Talking Text and Writing Extemporaneity

Abstract

The relationship of text to performance is often either schematic, with text providing a blueprint for a performance yet to be realized, or else it is documentary, representing a performance that has already occurred. This essay engages a case in which text and performance are mutually reliant on one another for their realization. David Antin’s signature talk poems, which he began publishing in the early 1970s and continued producing until his death in 2016, each began as an extemporaneous monologue presented before a live audience. Antin recorded these talks and had them transcribed, then edited the transcripts according to an idiosyncratic layout meant to represent speech patterns through the arrangement of words on the page. Though Antin’s talk poems are explicitly dependant on their own past as performance, his live performances themselves remain virtual presences in his published works – referenced and represented, but also superseded by their textual form. In fact, I have found that the relationship between Antin’s performance practice and his published product was considerably more complex than the work and its reputation otherwise suggests. Though Antin always acknowledged making changes to the transcripts during his editorial process, most critics and scholars tended to assume his interventions were fairly light. However, side-by-side comparisons of the recordings, transcripts, and manuscripts in Antin’s archive have made clear that his revisions could be quite extensive. He not only deleted and corrected material, but also sometimes added entirely new passages, composed to mimic transcribed speech. Through this process, Antin’s talk poems overwrite their extemporaneous origins, in effect retroactively revising his live performance, while still relying on that performance to shape and authenticate the resulting text. The outcome is an emergent format that is neither a performance of a text nor a textual representation of a performance, but exists only at the point of intertwinement between the two.

Notes

1 Thanks to Jacob Smith for the term as a way to describe the interlocking series of media through which Antin's talk poems passed before arriving at their most enduring form as published text. I relate this to Richard Schechner's description of ‘magnitudes of performance’ as a ‘continuum from brain events to public events of great spatial and temporal magnitude’ (Schechner 1988: 265).

2 Bauman and Briggs define entextualization as ‘the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting’ (BaumanandBriggs 1990: 73, emphasis in original).

3 ‘if robert lowell is a poet i dont want to be a poet if robert frost is a poet i dont want to be a poet if socrates was a poet i’ll consider it’ (Antin 2011: 273).

4 In a typical example, Marjorie Perloff mentions in a footnote, ‘David Antin has told me that he does, however, make some changes when he transcribes a talk poem on the typewriter’ (1981: 335). One notable exception is Henry Sayre, who does make note of a reference he encountered on an archival recording of Antin being interviewed to Antin adding a story to the text of a talk poem that he merely mentioned in the original talk. However, Sayre does not give a firsthand account of the relationship between Antin's performance and the published talk poem, leaving the implication that Antin might sometimes add something to his text that he mentioned but did not fully explain in performance, which still allows for the idea that the performance controls the parameters of the text. (1989: 209).

5 ‘in place of a lecture: 3 musics for 2 voices’ and ‘the london march: an improvisation for 2 voices’ are two pieces developed from semi-improvised domestic conversations between the Antins that anticipated the talk poems in both their use of transcribed talk and in their typographical layouts. Both appeared in Antin's collection talking, which culminated with the first talk poem, ‘talking at pomona’.

6 For example, in ‘talking at pomona’ Antin referenced ‘Nick and Rowan’ as, on the page, two hypothetical characters in a fictional exchange about a gallery exhibition. In performance, though, the mere mention of these names provoked uproarious laughter, laughter that suggested that Nick and Rowan were known presences in the room (Antin 1971c; Antin 1972: 157).