In a contribution to the spring 1975 issue of Boundary 2, David Antin recounts an ingenious and deadpan deduction of how he reconciled his ambivalence about being considered a poet, using the lowercase type and breath-like spacing that came to characterise published transcripts of his talk poems: “if robert lowell is a poet then i don’t want to be a poet if robert frost was a poet I don’t want to be a poet if socrates was a poet i'll consider it.”
On 11 October 2016 Antin died, just days after Charles Bernstein had joked to a British audience that one way of understanding the tensions between mainstream and alternative poetry communities would be to 'translate' Antin's now famous lines for any local context.
Against pompous claims about 'proper' English canons and language use that exclude unconventional voices, in sincere homage to Antin, we prepared this translation.
