Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Ambition shows up here as a kind of charming misfire: not the clean childhood dream of "inventor", but the messy, self-correcting memory of what that word once promised. Antin frames the desire in quotation marks without using them, letting "whatever I thought that meant then" do the heavy lifting. It’s an admission that the fantasy wasn’t vocational; it was mythological. "Inventor" isn’t a job so much as a costume you put on to feel consequential.

The roll call of Edison, Watt, Newton is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a kid grasping for famous names. Underneath, it’s a sly compression of how culture hands us greatness: invention (Edison), improvement and industry (Watt), and then the sneakily extravagant leap to pure theory (Newton). That escalation matters. Antin is telling you that his childhood hunger wasn’t confined to gadgets. He wanted the authority of explaining the world, the kind of prestige that makes your name stand in for a whole era of progress.

As a poet, Antin also smuggles in a quiet critique of the hierarchy that crowns "inventors" and sidelines artists. By narrating his uncertainty, he reframes invention as a mental stance rather than a patentable outcome. The subtext: poetry can be a form of invention too, but it has to fight for recognition in a culture that prefers its breakthroughs measurable, machinable, and myth-friendly.