i never knew what time it was [Paperback]

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of timehow it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk piecessometimes called talk poems or simply talksbegan 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.

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

by way of a preface

the theory and practice of postmodernisma manifesto

californiathe nervous camel

caf? europa

talking at bl?rancourt

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

The poems in this volume are unforgettable. Richly funny, elegiac, philosophical, contentious, filled with astonishing stories and bizarre characterssome of the finest writing by today's most compelling poet. Gerald Bruns, author ofThe Material l