David Antin life and biography

David Antin is an American poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, the writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and much longer as a professor there. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. Antin lives in San Diego with his wife.

Antin earned his M.A. from New York University in 1966.

Author of books:

Definitions (1967, poetry)
Code of Flag Behavior (1968, poetry)
Meditations (1971)
Talking (1972, poetry)
After the War (A Long Novel with Few Worlds) (1973, poetry)
Talking at the Boundaries (1976, poetry)
Who's Listening Out There (1979, memoir, composed for radio)
Tuning (1984, poetry)
Selected Poems 1963-1973 (1991, poetry)
What It Means to Be Avant Garde (1993, nonfiction)
A Conversation with David Antin (with Charles Bernstein) (2001)
i never knew what time it was, University of California Press, Berkeley, (2005.)
john cage uncaged is still cagey (2006)

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