Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Language is usually sold as a home; Antin flips it into captivity. "A hostage in somebody else's mouth" lands with physical claustrophobia: your selfhood reduced to a movable piece between teeth and tongue, spoken for, chewed up, swallowed. It’s a brutal image for what it feels like to be represented by someone else - especially someone with more authority, volume, or cultural permission to narrate. The line turns ventriloquism into a power relation.

Then Antin sharpens the threat by shifting from speech to story: "a character in somebody else's novel". A mouth can misquote you in a moment; a novel can misframe you for an era. Fiction here isn’t imagination so much as ownership. Someone else decides your motives, your arc, your ending. You don’t get interiority; you get characterization. The discomfort is that it’s often flattering on the surface - being included, being described - while still erasing agency underneath.

As a poet associated with talk pieces and improvisatory, essay-like performance, Antin is alert to how meaning is negotiated live, in real time, through voices that can overpower each other. The quote reads like a manifesto against the smooth authority of finished narratives: the kind that make other people legible by making them smaller. Its subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic: when you speak about others, you’re not just describing them. You’re placing them somewhere they may not be able to escape.