Wit & Attitude Quote by David Antin

Antin’s swagger isn’t just stage bravado; it’s a declaration of allegiance to risk. “Shaggy dog stories” and “common jokes” are deliberately low-status forms, the kind of thing literary culture is trained to treat as contamination. By staking a “right” to use them, Antin frames the reading not as a sanctified recital of finished poems but as a live, thinking performance where attention has to be earned in real time, not granted by reputation.

The line “as part of what I’m doing” is doing the heavy lifting. Antin isn’t apologizing for humor, he’s insisting it belongs to the work’s method: talk-poems that wander, test premises, double back, generate meaning through digression. The shaggy dog story is a perfect analogue for his aesthetics: long, apparently pointless, yet structurally precise in how it manipulates expectation and patience. If you stay, you’re consenting to a different contract, one where the payoff might be an idea rather than a punchline, and where the “joke” is often on our own demand for efficiency and closure.

“I don’t give a damn if half the audience walks out” reads as contempt, but it’s also a practical ethic. Antin is refusing the polite hostage situation of the poetry reading, where audiences sit through dutifully and call it respect. Walking out becomes an honest critique, a real-time edit. The subtext: poetry doesn’t need to be protected from ordinary speech; it needs to be put under pressure by it.