Education Quote by David Antin

Antin is pointing at a moment before language hardens into its job description. In early childhood, repetition isn’t a glitch; it’s a technology. Kids loop a phrase the way they spin a toy in their hands, not to communicate but to test-drive sound, rhythm, and feeling. The “meaningful phrases” part matters: he’s not talking about babble, but about language already carrying charge, even before the child can file it under “speech” versus “song.” That blurred category is the point. Meaning arrives braided with music.

The line also works as a quiet argument about poetry itself. By framing the distinction between “singing and saying” as something learned, Antin demotes it from natural law to cultural training. We’re taught to treat song as aesthetic, optional, and speech as practical, accountable. Antin, a poet associated with talk pieces and performance, has a stake in undoing that split. His work often lives in the borderland where speaking becomes rhythmic, where thought happens out loud and form emerges in real time. Children become his evidence: before etiquette and schooling police the voice, the mind defaults to pattern.

Subtext: our adult suspicion of “sing-song” speech is a kind of amnesia. We forget that repetition is how language becomes ours, how the private self tunes itself. Antin’s sentence doesn’t romanticize childhood so much as indict the culture that narrows expression, training us to believe that singing is extra while saying is real.