writing and talking

a meditation on David Antin

i was supposed to write an essay but i have hated writing essays for some time now though im very good at writing them at least in the traditional college-accepted college-trained manner and i have to write two other essays so this isnt really an essay call it a meditation it is addressed to you imagine a dear hank typed at the beginning even though im writing this little intro last and if it gets personal its because it has to or else it will have no validity as a meditation and if its looks deceive you well thats one of the points it tries to make

writing and talking

well what id like to do here is write a little about antins work on a speech basis that is a basis which may seem odd or uncomfortable particularly since im writing not talking but since this whole endeavor seems sort of silly sort of self-contradictory im not entirely sure it isnt appropriate to appropriate his page construction and so on i mean if i were talking a talk-poem about talk-poems or actually about antins particular talk-poems i would do it this way right? and what im doing is talking a talk-poem but on paper besides then i can do things like play with appropriate and appropriate or with the structure of a paper itself so given all this this is a paper not a poem this is just in an odd form a form which i hope will flatter the material and if it doesnt at least it will make it different although not for the professor who gets to read it i imagine hes getting lots just lots of talk-poems but then this will be different because its a paper not a talk-poem nomenclature is an odd thing i want to think on paper about a particular thing the boundary between writing and talking and writing is of course a form of thought as bernstein had it although you know i disagree with bernstein on a lot of things almost everything but disagreement is only natural anyway talking is also a form of thought a form that doesnt lend itself to revision easily unlike writing perhaps as ive been typing this ive gone back and fixed many typos adjusted spacing on the page and if i chose i coul dleave in a misspelled work whoops theres one no a few anyway and people would probably sit there and wonder why thats stupid surely he could have proofread or spell-checked nowadays and it leads to tangents in their thought like why he didnt typographical effects are a possibility he did it on purpose and then you can really get into picky little discussions the kind of thing like arguing over that space in addies section in faulkner in as i lay dying what does the space mean or in howes overtypes or cages scratched out stuff what does that deletion mean what does it imply about his philosophy a very graduate school kind of thinking in any case this is all different from talking of from talking as a form of thought which doesn�t lend itself to well to that kind of tricks i call them tricks not in a pejorative sense but in a sense like that of saying stunt acting sort of miniature tour de forces high risk moves that can easily fall into absurdity do them enough and theyll be cliched or precious although a good craftsman can of course prevent that but in any case you cant scratch out what you just said in speech it stays there even if you say disregard that disregard that members of the jury is a typical lawyer trick in the movies i dont know if its a trick in real life the trial lawyer says something inflammatory something objected to by the other lawyer and the judge strikes it from the record the jury is supposed to ignore it but they cant because theyve heard it and it is stuck in their memories but ah revision between the first and second drafts or even in a single draft like im doing now you can remove a thought and it will be gone the reader will never know it was there although the writer will and in a certain way thats all that matters so thats a difference between thinking in speech and thinking in writing some are better at one some at the other but there are many similarities in the ways in which we try to convey those thoughts in speech or writing whether were talking a poem or writing one and all this has been by manner of introduction to what i want to talk about i say talk because you can talk on paper i want to talk about the way in which antin uses the devices of speech in the supposed poems now antin doesnt claim to be doing poetry with these at least he says so in some places he wants to be called a philosopher socrates keeps coming up but he does call the works that result talk-poems a term i will quibble with about which more later i think these arent poems but speeches but i have my own terms and ive quarreled with people over them so i wont make a strong case for that now some call poetry language arts but i think thats overly broad it might have worked in the past but its too much now and i classify what antin has done as public speaking oratory is i suppose a more distinguished name but since i want to talk about the way in which antin uses the traditional devices of oratory in what he does it doesnt matter whether something like talking at the boundaries is a poem or not i could be talking about howes use of techniques of visual arts without saying that her writing is a painting which i dont think it is but the point is that its beside the point since this is an essay or a paper and not a discourse i suppose i should start by defining a thesis statement something along the lines of antins use of rhetorical devices such as parallellism analogy exposition of deductive reasoning and reasoning from the specific to the general contribute to the interpretation of his work as public speech and not as poetry but that would be needlessly argumentative and i think not in the spirit of his work at all so ill just start this and see where it leads me so like antin so often does i think ill tell a story but unlike antin its about myself more than an example drawn from someone he knows antin ive noticed tends to know people who serve as wonderful examples of ideas almost more like case studies than examples instances and