"There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation"
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Antin’s line quietly raids the old hierarchy that treats speech as raw material and writing as the only “edited” art. By insisting there are editing procedures for talks, he reframes the supposedly off-the-cuff as a crafted medium with its own discipline. The jazz comparison is doing strategic work: it names a form where structure and spontaneity aren’t opposites but collaborators, where choices happen in real time under pressure, guided by training, taste, and a feel for the room.
The subtext is a defense of compositional intelligence without the safety net of the page. In jazz, improvisation isn’t random; it’s a practiced set of moves: quoting, paraphrasing, revising a motif, laying out, returning. Antin implies that a talk can “edit” the same way: by circling an idea, cutting a thread when it stops yielding, letting an anecdote modulate the argument, or using a pause as a splice. The edit isn’t just subtraction; it’s timing, sequencing, emphasis, and the decision to leave a seam visible.
Context matters because Antin’s practice sits in the postwar moment when poets were aggressively expanding what counts as a poem: performance, process, documentation, voice. His talk-poems treat thinking aloud as an aesthetic event, not a draft on the way to a “real” text. The sentence also contains a gentle provocation to literary culture: stop pretending the only serious revision happens alone at a desk. Some of the sharpest editing happens live, with an audience as both witness and instrument.
The subtext is a defense of compositional intelligence without the safety net of the page. In jazz, improvisation isn’t random; it’s a practiced set of moves: quoting, paraphrasing, revising a motif, laying out, returning. Antin implies that a talk can “edit” the same way: by circling an idea, cutting a thread when it stops yielding, letting an anecdote modulate the argument, or using a pause as a splice. The edit isn’t just subtraction; it’s timing, sequencing, emphasis, and the decision to leave a seam visible.
Context matters because Antin’s practice sits in the postwar moment when poets were aggressively expanding what counts as a poem: performance, process, documentation, voice. His talk-poems treat thinking aloud as an aesthetic event, not a draft on the way to a “real” text. The sentence also contains a gentle provocation to literary culture: stop pretending the only serious revision happens alone at a desk. Some of the sharpest editing happens live, with an audience as both witness and instrument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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