Happiness Quote by David Antin

Antin turns the poetry reading into a stress test for attention: no velvet-rope reverence, no captive audience, no promise of neatly packaged meaning. "I'm standing up thinking" is an aggressive demystification. He refuses the poet-as-oracle pose and offers something closer to public cognition, like watching someone improvise with ideas in real time. The standing matters: it signals performance, but not theatrics; bodily presence becomes part of the argument that thought is an event, not a finished product.

The invitation that follows is pointedly non-seductive. "Anybody who wants to listen is welcome" sounds democratic until the second sentence snaps the trap shut. "If not, I'm happy to see them go" weaponizes indifference. It's not hostility so much as a refusal to bargain for attention. Antin rejects the default cultural script where the speaker owes the room entertainment, clarity, or emotional payoff. If you stay, you're consenting to work; if you leave, you're proving the piece's premise that listening is a choice, not a social obligation.

Context sharpens the intent. Antin's talk-poems and improvised lectures blurred poetry, philosophy, and stand-up timing, emerging from a post-60s scene suspicious of authority and allergic to literary piety. The subtext is an ethics of audiencehood: don't perform appreciation; don't confuse politeness with engagement. He'd rather have five alert listeners than fifty hostages, because the real subject isn't "the poem". It's the live negotiation between mind, voice, and whoever is willing to meet it halfway.