Art & Creativity Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line lands like an anti-origin myth, a refusal of the neat, careerist narrative that usually gets stapled to artists: the childhood epiphany, the first notebook, the calling. “I hardly remember” isn’t coy modesty; it’s a statement about how practice actually forms. The beginning is foggy because the work didn’t start as a program. It started as a drift, a compulsion, a set of accidents that only later gets retrofitted into “a poet’s life.”

Then he turns the knife: “It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.” That second sentence quietly punctures the grand promises attached to poetry - moral uplift, political leverage, pure beauty, transcendence. Antin, whose talk-poems and improvisational performances were suspicious of polished lyric authority, is wary of poetry as a tool with a job description. The subtext is that belief in poetry’s powers is often a kind of self-mythologizing, a comforting story poets tell themselves to justify the time, the solitude, the marginality.

What makes the quote work is its doubled humility. It isn’t just “I don’t remember”; it’s “I don’t even remember my earlier faith.” That’s more unsettling. It suggests that whatever poetry “does” may be less a mission than an ongoing negotiation with attention, language, and thinking in real time. In an era that keeps demanding content with outcomes - impact, brand, platform - Antin’s shrug is a principled stance: the value of poetry may be inseparable from not knowing, from refusing to pre-sell its purpose.