i never knew what time it was / Edition 1

by David Antin

Overview

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time—how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces—sometimes called talk poems or simply talks—began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520243057
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/25/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David Antin is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Among his most recent books are A Conversation with David Antin (2002), what it means to be avant-garde (1993), and Selected Poems: 1963-1973 (1991).

Table of Contents

by way of a preface

the theory and practice of postmodernism—a manifesto

california—the nervous camel

café europa

talking at blérancourt

the noise of time

i never knew what time it was

time on my hands

how wide is the frame

what happened to walter?

endangered nouns