Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

A quiet barb hides in Antin's phrasing: “what has passed for song” suggests a long-running con, or at least a genteel misunderstanding that literary culture has politely agreed not to notice. He’s not arguing that poems shouldn’t be musical; he’s accusing “literary circles” of confusing the appearance of singability with the experience of song. The jab lands because it targets a familiar institutional reflex: if a text looks like lyrics - short lines, compressed feeling, a decorative cadence - it gets ushered into the category of “song,” even when there’s no actual music, no social occasion for singing, no body in the room to carry it.

Antin, associated with talk-poems and performance-based work, is pushing against the page as the default stage. “Commonplace melodic setting” is the tell: he’s not praising accessibility, he’s indicting the way lyric forms get standardized into a generic tunefulness, a template of emotional cues. The subtext is that literary prestige has often favored the legible sign of “lyric” over the messy, time-bound reality of sounding. In other words, the culture rewards artifacts that resemble music rather than demanding the risks and constraints that music imposes.

Historically, this reads as a modernist/postwar correction to the lyric-as-high-literary mode, and a defense of performance, speech, and improvisation as more honest measures of what “song” actually is: not a look, but an event.