Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin strips poetry of its ceremonial costume and leaves it in its most radical state: thinking out loud. The first sentence performs a quiet demotion of the poet-as-visionary persona. He “didn’t think about whether” he was making poems, as if the label is a distraction, even a kind of social bribery. What matters is the cognitive act itself, unglamorous and unfinished. In Antin’s hands, poetry isn’t a product; it’s a mode of attention.

Then the turn: “And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn’t understand.” That’s not self-deprecation; it’s an aesthetic program. Understanding is not the goal that crowns the poem, but the pressure that generates it. Each new thought expands the perimeter of the unknown, like a flashlight revealing how big the darkness is. The subtext pushes against the workshop myth that writing is “expression” of what you already know. Antin is insisting that real thinking is inherently destabilizing, and the honest poem documents that destabilization rather than tidying it up.

Context matters because Antin’s reputation is built on “talk poems” and improvisational performances that blur lecture, anecdote, and lyric. The line reads like a manifesto for process art: composition as live inquiry, where meaning is negotiated in real time with an audience and with language itself. It’s also a rebuke to the market’s demand for polished takeaways. Antin offers something riskier: a poem that refuses to pretend the mind has reached a conclusion just because the page ends.