Time & Perspective Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line refuses the museum-glass fantasy of the “definitive version.” For a poet who worked in talk-poems and improvised performance, “Stories are different every time you tell them” is less a cute observation than a manifesto: narrative isn’t a sealed container, it’s an event. The story happens in the telling - in the room, in the breath, in the detours, in what the audience’s attention rewards and what it punishes.

The intent is to demote plot from sovereign to byproduct. Antin frames storytelling as a field of choices, where memory, cadence, and circumstance keep rewriting the same raw material. “They allow so many possible narratives” sounds generous, almost democratic, but there’s bite under it: if stories can be retold into countless shapes, then no retelling is neutral. Every version smuggles in an argument about cause and effect, blame and innocence, what counts as “the point.”

Context matters here. Coming out of postwar American experimentation - and shadowed by poststructuralist suspicion toward stable meaning - Antin’s practice treats language as action rather than artifact. His emphasis on variability pushes back against the idea of the author as a final authority, replacing it with the teller as a temporary organizer of experience. It also nudges listeners to notice their own complicity: you don’t just receive a story, you co-produce it by what you expect, what you recognize, what you’re willing to believe.

The subtext is a warning and a liberation. If narratives are pliable, they can be revised toward empathy or weaponized into propaganda. Antin bets on the live, shifting version because it makes that power visible.