The Tactics of the Text: Experimental Form in David Antin’s “Novel Poem”

Abstract

In the last chapter, we saw that Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets (1964) manifests a critique of the reification of language and labor in postindustrial capitalist society, and that this critique occurs primarily at the level of formal procedure. In David Antin’s poetry of the late 1960s, sociocultural criticism is more direct. In fact, Antin’s experimental poetry from the Vietnam War era deals quite openly with pressing political realities. In “the marchers” (1968), for example, Antin depicts a group of protestors carrying a coffin and “walking together” so that “they will not feel all alone” (SP 30). In “who are my friends” (1968), he calls into question the American rationale for continued involvement in Vietnam. Other poems such as “a list of the delusions of the insane / what they are afraid of” (1968) and “W.S. Male” (1968), though not directly partisan, offer an implicit social critique by pointing to a vague, generalized sense of unease, a fear of having “committed suicide of the soul” (40) or of “being dominated” (43). Antin’s critical stance toward cold war American culture and values places him at a remove from Berrigan’s pop sensibility, and yet his skeptical individualism is also far from Ron Silliman’s committed Marxism. In metaphorical terms, it seems that Antin prefers watching the marchers to joining them. Thus, on the ideological spectrum of this study, he represents a middle ground, neither indifferent nor radical.