Parenting & Family Quote by David Antin

There’s a studied bafflement in Antin’s admission, the kind that reads less like ignorance than a method. “I had no idea” lands as both confession and stance: the poet refusing the comforting fantasy that an audience is knowable, legible, or already “his.” In a culture that expects the artist to arrive with a brand and a demographic, Antin opens by declaring his lack of market research. It’s a small act of resistance.

The line’s power is in its triple uncertainty: where they were coming from, why they came, what they “needed.” Those clauses quietly dismantle the standard performance contract. A visiting writer is supposed to presume motives (they’re students; they want craft; they need wisdom) and deliver product accordingly. Antin instead treats the event as a live problem rather than a lecture: a room full of people whose inner lives can’t be reduced to “kids at a small private college.”

The specificity of place matters. “Small private college in the San Fernando Valley” signals a peripheral stage, not the mythic center of literary culture. Antin isn’t walking into the Ivy League as an anointed figure; he’s entering an oddly situated micro-public, and he’s alert to the mismatch between institutional setting and actual human desire.

Subtext: the poet’s job isn’t to transmit a prepared message but to discover, in real time, what can be said in front of strangers without pretending intimacy. It’s an ethics of attention disguised as casual candor, making uncertainty the engine of the work rather than an embarrassment to hide.