Discursive Events in the Electronic Archive of Postmodern and Contemporary Poetry (Excerpt‪)‬

THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT IS NOT KRAPP SPEAKING, from Samuel Beckett's 1958 one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape which features one actor and "a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes" (10). The following is David Antin writing, in a 1984 book of, as he calls them, talk poems. "Ibis excerpt is from the introduction to the published rendition of Antin's talk-poem entitled "whos listening out there." Italicizing introductory materials is a publishing convention of drama that the Beckett play and the Antin talk-poem both follow. Antin is from the generation whose work would be anthologized as the New American poetry, but he went his own way, inventing an improvised talk genre beginning in the late 1960s that requires performance and inscription, audience and tape recorder and typewriter. (1)