even for instances now when i was a senior in high school i did oratory in the category called by forensics people extemp short for extemporaneous speech and this category is usually divided into levels national affairs and international affairs the advanced people took international i guess because there was more to know i did international because i have a better understanding of them than of national affairs my upbringing no doubt but not because i was advanced i wasnt we were all new at it it was a new program at my high school the way it worked was that you were given a question or three and you had to choose one and you had half an hour to prepare and then you spoke a short speech six minutes no more no less if you could help it it was supposed to be not just explanatory because the questions usually demanded more than just research and speaking ability they wanted you to answer the questions like solve the problems in yugoslavia i was asked what the solution to ethnic troubles in the region called bosnia might be this back in 89 before it blew up and i blew the question not as badly as i could have but pretty bad by my lights because there is no six-minute solution to bosnia not in 89 not today i did advise legitimizing milosevic to defuse his rebellion but who knows if that would have worked you had to prepare out of files you brought with you and being beginners at it we had very small files on only a few subjects we did well despite that we went to philadelphia for the national championships we were wiped out in the first round i was so nervous all i could think of was it cost me a hundred and fifty bucks of my own money to come up here and im going to flunk out fast why didnt i spend the 150 on something else but before we got the nationals i had to do my state-winning speech and that was on afghanistan the ussr had just retreated from there and the war was officially over and the speech was about the war and about the future and it was brought closer to me by the fact that the niece of one of the top contenders for the presidency then newly created one of the mujahedin leaders niece was a classmate of mine in school [name redacted] and now she is the niece of the president or maybe of the expresident the troubles continued but it was brought home to me by this by the personal knowledge of someone who was personally involved and so i won the right to be on the state team with an anecdote about the last soldier to leave afghanistan and i had his name but i dont remember it but it was a very powerful anecdote and it brought a reality to the subject matter a reality that my analogy about a big red bear and a little sleeping country just couldn�t the analogy was a good opening but it had no magic to it but a personal account a story now theres mythmaking and mythmaking is my term for creating a resonance a communication that conveys a fundamental without stating it essentially didactic but expressed through story it was a good speech i think and i won a berth in philly and it was a worthwhile trip but what has stayed with me is tell a story an old lesson but one that has stuck because stories are things people relate to they tend to jump boundaries and thats why the anecdote is such a fundamental part of public speech i think antin organizes his talks around anecdotes as a structuring principle in the same way that his organizing principle on the page is the phrase i was touched by afghanistan because i knew [name redacted] and because i was touched i knew to tell a story that could touch people now i have no idea if this story has touched you but it was intended to be an example of a rhetorical device one that is the center of antins technique the anecdote and he tells rather long involved ones too with lots of possible angles of approach but then even simple stories have many possible approaches i was reading william goldmans book on hollywood the part about how to adapt material for a screenplay and that was a major concern of his how to present the story a book about a family cant be about a full family onscreen because of time limitations it has to center on somebody and whats more on one problem in that somebodys life if you do it right the audience will feel involved but if you cant focus the effect will diffuse and in a speech where there is no visual element or at least not as involved and involving a visual element anecdote and other descriptive measures ground the listener im reminded on the old radio serials i know im too young dont bother thinking it ive heard them anyway and i was reading stephen kings fascinating book about horror danse macabre and he talked about the way reader or listener involvement varied from the old radio horror shows to the novels he writes and how what was totally involving in one was stultifyingly dull in the other i dont doubt this paper as a speech or read aloud would be less involving because it isnt full of colorful anecdotes and it tells more than it shows and modernist texts which present multiple or infinite perspectives on an issue or assume this idea of relativism as a basis for thought seem to me to miss this point and fail to ground the reader and heres a difference between a written artifact and a spoken one im going to go eat dinner and this could have been totally hidden to you the reader but im telling you because i want to reinforce that point that immediacy is a tricky thing when you start considering writing versus talking immediacy might be conveyed by simple tricks like anecdotes or by attention-getters like saying im going to dinner and the beauty of doing it in writing is this i actually went to dinner yesterday this paper got picked up over a day later but the break is mid sentence and could have been totally hidden but there is a unity in speech a unity that you cant help but deal with of time and place because you can only wander so far from your listeners and your voice can only go so long not to mention the attention spans of some poor fuckers who maybe think theyre getting culture its like a swimming pool you can swim around but only in the pool