ANTIN, David

Beginning as an independent New York poet and art critic, Antin became a Southern Californian and state-university academic. A handful of his essays are illuminating and persuasive—especially one on the unprecedented character of video and another on American poetry between the wars; others are unintelligible in ways more typical of, and available to, professors than lay writers. His early poems, collected in the marvelously titled Code of Flag Behavior (1968), reveal an arbitrary Expressionism that...