Bad guest poetics

This essay proposes bad guest poetics as a way to examine how artistic practices resist philosophical abstractions of hospitality when applied to literature and performance. Rejecting phenomenological terminology derived from Levinas, the essay returns to an ordinary understanding of invitation and hosting in order to analyze David Antin’s improvised “talk poems.” Delivered in institutional settings and later adapted into texts, these performances present talking as poetry while deliberately testing the expectations placed on invited speakers. Focusing on Antin’s 2006 talk poem “hiccups,” performed at SUNY Buffalo, the essay shows how Antin responds obliquely and comically to Levinasian poetics advanced by his host, Stephen McCaffery. Grounding poetic meaning in bodily interruption and ordinary language, “hiccups” exposes how theoretical vocabularies can become inhospitable to artistic practice. Bad guest poetics thus names an ethic of artistic responsibility enacted through refusal rather than accommodation.