Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line reads like an aesthetic manifesto delivered with the dry clarity of someone who knows the “sacred” is often just a costume authority wears. By stacking near-synonyms - secular, casual, colloquial, vernacular - he isn’t being redundant; he’s tightening a net around a single preference: language that still smells like breath. The sacred, by contrast, implies distance: elevated diction, inherited forms, the kind of seriousness that arrives pre-approved.

The intent is less to mock spirituality than to demote reverence as a default mode in art. Antin’s poetics, rooted in talk pieces and performance, treats speech not as a lesser cousin of Literature but as its engine. Casualness becomes a method: it lets thought happen in public, including hesitation, tangents, and self-correction. That’s the subtextual wager - that truth is more likely to emerge from the messy process of thinking than from polished pronouncement.

Context matters: mid-to-late 20th-century American poetry is crowded with battles over voice, authenticity, and the politics of form. The “sacred” can stand in for institutional taste (the academy, the canon, the high-modernist altar), and Antin’s vernacular turn is a refusal of that gatekeeping. He’s aligning himself with a democratic ear: meaning made in real time, with ordinary words, for listeners not initiates.

What makes the line work is its quiet defiance. It doesn’t declare war on the sacred; it simply keeps choosing the human register, again and again, until the holy starts to look like a rhetorical special effect.