Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin frames poetry less as inspiration than as edit-room labor: splice, rewind, cut, and reassemble until meaning flickers into focus. The surprise is the analogy’s swagger. He doesn’t compare himself to a novelist, a painter, or even a musician, but to an “experimental filmmaker,” a figure associated with noncommercial risk, anti-plot structures, and a refusal to smooth over the seams. That’s the tell. Antin is claiming a lineage in which form is the argument.

“Committed to the process” is a quiet rebuttal to the romantic myth of the poet as conduit for sudden genius. The verb “working” insists on duration, repetition, and friction. Then he gives us a tactile method: “putting things together and taking them apart.” The line implies that a poem is not a precious, unified artifact but a provisional construction, always subject to dismantling. It also hints at collage: found materials, overheard speech, intellectual debris repurposed into art.

The subtext is about authority. By invoking experimental film, Antin signals that the poem’s success won’t be measured by clarity or easy payoff, but by what the procedure reveals: the thinking itself, the cuts and jumps, the productive discontinuities. Contextually, this maps onto postwar American avant-garde practice - Cagean chance, conceptual rigor, performance-inflected writing - where “composition” becomes an ethical stance. He’s defending difficulty, but not as elitism: as honesty about how ideas are actually made, tested, and revised under the pressure of attention.