Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin is admitting a small heresy in the romance of solitary genius: thinking, for him, is a social activity with a room tone. The phrase "go about my business of thinking" sounds almost bureaucratic, deliberately un-mystical. He frames cognition as labor, not lightning, and that choice matters because it makes the audience less a jury and more a piece of equipment: a condition of the work.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two literary pieties at once. One is the poet as pure inwardness, composing in splendid isolation. The other is the crowd-pleaser, tailoring every line to applause. Antin splits the difference with surgical calm. "I'm aware of my audience in a way" is both concession and boundary; he won't pretend they're irrelevant, but he refuses to flatter them into co-authorship. He "engage[s] with them" while keeping thinking as the primary action, not performing.

Contextually, this fits Antin's talk-poem practice, where improvisation, digression, and intellectual riffing happen live, in real time. In that setting the audience isn't just reception; it's a constraint that sharpens attention. "They help me by providing a focus" is the punch: an audience becomes a lens. Not because they demand simplicity, but because their presence forces selection. You can't think everything at once out loud. You have to choose a path, commit to a thread, keep faith with listeners' limited time and your own. Antin turns that limitation into form, making the crowd not an obstacle to thought but the pressure that gives it shape.