Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line smuggles a manifesto into a modest complaint: expertise is always local, while curiosity is promiscuous. He’s not flattering the crowd or rebuking it; he’s naming the mismatch between how institutions want knowledge to behave (disciplined, bordered, credentialed) and how his mind wants to move (restless, associative, cross-contaminating). The sly pivot is “occasionally.” Yes, he’s spoken to “expert audiences,” but only in pockets, only in moments. Then comes the kicker: “no audience is expert over the whole range.” The sentence turns the room into an optical illusion. It looks like a problem of audience capacity; it’s really an argument for a different kind of speech.

As a poet associated with talk-poems and improvisational performance, Antin is operating in a context where the lecture, the reading, and the conversation blur. His work often proceeds by thinking out loud, letting digressions become method. So the quote doubles as a defense of form: if you want to explore widely, you can’t write like you’re submitting to a gatekeeper. You need language that can carry non-specialists without pretending everyone shares the same toolkit.

The subtext has teeth. “Expert” here is less a compliment than a narrowing device, a way audiences pre-approve what counts as legitimate inquiry. Antin dodges that trap by reframing his ambition: the range of his exploration is not an indulgence but the point. In a culture that rewards specialization, he’s insisting that the most honest thinking often happens in the gaps between expert domains, where nobody gets to be comfortable for long.