Abstract

David Antin’s work explores the continuum between live speech and printed poetry. This essay considers the implications of Antin’s approach to poetry both for an understanding of that genre, in a general sense, and more specifically, for the trope of apostrophe which traditionally underlies any definition of lyric poetry. If, in the romantic conversation poem, the trope of apostrophe is a key device for the procedure of an imagined, private mode of meditation and internal dialogue, the rhetoric of address in Antin’s work is aimed at revealing the situations that determine the import and direction of a poet’s expression. By “talking at the boundaries” of several identifiable modes of expression, Antin’s ‘talk poetry’ enacts an institutional definition of poetry, and thus challenges basic assumptions about the nature of poetry and the rhetorical tropes that are usually used to define it.