David Antin (1932–2016)

"Antin's background in linguistics drew him toward the secular, the colloquial, the pop, both were tuning to a range of voices—and noises—to form work that transgressed the boundaries of taste that academic culture had drawn between current and historical or seemingly ahistorical sources, or between literature and variously embodied poetic acts."

-Jennifer Scappettone, "Tuning as Lyricism: The Performances of Orality in the Poetics of Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin" (Summer 2011).

David Antin in Critical Inquiry

"Fine Furs," Critical Inquiry 19 (Autumn 1992): 151-63.

"hiccups," Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer 2011): 754-67.

David Antin was a poet, performance artist, and art and literary critic. He published six books of talk pieces, Talking (1972), Talking at the Boundaries (1976), Tuning (1984), What It Means to Be Avant-Garde (1993), I Never Knew What Time It Was (2005), and John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey (2005). He was a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego.