Art & Creativity Quote by David Antin

Antin’s jab lands with the casual precision of someone who’s spent a career watching “song” get used as a decorative label. When he says he has “a great distaste for what’s usually called song in modern poetry,” he’s not rejecting musicality; he’s rejecting the imitation of it - the prettified cadence, the dutiful lyric swell, the way “music” can become a prestige filter that makes a poem feel serious without making it alive. The repeated “what’s usually called” does the real work here: it’s an attack on category-thinking, on critical consensus, on the museum tags that tell you what you’re hearing before you’ve heard it.

Then comes the pivot: “I really don’t think of speech as so far from song.” Antin is smuggling in an alternative lineage. Instead of poem-as-lyre, he points to poem-as-voice: talk, breath, timing, the micro-rhythms of hesitation and insistence. It’s a credo for his “talk poems,” performances that treat thinking-in-real-time as form, not raw material. The subtext is almost political: lyric “song” can imply a purified speaker, a cleaned-up self. Speech reintroduces the messy social body - the argument, the anecdote, the interruption, the pressure of an audience.

Context matters because Antin came up when poetry was splitting between page-bound craft and live, countercultural experimentation. His line insists those aren’t opposites. Song isn’t something you sprinkle on language; it’s what language already does when it’s allowed to sound like a person.