"When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor"
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Antin captures the peculiar hangover of authorship: the moment your own work hardens into a script, and you become the least interesting person in the room. The line pivots on an almost comic demotion. Writing is framed as agency, invention, risk; “the reading” is framed as repetition, a forced embodiment of decisions already made. By calling it “an experimental play,” he needles the cultural expectation that avant-garde work stays alive through performance. Even the experimental can calcify into routine the second it has to be delivered on cue.
The subtext is a quiet revolt against the literary marketplace’s preferred version of the poet: a charismatic mouthpiece for the text. Readings, especially in late-20th-century American poetry scenes, function as both ritual and audition. Antin, known for improvised “talk poems,” is allergic to that. His work depends on thinking in real time, letting narrative, argument, and digression generate the poem as it happens. If the poem is already “written,” then the reading asks him to cosplay spontaneity, to simulate discovery while actually reciting a settled artifact.
“I didn’t want to be an actor” is less about shyness than about control and authenticity. Acting means inhabiting someone else’s words or, worse here, pretending your own words are happening now when they’re not. Antin’s complaint lands as cultural critique: we prize the performative aura of the artist, then wonder why the art starts sounding like branding.
The subtext is a quiet revolt against the literary marketplace’s preferred version of the poet: a charismatic mouthpiece for the text. Readings, especially in late-20th-century American poetry scenes, function as both ritual and audition. Antin, known for improvised “talk poems,” is allergic to that. His work depends on thinking in real time, letting narrative, argument, and digression generate the poem as it happens. If the poem is already “written,” then the reading asks him to cosplay spontaneity, to simulate discovery while actually reciting a settled artifact.
“I didn’t want to be an actor” is less about shyness than about control and authenticity. Acting means inhabiting someone else’s words or, worse here, pretending your own words are happening now when they’re not. Antin’s complaint lands as cultural critique: we prize the performative aura of the artist, then wonder why the art starts sounding like branding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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