David Antin is most famously known as the "talk poet." Since 1972, rather than typing poems in private, he has composed his poems by talking them out in front of audiences, improvising across genre boundaries and combining features of epic poetry, academic lecture, stand-up comedy, and storytelling into compelling, narrative collages. These post-modern talk pieces link Antin with Beat poetry, performance art, and writers such as John Cage, Jackson MacLow, Charles Olson, and Jerome Rothenberg--all of whom have been fellow participants in the informal movement that critic Henry M. Sayre addresses in his essay, "David Antin and the Oral Poetics Movement" (1982). Antin himself suggests that this loose coalition of poets was held together by the "conviction that poetry was made by a man on his feet, talking," a quotation that comes from Antin's 1972 essay, "Modernism and Postmodernism," which critically supports his own practice of "talking" poetry out.

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