the flood of objects the Walkman with the polaroid, with respect to speed of act, immediacy of effect, simplicity of mechanical construction, verisimilitude of output, low-fidelity (lower than the ordinary stereo or camera) of reproduction, ease of operation, non-specificity of territory, anonymity of subject, and contingency of event.” (p 108)

“The Walkman, in fact, has no meaningless context; at the same time, paradoxically, no context is strictly appropriate for it. Every context (or no context) can be justified, appropriated and legitimated by its singularity and autonomy.” (p 109).

Q: What are the media aesthetics of antin’s talk poetry? What does context mean in antin’s talk poetics?