"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James"
About this Quote
Antin isn’t confessing a preference so much as drawing a border patrol line around what counts as livable prose for him. Laurence Sterne stands for the pleasurable mess: digression as method, voice as event, the mind showing its seams in real time. Henry James, by contrast, is the high priest of composure - sentences that lace and tighten, consciousness rendered with such polish it can feel sealed behind glass. Antin’s stake is clear: if prose starts behaving like a museum vitrine, he can’t breathe in it.
The subtext is a quiet manifesto about authority. Jamesian prose implies mastery: the writer knows, the reader follows. Sterne implies companionship: the writer wanders, the reader keeps pace, both consenting to distraction. For a poet associated with “talk poems” and performance-inflected writing, that’s not just an aesthetic choice; it’s an ethics of attention. He wants prose that preserves the provisional, the half-formed thought, the interruption that proves a mind is actually present.
Contextually, Antin is speaking from late-20th-century American experimental practice, where the page is often treated as a transcript of thinking rather than a monument to thinking. His line smuggles in a critique of literary prestige: “seriousness” is too often code for density, restraint, and social filtration. Sterne lets Antin claim a different lineage for intelligence - one that can be funny, discursive, and suspicious of finish. In that sense, the quote is less about two novelists than two models of cultural power: prose as control versus prose as lived motion.
The subtext is a quiet manifesto about authority. Jamesian prose implies mastery: the writer knows, the reader follows. Sterne implies companionship: the writer wanders, the reader keeps pace, both consenting to distraction. For a poet associated with “talk poems” and performance-inflected writing, that’s not just an aesthetic choice; it’s an ethics of attention. He wants prose that preserves the provisional, the half-formed thought, the interruption that proves a mind is actually present.
Contextually, Antin is speaking from late-20th-century American experimental practice, where the page is often treated as a transcript of thinking rather than a monument to thinking. His line smuggles in a critique of literary prestige: “seriousness” is too often code for density, restraint, and social filtration. Sterne lets Antin claim a different lineage for intelligence - one that can be funny, discursive, and suspicious of finish. In that sense, the quote is less about two novelists than two models of cultural power: prose as control versus prose as lived motion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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