the same book, he pages through popular novels, choosing a line or a phrase from each page to assemble poems. After gathering some experience reading his poems, he began to find the convention of reading his own previously written poetry stultifying. He turned instead to improvising poems that are a kind of thinking out loud about the act of creating meaning. The themes of these "talk pieces" are often inspired by their location and audience. The talk pieces can be viewed alternately as poetry that seeks to re-connect with oral and performative aspects of the poetic tradition, as philosophy in the tradition of Plato's dialogues or Wittgenstein's lectures, or as a "site-specific" artwork like Robert Smithson's earthworks. He tape-records each performance and often composes subsequent written versions, which are collected in books like "talking at the boundaries," "tuning" and "what it means to be avant garde." In his talk pieces Antin blends personal narrative with philosophical reflection to address issues of meaning. In "tuning," for example, he critiques the concept of "understanding" and offers an alternative model. In "what it means to be avant garde" he suggests that the avant garde attempts to address not the future but the present. In "the fringe" he tells a story about resistance to the Vietnam War that offers as a central figure a bucket containing the urine of several Guggenheim poets. Selected works Definitions Caterpillar Press, New York, 1967. Poetry Autobiography, Something Else Press, A Great Bear Pamphlet, New York, 1967. See: UbuWeb edition 2004 Code of Flag Behavior, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1968. Poetry Meditations, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1971. Poetry After the War; A Long Novel with Few Words, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1973 Talking, Kulchur Foundation, 1972. New edition: 2001. Poetry Talking at the Boundaries, New Directions, New York, 1976 Tuning, New Directions, New York, 1984 Selected Poems: 1963-1973, Sun & Moon, Los Angeles, 1991. What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, New Directions, New York, 1993. 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 Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, University of Chicago Press, 2010. References External links David Antin at UbuWeb Includes PDF edition of Autobiography and full text of In Place of a Lecture: Three Musics for Two Voices