theres no ocean to escape to not if you want to keep swimming and sooner or later youll run out of pool or at least pool that holds your interest and start being prunelike and you have to get out its the unity of time and place classical greek drama worshipped these unities but weve dropped them from theatre mostly but they remain in life now the swimming pool is just an analogy and its an imperfect one but then analogies tend to be imperfect that is because to use a professorial term they are asymptotic approaching but never equalling antin uses analogy a typical speech device even more typical of explanatory communication a didactic device relating the unknown to something familiar in order to bring the unknown into the realm of the comprehensible analogies work well either in speech or in poetry a metaphor is often used in poetry as an analogy and a simile is an analogy really saying one thing is like another perhaps when its not but to facilitate understanding but the difference between a speech analogy and analogies in poetry is that you just dont seem to get poetic lousy term in speech analogies you can in written essays and often do but rarely in speech often the moment of poetry is the high point of any speech king saying he has a dream and literally its a dream but its also a metaphor for the possible future world only comprehensible in the light of dreams because of the harsh reality and dont say im too young for king too all this analogy by way of saying antin is essentially an analogical person in his talk-poems and we can extend that analogical and analytical exploratory in a rather didactic sense his talk-poems are constructed rather rigidly around anecdotes that personalize what seems to be a very intellectual exploration of issues that are abstruse enough to require analogies for their explication and explicate he does although he asks many questions at the same time now let me tell another story again about me ive been thinking a lot about modernism not modernism the literary term per se but modernism as in the modern life and modern thought patterns not necessarily modern thinking as in discussing nietzches philosophy but as in thinking about the broad patterns that can be seen in life and art and ive been putting down a lot of my thoughts in a journal thinking on paper which has a tendency to make them seem more solid better conceived than simply saying them out loud if we read it it must be true goes the old saying in any case i have been talking about this matter of the general thought of the twentieth century to many people professors students in several disciplines and uniformly the young agree with me and the older disagree and specifically you disagree with many of my ideas which is fine especially since i disagree with many of yours but what fascinates me most i think is this gulf between the perspectives of older and young and the kneejerk reactions both sides have upon hearing the others point of view the young seem to think the old well they love modernism because they make a living off it and feel threatened by suggestions that it may not really be helpful to life in any concrete way and maybe hide behind the idea that nothing needs to be helpful to life or society and i called that selfish in my journal and got the comment come on but i think its a valid observation this is not socially engaged writing it is self engaged writing but this is a whole other argument the story i want to tell has to do with the gulf in perspectives and the kind of reasoning it implies i could quote here at some length because this is written thinking and i can pause long enough to look up something that id like to put in the essay so heres my quotation whoops cant find it its down in the car and its two a m im not going down there but i can paraphrase in my journal you wrote im worried about a certain closed mindedness you wrote and so were back to the beginning of the term if so why are you in this class you wrote i suggested further research and i see no evidence of it now these remarks hurt when i read them because i feel them to be unjustified but i cite them as examples of an antin technique that is also a logical fallacy but which antin uses brilliantly to explain and convey his meaning now you dont know and cant know how many books i may have read on modernism this term the answer is around twenty to thirty and i didnt read just on poetry i read on art and on music by professional critics and by laymen who were often more perceptive and ive read nonfiction by modernist writers and painters and musicians and composers too and this term ive written about forty thousand words on modernist thought and ive written positive and negative things and ive argued the case for bernstein and cage and howe before unsympathetic people who thought it was just crap artsy crap but crap and because i didnt get to read antins own modernism book i am suddenly treated like an eight year old who isnt doing his work right and my own thoughts suddenly have no validity this is an example of reasoning from the specific which was my brief little essay on bernstein which i admit included broad sweeping statements intentionally meant to be inflammatory to the general which frankly was the validity of my thought processes my integrity as a student and my integrity as a writer i was enjoying the give and take in the journal writing but those comments soured me they were a logical fallacy flawed in their assumptions a similar assumption arose from the others in the class they saw that we had a give and take they saw my attitudes towards what we read only in the classroom and one night at storyville the last night it was open i learned that they all thought i loved everything we had read they were shocked to hear about the intellectual quarrels you and i had shocked and pleased about the quarrels over the material assuming because they did not see the journal that my in-class comments reflected all i thought again reasoning from a specific instance to a generalization now this form of reasoning works sometimes for some things a classic example is saying from a drop of water i could reason out the existence of not just the atlantic ocean but of ocean liners fly fishing and the el nino current i think this is in conan doyle but ive rephrased it considerably anyway antin does this i think of the various anecdotes he tells particularly the moments in his talk at the university of alabama when he plays with the permutations of black warrior he reasons out from a specific instance metonymy and synecdoche are the parallel devices in poetry again they are metaphorical rather than analogical at least in the sense that i use the terms now ive been piling up instances here examples and antin uses examples continually they are intrinsic to argumentative or didactic speech and for all of his questions i think antin falls into these two categories and these examples have been supporting the case i said i wouldn't argue that antin leans towards speech not poetry in these talk-poems so ill let the essay so far stand as my quibble with the term talk-poems even though i realize my own approach has been argumentative but not necessarily towards that goal sorry if this rambles in other words sorry if this meanders and wanders around the point a little but then this is a major feature of antins work as well his careful structure is like a grape trellis and his talk is the vine that weaves around his anecdotes and his parallel structure a structure which i wanted to mention but which i think requires no real examples taken from a talk-poem originally i was going to examine a talk-poem closely in the best grad school fashion but take this as my own form as content talking about a book you can and have perfectly well read yourself seems selfish to me a sort of futile digging valid in its place which is to open the minds of people who may not have seen certain things in it but my telling you what i saw in it when really these are things you have seen yourself seems silly thats why im not wild about citing from antins work or even to the extent of going down to the car to dig up the journal to find your exact words because i want this essay to illuminate antin not from within thats his job but from outside to be socially engaged criticism perhaps although i hate calling anything criticism so my anecdotes are and have been about me or from books i have read and hopefully about the world at large through my lens because i cant portray it any other way they are externally directed not referring back to the text now if you grant this the same validity that random processes have for cage or that the impossibility of a single perspective has for howe or that collage composition has for you if you grant this entirely every single paper must get an a because they are individual reactions to the reading what makes one more valid than the other? form i guess will be the criterion well im trying to talk about form in antins work and im going to make a value judgement just as you must when grading these papers antins talk-poems are misnamed they should be called speeches they work better when seen as speeches they work better when seen as philosophical inquiries as essays even than as poetry and this is because we must label we must categorize our experience and we do it with parallel structure with personal anecdotes with analogies and logic and whatever we are binary thinkers analog machines are what we build all languages go at least to two because of our biology we are tool makers and we build and if one of the things we build is intellectual constructs so be it and certainly we may label and in labeling exclude rigidify limit but the alternative is no labels whatsoever and no value judgements but trust me you would hate to live in a world where nothing was better than anything else one last story i said that i had written free verse for years and the comment penciled in the margin was the word pompous are you fifty? sigh here is labeling and value judgements and everything else perhaps i have been writing free verse for years two is years although its closer to ten years and this annoyed me because i can imagine going to antin himself despite the things he mentions in these talk-poems and getting a similar reaction i did from chris custer i can from many people age is no barrier we make value judgements i was to talk about writing and talking as forms of thinking and this is it im talking by example antin is my trellis this essay is my vine and this is our conversation but you have to by the framework imposed by university the framework you work to maintain contravene ideas you have set forth in class and make a value judgement and i am going to let this stand an essay not about antin but about things that spin off antin because things spun off [name redacted] and because of that i saw philadelphia for the first time this is the question you have to ask yourself what grade does this get? and the question i have to ask myself because i have listened and thought hard about the things youve mentioned issues youve raised in class does this grade matter? your value judgement matter? its just a label a label as essentially divisive as say the boundary between writing and talking and my world tells me that since it matters to me not because i might not get a degree ive gotten past the stage of worrying too much about things like that since it matters to me what grade i get labels matter or otherwise bosnia would be quite happy as yugoslavia and this could have been spoken out loud to you in a rush of words perhaps less well-formed but valid in my eyes despite my age reading beliefs background past poetry writing journal classroom comments preferences in reading material and valid in your eyes if you believe in what you say so theres an implicit rhetorical question im not going to revise this away or back down from the challenge you would never know had been there let it stand as if it had been spoken unretractable because im tired of writing essays which is just me and want to return to talking to you because the beautiful thing about binary is the implicit relationship that theres a story in it